Blogger Bloggered
You get what you pay for, so as a public service-
Whatever they did last night at 10 PM PDT has resulted in a major problem beginning at about 2 PM PDT today. If you attempt to log on to a Blogspot site you get an error message beginning bX- followed by an individual identifier for the site.
They will probably have it fixed “real soon now”.
Update from Blogger Status:
Friday, May 13, 2011
We’ve started restoring the posts that were temporarily removed and expect Blogger to be back to normal soon.
Posted by at 06:07 PDT
23 comments
Yeah, real soon now.
Right now, even the passive displayed version of my site is about a day old, with two major posts and one small post all missing. No, I don’t have backups, though I do have the doggerel in a plain text file, so it’s not lost.
Reliability is not Blogger’s strong suit. In fact, at the moment, I can’t think of any advantage to Blogger except cost. What price for a blog that works most of the time?
Unfortunately my experience with hosting elsewhere is no better than Blogger. Even self-hosting on my own server on my own DSL line wasn’t particularly reliable, because the #$%@! DSL kept going out, I had to put the DSL modem on a timer to reboot it every six hours ’cause that’s about how long it lasted between lockups. GRRR!!!!!
Badtux, at one time I did the same thing Bryan does, except by hand, all on NFS servers, also just like Bryan. I used the venerable and much-missed HaloScan for comments.
You know what happened to HaloScan. The bastards at JS-Kit gave me LESS THAN TWO WEEKS NOTICE, right at CHRISTMASTIME, that I had to pay up or else lose all my comments and comment mechanism. People I knew who had already moved to JS-Kit Echo were already beginning to regret it, so I archived everything and began anew on Blogger.
Why Blogger? because I already had some familiarity with it from some work for a client. Good choice? bad choice? I still can’t decide; today it seems like a bad one.
I am hoping Blogger has transaction logs that they can apply to put up the more recent posts when they get the impulse engines working again. But you never know. I back up things like templates and scripts, which are hard to replace, but no post I write is worth enough to me to keep local backups of it. If Blogger doesn’t have those posts, I’ll reconstruct two of ’em and let the third one go.
What annoyed me more than anything was to find that my profile name had been changed from Jams O Donnell to my real name. Okay so my real name is not a huge secret but I prefer to use Jams as ny blogging handle
Current Blogger status:
“We are very sorry that users are unable to publish to Blogger right now. We have rolled back the maintenance release from last night and as a result, posts and comments from all users made after 7:37 am PDT on May 11, 2011 have been removed. Again, we apologize that this happened and our engineers are working hard to return Blogger to normal and restore your posts and comments. We will post a report once this work is complete.
-The Blogger Team”
By and large Blogger has been pretty good about restoring comments and posts after one of these outages. I suspect the profile issue was one of the things that got the changes yanked, I did notice some profile strangeness yesterday, with folks who usually blogged under an alias suddenly under their real name and folks who usually blogged under their real name suddenly under an alias…
Oh yeah, my “real name” on my profile is (first name) Bad (last name) Tux, so I didn’t notice any strangeness yourself. In general if you don’t want your real name associated with your profile, don’t put it anywhere in your profile, these hosting services have no (zero) interest in maintaining the privacy of profile fields unless forced to do so by law, because it doesn’t earn them any money to maintain privacy on profile fields.
– Badtux the Psuedonomynous Penguin
(I say “pseudonomynous” because a few Googles will turn up my real name and a few clicks more will turn up my address, even, but luckily most folks are too moronic to figure out how to do that).
Actually, Blogger’s reliability has been extremely good since they were bought by Google in 2003. Royal Pingdom recognized them as the most reliable in a recent comparison of blogging platforms. In fact, I can’t recall downtime like today’s for several years.
Nevertheless, it is rather amazing that the folks at Google are apparently really struggling over this simple site upgrade. To make things even worse, their communication sucks. Especially in this day of social media.
When I say “pseudonomynous” it’s because I’ve misspelled “pseudonymous”. 😈
All the posts have been restored on the YSS, but the comments aren’t back yet, and there’s still no access to the dashboard. This could get old really fast! OTOH, as Bryan notes, I can’t exactly complain that I’m not getting my money’s worth…
Eh, well, I went ahead and set up a temporary WordPress.com site, and changed the background on my Blogspot blog (said background hosted on my own server) to point at it. Was going through blogging withdrawal. I mean, I had a cat picture that needed postin’, and no way to do it!
– Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
I know about last night because I had just finished a magnum opus comment and hit preview to ensure they didn’t change the Captcha while I was finishing and they gave me an annoying message indicating that Blogger had gone read-only as they said they would at 10 PM [no time zone indicated, PDT assumed as it was Midnight my time]. I, of course, didn’t interrupt my thought processes to copy the comment locally so the world is now devoid of a fabulous piece of hard-hitting, masterful snark [that’s my story and I’m sticking to it].
