The Real Blogger Status

Occasionally, Blogger makes small changes to their code, which we may not see immediately. This, as in a previous example , I will call a snake. If it was a snake, it would have bitten you. This is a very small snake, but one that we've been asking for, for a while. I just published my previous post, Manage The Blogs That You Follow, Carefully , and I was casually looking at the display Your blog post published successfully! . What is that odd symbol next to the caption View Post ? For that matter, what is View Post ? OMG, that's now " View Post ", instead of " View Blog "! Surprise! No reloading the entire main page, after publishing a new post. And no reloading the main page, then having to search, for an edited post. Just click on "View Post". Bravo, Blogger. Another change made in silence. And, a significant improvement enabling my Progressive Publishing strategy. A second change was noted today, but it's one that won't be nearl...

All of the companies that I've worked for in my history, which had computers, controlled everything rather tightly. Businesses do that. Businesses owned the big computers, aka mainframes. We, as programmers, would write code. We would test the code. We would give the code to a computer operator, who would run the code as a job. We would train the computer operators. All code ran on company owned and controlled computers, over company owned and controlled networks, maintained by company trained personnel. Every change was made, and tested, by people working for the company. Very tightly focused, and controlled.

Hey Guys, Bloggers work, and blog, 24 x 7. Supporting them on an 8 x 5 basis isn't right. Strolling in to work casually today, to find thousands of panicked posts in Google Blogger Help , isn't cutting it. The Blogging world isn't all located in California USA. Your product is used worldwide, and you need to recognise that. Get your act together, please. This was more than a few minutes outage, and an inconvenience . This was a major malfunction . Don't keep doing this. This is not the first time we have had a similar major problem affecting millions of people . (Edit): But thank you for at least providing me a foundation for a nice succinct post title . >> Top

I don't know what to say about the name Blogger Status - except that it must have been named that way on purpose. Or did it become that way because of the acronym? The chicken, or the egg? Who will ever know? I've been writing about Blogger Status for months. One of the problems with Blogger is The Silence . And The Silence never goes away . This is merely the episode of January 23, 2007. It would appear that some Blogger employees are at the beach this week. So the server outage of January 22 Where to chip in money... Help, I'm getting 502 errors... What is going on with these servers? never even made it onto Blogger Status . (Edit 1/24 12:30): Bet you saw this a bit too? Not even a day up. What we see is Blogger is undergoing unscheduled maintenance this morning. We hope to resume service shortly. and when it finally comes up, the BS Message of the day New Blogger has had troubles this morning, which you may have seen with slow requests and 502 error pages. No shi...

Exciting news here. It appears that Blogger, in an effort to make it possible to handle the ever increasing problem level, is now issuing problem codes, rather than diagnostic messages, when specific problems are experienced. The old familiar, monolithic We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it. appears to have been replaced by some very unique error codes.

If any of you are fans of classical American (USA) literature, you may recall the tale by Samuel Clement aka Mark Twain, and Tom Sawyer and his White Picket Fence . I am imagining this conversation between two Google executives back a few years ago. Exec 1: We need to increase our ad sales. Exec 2: OK, let's set up more web sites, and put our ads on them. Exec 1: No way, bro. That's too much work. How will we ever come up with enough content? Exec 2: No problem, dude. We'll get the public to do it for us. We'll provide the network, and the servers, and con the Internet users of the world into creating all of the websites for us. Exec 1: That's the ticket! I've been looking at Blogger - they have an easy interface, we can get lots of dumb asses, who know nothing about computers or the web, to set up web sites, and write all sorts of shite. And we will own the web sites, and get richer from the ads that we put out there. Exec 2: But with millions of dumb ass...

If you're as old as I am, maybe you too remember the Captain in Cool Hand Luke What we got here is... failure to communicate. Blogger Support wrote some interesting guidelines about Blogger Status . Blogger Status: This venue is used by the Blogger Team to report production outages, such as database problems. This is not a place where we report known application issues. The people who depend upon Blogger Blogs known nothing about application issues vs production outages. They just know that they can't login, can't publish, whatever. Then they go to Google Blogger Help - Something Is Broken , and they see a dozen other folks reporting the problem, and nothing being done. And when there is a 3 day discussion about a problem, and nothing is done for 3 days, and then we see a Blogger Status post like Wednesday, August 30, 2006 Posting to the Blogger Atom API (e.g. via a third-party website or desktop client) is not working properly. We are investigating. Update, 11:24AM: This ...

