Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Blogspot...you get what you pay for?

When I first started this blog almost two years ago I really didn't know what to expect, but this blog has grown and I'm very happy with that. Yet Blogger has become increasingly less and less reliable and with the release of the new "beta" we have been told eventually we are going to have to switch to that whether we want to or not. I don't want to switch. Even though I'm tired of the almost daily failures where you cannot access your blog or discover that a post you have written has gone *poof* only to later return in doubles or even triplicate the Beta Blogger is going to be a major headache for those like me who don't want a cookie cutter blog template. It looks possible but it would take hours to take what I have now and convert it into a format acceptable for the "beta". Not really worth it given the reliability of blogger. I moved my other blog to it's own domain so I could just move this blog over there as well. The downside to that being that my page rank and all of the links I have worked over the past two years to develop would be gone and I'd have to start over again.

Take right now - when I started typing this blogger was fine but I now once again have the little message, "could not connect to Blogger.com. Saving and publishing may fail". May fail? Now that's an understatement and I've seen this message too many times to count today. That at least gives you some warning, I've tried to get into the practice of saving what I have written on a notepad but I can almost guarantee that the time I forget to do this extra step? Will be the time when blogger appears to be working then fails to publish.

Yes, blogger is free but honestly I'd be willing to pay a few bucks a month to not have to deal with the daily struggles to be able to post when I want to post...

:-)

8 comments:

Scott G said...

I agree with you. When I switched, Blogger was starting to get less reliable almost every day. That was probably when they started working on the new version.

Bradley Herring said...

Wordpress! I got tired of dealing with Blogger's nonsense and made the switch. Have never been a happier blogger.

You'd have to pay a one-time charge of something like $15 to be able to have complete control over your template. And moving posts and comments is very easy. Couldn't recommend it higher.

Scott G said...

My biggest problem was moving posts since we wrote the blog portion ourselves. After I moved the blogger archives, the comments came easy since they are Haloscan though

Unknown said...

I'm using wordpress over at my domain that I bought for my other blog and they have an import tool so I was able to move all of my posts and comments over to the new wordpress blog. Wordpress was one of the free options that came with the webhosting and I do like it.

The problem is of course links and page ranking. That wasn't that large of an issue for that blog because it was newer but for this one that is the only reason I've been hesitant in moving it.

Anonymous said...

Heck, I don't understand any of it!
I just let Jason set it all up for me and I go from there. If I ever want changes in my blog appearance I get in touch with Jason and he takes care of it for me.

Anonymous said...

Lisa, can you set up something on the other domain and just redirect from here? I don't know what kind of effect it would have on the rankings, but in my head, it seems like it would maintain them at least until you can establish the blog in it's new location. And if you weren't actually posting using Blogger, it would eliminate the "Poof! It's gone!" posts.

The other suggestion I might offer is, if you're using Firefox, download the Performancing plug-in. That at least allows you to keep your posts on your computer until you can verify that they published.

Unknown said...

Val, I wish I could but I tried to get a re-direct to work for Glass City Jungle and blogger won't let you add the code that's necessary to be able to have people be automatically re-direct. I'm still working on it, there are a few people out there a lot technically smarter than me that I am going to ask for help but I've been dealing with some real life stuff so I haven't been in a tech mood. Hopefully that will soon end.

I can create a subdomain and link back to here as well as use a few other tips to re-build the standings here at a new domain but that will take time. Unfortunately I think that's what I'm going to have to do and probably the sooner the better.

Hooda Thunkit (Dave Zawodny) said...

I don't understand enough about this stuff to do much on my own, but I would love to switch.

The one thing that I don't like about WordPress is the inability to preview before posting a response.

I'm open to moving my teensy little blog and am watching what everyone else does anxiously.