If they has lost the doggerel, Steve, I have the e-mail you sent me. [It is nbsp that it choked on. It does it to me, if I forget and use it.]
Yeah, I’ve noticed that it has changed the names on the posts, which is truly annoying, and a bit confusing if you don’t know who people are.
It would be comforting to think this was some evil plot, but it is just incompetence. They didn’t do enough testing before they updated – a fairly common occurrence these days.
We were posting at the same time, Badtux. I have an emergency site in case of problems during big events, like hurricanes, sled dog races, the World Cup, or Le Tour.
Welcome, Rick. I left Blogger March of 2006 after a series of failures, and looking at the possibility of not being able to blog hurricanes, after the disastrous 2004 and 2005 seasons. The only reason I have archives is because I manually downloaded them to my own machine. Blogger lost my archives during the transition to Blogger 2.0.
They have been fairly stable lately, but most of the “old guys” around here have seen more than a few extended periods when Blogger has been down.
Hosting their Status site on their own service is a rookie mistake. They can’t communicate with their users if their service is down. This is in the same league as a modem company only providing Internet support for their products – if you can get on the Internet you don’t need the support.
I use a small hosting service, but when they have a problem, I can go to their status site and get constant updates, because it is on a separate host. Actually they use their status site as a check on their network, sending them a notification if it can’t connect to the main site, and posting that information automatically.
Blogger is free, so you have no right to expect a great deal from them, but they are certainly not without their faults.
It is still read only at 8am….Happy Friday the 13th.
“It would be comforting to think this was some evil plot, but it is just incompetence.” – Bryan
Exactly so. I’m a conspiracy theorist by nature, but this isn’t one; it’s just a screw-up. I know it’s not the same technology, but… wouldn’t this make you hesitate to put your business’s documents in the Google cloud?
Bryan, thanks, but I do have a text file of the doggerel, and for a short time (before they yanked everything back) Blogger displayed my post of it in the course of restoring things, so apparently they have it, too.
So the problem was nbsp? Who knew! I wonder why the filter chokes on nbsp while allowing various other… interesting words…
fallenmonk, I hadn’t noticed that. How appropriate!
Oh, and we need a new acronym… TANSTAAFBS.
I know someone who works at Google. When it came time to set up a mailing list for “Former Employees of X” (where X is a former employer that is no longer with us, duh), he set it up on… Yahoo Groups.
People asked him why. His reply: “I’ve seen how the hamster wheels work behind the scenes at Google.” Heh. His faith in his employer’s product is touching :twisted:.
It appears that my background redirect isn’t showing up on Windows. Color me baffled. The blogosphere is certainly quiet, anyhow…
You should be defending your crops from the deer and other critters, Fallenmonk, before the temperature rises. 😉 You have certainly had some major ‘time management’ problems lately with the weather, work, and critters hellbent on interfering.
I think there is a “white list” somewhere in the code, similar to the one for tags, Steve. If I can find it, I can change it.
Come on, Steve, the BS is always free and freely dispensed – oh, never mind …
I got the swap after I did a hard reload, Badtux.
Actually, everyone who works for a large entity assumes that other companies are better managed. I thought the military was the absolute pits until I worked for a couple of Fortune 50 clients. It’s depressing to think, but based on personal experience, the military is significantly more efficient and effective that large corporations. It is probably related to the consequences – screw-up at corporation and you get fired; screw-up in the military and you go to prison.
Oops, my bad, Badtux – I had to manually insert the URI to get the real site on WordPress. What I got with the hard reload was the Blogger site with an underlay saying it was moved.
It’s even sadder than that, Bryan. Screw up at corporations, and you get promoted. Depending upon how close a friend of the CEO you are, of course.
– Badtux the Cynical Penguin
You have to be in management for that to happen. Every one else is working day-to-day, whether they realize it or not.
BadTux @ 17 – maybe it’s Firefox, ’cause I’m on Ubuntu Linux and I don’t see the background redirect either.
Just as a precaution, I’ve set up a site at http://yellowdoggereldemocrat.wordpress.com/. If I don’t appear on the Blogspot site for a day or two, that’s where you’ll find me. It’s even uglier than the Blogger site, but hey, they say buggers can’t be choosers… I hope I don’t have to move there permanently.
My last two days’ posts, with their associated comments, are still missing from the Blogger YSS. Don’t believe them when they say they’ve restored everything.
My posts have reappeared but without my comments. Will they come back eventually? Who knows.
Here is my WordPress URL, both in the “Website” box above and here:
What a @#$%^ pain this has been, and will yet be!