YouTube can admit their errors. Why can't Blogger?

I was actually quoted, externally, for saying that in my earlier post I Don't Get It . And as Blogger Beta rolls out, the silence just does not let up . It's depressing, actually. I noted last week of a major design deficiency in Blogger Beta - the fact that the title in Beta blogs wasn't linking back to the home page . I even developed a (ugly) workaround . So today, I was surfing away at Googolians , and I clicked on the title. And imagine my surprise when I found myself back in main page view. Then I went to page layout view on RBS Beta , and removed my ugly workaround. And noted that, indeed, the title is now clickable in article view, and will take you back to main page view. And thinking back a few days, I don't remember seeing any official announcement about raw HTML template editing capability being provided either. Just a question or two in Google Blogger Help . I've actually noted several avenues that Blogger appears to have use of, in comm...

As Blogger rolls out their (vastly improved) Beta blog template, the problems arise . Now, I have been part of many roll outs of software and hardware, and problems are normal. So the Blogger Beta, though it may seem catastrophic to most Bloggers (the unpaid employees , I mean), these problems are not unusual. What is unusual though (at least compared to the real business world), and what has fueled many posts in The Real Blogger Status, is the silence . An example of the frustration and uncertainty felt, by many Bloggers, is this bit of genius , which I quote in its entirety. An actual fictitious conversation at google.... Tech 1: Hey lets update blogger with a new beta! Tech 2: Yeah that would be fun...should we test it first or just make it live on the web? Tech 1: Hmm...lets just make it live and watch all our faithful bloggers panic. Tech 2: Haha...man you have a sick sense of humor, but I like the idea. Oh and while we are at it, lets ignore their emails as well. Blogger Staff...

Blogger is a free service - anybody can have a Blogger account, and setup as many websites (aka blogs) as he / she wishes, simply by providing an email address for registration . But - and don't be deceived here - Blogger is not a non-profit organisation. Blogger - and Google - is paid very well. From advertisements, that appear on our websites. Or in the browser display, on the computers of folks who are reading our websites. We build and maintain the websites. Our readers view our websites. Our readers view the ads, provided thru our websites. Our readers buy the products presented in the ads, provided thru our websites. The retail companies pay their advertisers. The advertisers pay Google. We don't charge Google for our time building and maintaining the websites, and they don't charge us for the hardware and software that hosts the websites. It's a circular partnership. And it's good that they don't charge us for support. Charging for support would requi...

Everybody has them. They involve strange feelings, based upon a dream. Sometimes, the dream becomes reality. Or reality becomes like a dream. I'm unsure which this is. Today, I read my GMail. support@blogger.com to me 5:00 pm Hi, Can you help us improve Blogger support? We welcome feedback about your recent experience so that we can improve the way we serve you. Share your thoughts by answering five quick questions via the link below. http://services.google.com/blogger/ts2?... Your thoughts will help us to serve you better in the future. Sincerely, The Google Team Share my thoughts ? This is where the out of body feeling began. Blogger wants to know my thoughts!!?? Hot dawg!! So, I followed the link. And as abruptly as it began, the euphoria ended. The link led to a simple 5 question multiple choice quiz. No opportunity to actually tell them anything. Back down to earth. Can you help us improve Blogger Support? We welcome feedback about your recent experience so tha...

Long ago, and oh so far away (no, that's a popular song from when I was young), I wrote an article Why Do I Do This? . This is not a rehash of that article. I've had a few folks, (maybe misunderstanding my motives, maybe wanting to interfere with my message, who knows?) tell me, in not so many words but close Chuck, you have your head where it won't see any sun. Of Fables And Blogger : Comment #3. To the Blogger Staff Reading This Group Damn, Down Again, Is There Someone Smart Enough to Fix This Mess? It appears that my pointing out that There are no blog hijacks (in these cases) . There is no major outage of Blogger or Blogspot (right now) . Blogger shouldn't be expected to respond to every complaint immediately (without any work on our part) . ... all of these posts, in general, mean that I am trying to be a shill for Blogger. Simultaneously, though, I wonder whether Blogger might become tired of my prodding them. I prod them to get off their coffee breaks and fix...

