Wednesday, January 31, 2007

An Open Letter to My Blog Colleagues Who Have Switched to Blogger Beta, or "New Blogger", if You Prefer:

The effects of beta

Please switch back to old blogger. At least for a little while. With new blogger your pages load poorly and often have elements missing. Comments don't stick. Attempted interaction with your blogs often results in a "Cannot find server or DNS Error" message. It could be me, but that would mean that both my home and office ISPs would have to be screwed up, and both are different companies who use different delivery mechanisms, so that would be really odd. I'm sad to say that new blogger is making your blogs quite hard to visit.

Is the ability to tag posts with categories like "shoes" and "beef anecdotes" worth all this pain and inconvenience to your readership? Please return to nestle in the familiar bosom of old blogger, just until google and blogger figure out who to make the new version less irritating.

Thank you.

11 comments:

Mondale said...

But to do so would be admitting defeat to the forces of terro and evil.

Wisdom Weasel said...

And Terro was always the scariest of the Decepticons, worse than Megatron himself.

Where is the value in publishing one's musings in a public format that irritates the public? That's all I'm wondering. I mean if one wanted to marshall one's thoughts using excellent sorting and tagging tools there are some really cool word processing programs out there that don't exist just to annoy those who don't use their buggy services...

mj said...

Would I be correct in assuming that the change to the 'beta' blogger (sic) is irreversible?

Poor souls.

Anonymous said...

I think it is irreversible.
I like Beta because I can change the colors without changing the template and I can add pictures to my sidebar! And I just did both.
Sorry for the inconvenience

Listmaker said...

i just switched and was annoyed that many previous comments were now rendered as anonymous. other than that, i haven't really had too many problems. my baseball blog changed awhile ago. i like how quickly it publishes. why is it taking so long for things to load? i haven't had that problem.

Bill Norris said...

Well, I hate it--but it's no longer in Beta allegedly.

And I don't think I can switch back; there seems to be no recourse.

Wisdom Weasel said...

I'm sure it is a great writing and editing tool like you all say: just don't forget that unless your blog is set to private it is out there to be read by anyone using a wide range of browsers and technology. Anything that puts up barriers to that- well- sucks.

I'm usually fairly geeky about getting in on the ground floor with new toys but something about new blogger seemed iffy, like new coke.

I'm sure it is fine. I a) was just having a hard time with it yesterday (I don't want to use my gmail login to post on blogs, but if I change to the blog handle I log myself out of my mailbox despite being on another site. Perhaps that is down to Firefox.) and b) I found that awesome nerd picture and so wanted to use it.

And MJ: M!key! You live mate! Nice biking page- happy Australian summer.

Wisdom Weasel said...

Furthermore, I just went to visit Mondale, Listmaker, and Norris is quick order and got:

"We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.

When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please:

Describe what you were doing when you got this error.
Provide the following error code and additional information.
bX-vjhbsj"

Could be me, but all of y'all are in new blogger- old blogger sites, typepad sites, etc are not giving me guff.

Its sad. I'm going to write to blogger tonight.

Joe said...

You make it sound like we wouldn't want to annoy you, Weasel. In fact, having you open up a can of curmudgeon-ass is perhaps the greatest benefit of switching to Beta.

Joe said...

I tell ya, that damn word verification makes me downright dyslexic. It took me like four tries to get that last comment up.

But it was worth it, dammit!

Crossing my fingers that I'll be able to navigate through this one.)

youthlarge said...

i've been getting some crazy error messages the past few days, but what's really pissed me off is how it's reverted comments to anonymous status.

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