The Real Blogger Status

I've always been an advocate of redundancy, with essential components and features. One essential feature of a website is the ability to remain aware of where your readers come from, and what they are reading , on your blog. Besides Blogger Stats, I've advocated both SiteMeter and StatCounter, in a complementary role to each other. A while ago, SiteMeter decided to add video advertisements to their blog / website agent, that tracks the clicks.

Many blog owners are experimenting with multimedia, as part of their blogs. People who have 5 channel audio / 3D video systems, and various sources of content for each, look at their blogs and decide that the next frontier, for decorating their blog, has to be music. Any blog with a visual theme surely deserves an audible theme, also. Unfortunately, many blog readers like to surf the net, while listening to their favourite tunes. People who are listening to new age music won't appreciate surfing to a blog that makes their computer suddenly start to play grunge rock. Nor will classical music fans appreciate the latest rhythm and blues, or urban beat, hit tune. Unexpected music can create both a bandwidth annoyance, and an audible distraction. People surfing blogs in a shared environment - for instance a public library - won't appreciate any audio content , in any blog.

Blogger has thousands of computers that they control and support - their servers. They have millions of computers that they don't control, but still try to support - our computers. They can support, to some extent, Blogger running on our computers. Their ability to support us is greatly enhanced when we can accept the responsibility for the problems that are our own . Then there are the remote servers, to where we publish blogs by FTP. They don't own, or support those computers. Very few of them do we own or support either. When we try to FTP a blog update, and something goes wrong, what do we do? Can we check a log anywhere on the remote server? Not easily. Neither can Blogger Support. The remote servers, that host blogs published by FTP, are computers owned and supported by third parties. Blogger Support can't get even the feedback from the third parties, that they would from us if the problem was our locally published blogs running on our computers. Any problem ...

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.