I don't know what was down, nor what was fixed. I can read a brief note in Google Blogger Help , by Blogger Employee. And I can read the latest Blogger Status post . For me, I was unable to publish anything for several hours today, though, as far as I can tell, my blog was still accessible. And the GBH note tells us that something was done, and that Blogger is somewhat aware that we were concerned. That's a good start, but only that. The problem here is that there's never enough information provided for any Blogger "customer" to determine the nature of a problem, when it happens. The only thing we can ever do is submit another Blogger Help form. And since we never get a reply back from that (please don't call the botmail a reply, that's purely an acknowledgement), we never know if our problem is something that gets fixed, or if it just randomly went away. The Blogger Status page refers to "a hardware problem", and "new hardware" t...

When I was young - back in the middle of the past century - I lived with my parents in rural Virginia. There were no real suburban areas then - just little towns with a an A&P or Piggly Wiggly for foods, Ben Franklin for toys and miscellaneous stuff, and Western Auto for auto parts and hardware. Sam Walton was just a kid then too, I guess. Anyway, the nearest town was the nascent metropolis of Richmond. It had a real urban downtown - with a Miller & Rhoads, and a Thalheimers (both chains now owned, I think, by Macys or Saks). And in the suburbs, a K-Mart. Now getting to Richmond was a couple hours of boredom on the country roads, and 2 hours in the car with my parents was like 6 hours nowadays - the car didn't have a radio, or air conditioning. But 1/2 hour outside the Richmond city limits was the K-Mart, and we would stop there first. After 2 hours in the car, K-Mart was always our favourite stop. But, we were always picky about actually buying anything there. For q...

So late yesterday, I noted that my friend CameraDawktor was able to update her blog Trouble Always Has a Door , with pictures and everything. Which makes it apparent that the current state of emergency has been resolved, for right now anyway. Dare we to hope that things will go smoothly for a while? Only time will tell. NOTE : Just because the underlying problem has been fixed (we hope), there are still corrupted blogs out there. Blogger Support won't fix those, we the owners of the blogs must do that. If your blog continues to load badly : Republish the Entire Blog. Refresh your Blogger client setup .

This problem is not going away, and it doesn't appear to be server specific either. I can reproduce it at will too. I can post to this blog. On another blog, where I have administrative access, and COULD post, I get a 450 when posting. When I try to mirror my "test" blog (it's not really a test blog, and my friend doesn't think so either), using HTTrack , I end up with the same problem that's being seen online. The sidebar is truncated halfway thru its content. Posts are missing from the display. Looking at the download log, I see numerous entries Warning: file not stored in cache due to bogus state (incomplete type) which I'm pretty sure correspond to the missing posts (#2). I can go into the Dashboard for my friend's blog, and I can see all of the posts there. Including the ones omitted in #2 above. I just created a new post, and when I tried to publish it, it came back with the dreaded 450 Write error: No space left on device 001 java.net.Socke...

They updated Blogger Status ! They finally have a new entry Wednesday, March 15, 2006 We’re doing some maintenance on one of our Blog*Spot servers. Some blogs will be inaccessible while this is going on. Everyone is able to publish, however, regardless of whether or not the blog is down for maintenance. We apologize to those blog owners who are affected by this. This partial outage is necessary to fix some of the transient Blog*Spot problems that have popped up recently. Update: The maintenance is complete. Posted by Pete at 12:32 PST Again, posted after the work was done. Thanks, Pete. So, the outage 3/10 - 3/13 was a transient Blog*Spot problem. That's real useful.

See these Blogger Support tickets: [#415414] Forbidden / Permission Denied [#416206] 403 Forbidden [#417267] 403 Forbidden See these discussions: Blogger Support Forum Blogger Support Forum Blogger Forum Blogger Support Forum Current open issues . 5 years later, I figure out what "403 Forbidden" really means .