Monday, January 24, 2005

Does Blogger.com suck?

On Thursday I sent an email to Blogger.com support complaining about the slow responsiveness of the site, including the slow responsiveness of the commenting feature. Today they wrote back:

Hi there,

Errors like this are generally due to temporary problems with our servers, and if you wait a little while before trying again, Blogger should work normally. If you continue to have trouble with it, please try clearing your browser's cache and cookies before logging in again. We apologize for the inconvenience, and we are constantly working on making our servers more reliable.

Thanks for using Blogger!

Sincerely,
Blogger Support Team

Is it just me, or do their severs have a lot of "temporary problems"?

15 comments:

Bill said...

Yes. Blogger does suck. As a Libertarian you of all people should approciate that you get what you pay for.

Adam Lawson said...

I wouldn't say they suck, but yes, I've seen the problems lately. It happens.

Ron Chusid said...

If by "temporary" they mean a condition which is present most (although not all) of the time since at least July (when I became involved with blogger), then yes, this is a temporary problem.

By most conventional definitions, the problem would be considered chronic, not temporary. Today has been a worse day than usual for blogger, so we might be experiencing some temporary problems superimposed upon their more chronic slowness.

2spothipshot said...

Yeah,blogger does apply suction! I want what I want when I want it and right now I want my gub'mint check to get here!...RIGHT NOW! Damn it to hell, the free stuff that doesn't do what I want it do.

2spothipshot said...

Yeah,blogger does apply suction! I want what I want when I want it and right now I want my gub'mint check to get here!...RIGHT NOW! Damn it to hell, the free stuff that doesn't do what I want it do.

David Foster said...

The fact that something is offered free doesn't mean it has to suck. Google is free (to searchers) and it usually provides very good performance. Google, the company, is also the owner of Blogger, and I feel confident that they have at least a few ideas about how they think they are going to make money off it some day. However, if they don't address the Blogger performance problems, they are going to ruin the franchise that they have bought. The performance on the comments system is really terrible, and so is the conceptual model with the "profile" thingy.

Adam Lawson said...

Why is it that in almost every post, there's a comment about how she's should feel this or that way, as a Libertarian? It's getting ridiculous. She's not, nor does she pretend to be, a mindless libertarian party drone.

Scott said...

As a Libertarian, I think she should ignore the previous comment.

2spothipshot said...

I concur. Hurumph!!! I said HURUMPH!!!

Ron Chusid said...

Amazing (but not surprising) how a simple technical question turns into a politcal debate.

By the way, while this discussion has concentrated on comments, Blogger is also frequently slow for entering and editing main blog posts.

As someone already noted above, Google will most likely look for a way to profit from this. It is not hard to imagine ways in which this would be possible. However, they will need to get some of the bugs out of the system first--which perhaps is one of their goals in running this as a free site for now.

Luboš Motl said...

Hi Libertarian Girl! I often encounter the same problems. Submitting comments and editing is often very slow; the main page of the blog is sometimes displayed incorrectly.

At any rate, this did not prevent me from including your cool blog between the links on mine - http://motls.blogspot.com/. Please don't feel any obligation to do anything.

All the best
Lubos

Micah said...

I've noticed the slowness of Blogger and would switch to Haloscan in an instant if it wasn't for the fact that I'd lose all of the comments on my blog (if I knew then what I know now...). But I've heard that, unless you pay, Haloscan won't access comments older than four months.

Engineer-Poet said...

My complaints about Blogger are different in specifics but eerily similar in the gist.  The "tech support" does not show any obvious understanding of the problem, and nothing seems to get fixed.

(My recurrent gripe is HTML in responses.  If you ended a paragraph with an HTML tag, the following TWO line breaks would be deleted when the response was posted... but not in the preview!  On top of this, Blogger forbade the <p> tag, blockquote, and lists in responses.  I have not tested these things recently, but it seems ridiculous that Slashdot can handle these things without a hiccup yet Blogger cannot abide them.)

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