We all know Blogger is a sucky place to do any sort of serious blogging -- but sometimes inactive use of a service lulls us into a false sense of satiety and satisfaction and that's precisely what happened to us.
Our Blogger horror started when we decided to move this Celebrity Semiotic blog from Microsoft Live Spaces -- another sucky blogging platform -- to Blogger.
We chose Blogger out of blind loyalty. We started a blog there on January 6, 2007 -- when we wrote our Google Apps book -- and it originally looked like Blogger would be a piece of that suite, but Google wised up and did not, and have not, included Blogger in Google Apps.
We had a serious re-direct problem with Blogger that would send any WWW.CelebritySemiotic.com visitors to the BolesUniversity.com homepage instead of to CelebritySemiotic.com. That is not acceptable and it was wholly Google's problem.
Our A Name records and CNAME records were working fine. There was obviously a problem with our zone file on the Blogger server that -- now 55 hours later -- is not only unresolved, but UN-responded to in the Blogger "help group."
We do not understand how Google can provide "support" in a group when no one from Google is there to process and answer serious calls for technical support.
The Blogger support group is obviously more placebo than remedy and we could never figure out a way to directly contact anyone at Google to help sort it for us.
So, accepting the inevitable and the non-divine, we pulled this blog off of Blogger and inserted here into our Movable Type setup where we've been singing now for a day.
Beware of Blogger -- it is not a serious blogging platform -- and if anything breaks, you are wholly and completely on your own.
We chose Blogger out of blind loyalty. We started a blog there on January 6, 2007 -- when we wrote our Google Apps book -- and it originally looked like Blogger would be a piece of that suite, but Google wised up and did not, and have not, included Blogger in Google Apps.
We had a serious re-direct problem with Blogger that would send any WWW.CelebritySemiotic.com visitors to the BolesUniversity.com homepage instead of to CelebritySemiotic.com. That is not acceptable and it was wholly Google's problem.
Our A Name records and CNAME records were working fine. There was obviously a problem with our zone file on the Blogger server that -- now 55 hours later -- is not only unresolved, but UN-responded to in the Blogger "help group."
We do not understand how Google can provide "support" in a group when no one from Google is there to process and answer serious calls for technical support.
The Blogger support group is obviously more placebo than remedy and we could never figure out a way to directly contact anyone at Google to help sort it for us.
So, accepting the inevitable and the non-divine, we pulled this blog off of Blogger and inserted here into our Movable Type setup where we've been singing now for a day.
Beware of Blogger -- it is not a serious blogging platform -- and if anything breaks, you are wholly and completely on your own.
Indeed, it is not serious at all. I let Vampire Bear have a blog on there because it is free but we don't take it more seriously than a fun blog for laughs and helping people read Hebrew :)
When blog.bolesuniversity.com went live on Blogger three years ago, it wasn't updated every single day. Sometimes, Gordon, a week or two would pass without a new post. Blogger is fine for that sort of impassive blog that doesn't get a lot of comments. If anything breaks, however, your are totally and completely on your own -- and if the fix is something you aren't allowed to touch or access... you're simply broken forever...