Out(r)ages

No post this morning because Blogger Beta was down.

You know, I don’t really mind having these Unscheduled Outages. (Or OutRages, as one of my colleagues dubs them.) No, let me rephrase that – outages are always a bit annoying, but Blogger is free, and no one forced me to switch to Blogger Beta, after all.

What really annoys me is the fact that everytime something goes wrong, I have to look around to find out if it’s just my blog, or if it’s a problem with the system itself. And if it’s a problem with the system, having to then work out if the Blogger people know about it and are working on it. (I don’t like to assume anything.) Why can’t they put information on problems (or or any news, for that matter) on the main Blogger page? Or on the Blogger Buzz blog? As well as on the Blogger Status page? (Or make that page more prominent!) And having to trawl through the Blogger help list is time-consuming – and I don’t know about you, but reading about other users’ exact same problems with their blogs and the fact that they don’t know how to fix the problems (or when the problems are going to be fixed) either is not really empowering or helpful to this user. To make a messy situation even messier, each time I’ve needed to find out about problems with the system, I’ve found information in different places (each of the sites I’ve mentioned) – they don’t seem to just use one forum (or better still ALL forums) to let us users know.

Maybe they don’t want to make such information so prominent on their main page because it sends a less-than-positive message to people. I can understand that reluctance, but on the other hand, isn’t it more annoying for people to not have this information? And while you might be trying to minimise the bad news element, the fact that users may be having problems with your service, and then having trouble finding out anything about it – well that’s worse news, In My Humble Opinion. If there’s something simple I need to be doing to keep up with all this – do let me know!

Pbwiki really won points with me when they had a bad outage some weeks ago – they emailed all users so we knew what was going on. Yes, they actually sent us an email. So even if you were peeved about the outage you at least knew what was going on, you knew they knew there was a problem, and you knew they were working on it. You could then go away and do 30 minutes on your exercise bike, or something.

**Sigh**

On another note: I don’t use Google Reader to keep up with my online reading, but apparently the latest upgrade of the service has been good. Like Peta, however, I am a happy Bloglines user, and I do like the recent Bloglines upgrade (I like the auto-refreshing, even if it does make me feel like I will never ever keep up).

I note that it’s possible to display Google Reader feeds in your blog, but I’m not sure I’m game to do try fiddling with this blog’s layout at the moment, given that my last attempt was painful. I note that the Blogger user sharing this information is not using Blogger Beta…

Is this turning into a cautionary tale for all you Blogger users out there who haven’t swapped to Blogger Beta yet?

9 Comments

Iris 2 October 2006

What a pain! It seems like one of the first rules of running a beta project should be copious and open communication with your beta testers.

Angel, librarian and educator 2 October 2006

Yea, it is pretty much turning into a very cautionary tale. The more I hear from people who have switched, the less I want to switch. And I know they will eventually switch everyone, which makes me wonder, would I want to stay on Blogger then? Oh well, we’ll see. Best, and keep on blogging.

CW 2 October 2006

Yep, Iris. Communication is one of the most important aspects of a good tech project. It almost doesn’t matter if there are problems, so long as you keep people well informed.

Angel, one would hope that they don’t swap all Blogger users until all the issues have been fixed! I’ll stay with Blogger Beta a while longer because I want to see what happens (call me a masochist).

jl 2 October 2006

I was gonna say… can’t you revert to the previous version of Blogger? But you’ve just answered my question.

CW 2 October 2006

jl, do you like WordPress.com? I’ve actually tried using it but have always been flummoxed by its seeming slowness…

Penny 3 October 2006

Yep – a cautionary tale. I’m reluctant to transfer just yet. I realise one should expect bugs but… so many?

jl 3 October 2006

I like WordPress but it’s not perfect. Recently, for example, it’s taken to not publishing posts in full. That is, if you create a post, save and continue editing, then click ‘publish’ at the end, it only publishes what you saved last. This seems to be a new thing with WordPress and i’ve been caught more than a couple of times. Lots of expletives as you can imagine. Now, just to be save, i select and copy all my text before i click anything.

But on the whole, i don’t have any issues with WordPress. (Now that i’m away from Squarespace, i sort of miss it. It was very good, user friendly. But i think i’m one of those people for whom the grass is always greener…)

jl 3 October 2006

… just to be ‘safe’ i meant to say. Oops.

CW 3 October 2006

Hmm.. I thought I’d written a reply to your post Penny, but obviously something went astray. Can’t remember what I said, but I think I agreed that there are rather a lot of bugs in Blogger Beta. >.< Cheers jl. I’m starting to think that if I do leave Blogger (Beta or otherwise) I will get a host somewhere. But that’s another thing again.