Blogging about Blogs
Stumbling Upon StumbleUpon.com
Thursday, July 31st, 2008There’s a site out there called StumbleUpon.com.
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Allow Me to Give You the Tour…
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Now that it’s done, allow me to point out some of the super-cool features of my new site.
Categories: Blogging about Blogs, Tech Talk | 1 Comment »
I’m Baaaaaaack!!!!!
Thursday, July 10th, 2008So, how long does it take to move a blog from Google’s Blogger tool to WordPress?
Well, I don’t really know, but I’m here to tell you that it can take 38 days, if you’re crazy enough to do what I did.
Categories: Blogging about Blogs, Tech Talk | 7 Comments »
Sorry, Blogger – Two strikes and you’re out
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008For those who wondered where I went again, Blogger took another 5-day hiatus on me. Once again, no explanation and no response from any help groups, e-mails to support, etc. It seems to be up & running now (maybe it’s because it’s almost 2AM?), but I’ve officially lost faith in this previously reliable service.
My next tool of choice is WordPress, which I’ve heard good things about, and also comes with instructions on how to install on a Yahoo server. Step 1 is to create a MySQL database in Yahoo, which I (believe) I’ve successfully done. Step two is to login to that database. Right now, Yahoo is giving me a “server is not responding” message when I try to login. I called Yahoo tech support and got an actual human, who theorized the potential problem for me, reset the database and allowed me to try again. The problem persisted, but I haven’t had time to call them back during normal (Pacific time) business hours. Still – that’s more responsive than Blogger has been for me.
So here’s my plan (I know – who asked me? Leave me alone – it’s my blog & I’ve been silenced for 10 of the last 12 days. I can ramble if I want to…): I’m going to chase down the problem over at Yahoo. If I fix the problem there and Blogger starts working consistently again, I’m willing to retroactively forgive Blogger and declare the problem to be on the Yahoo side. One more Blogger outage without a Yahoo problem, though, and I’m done.
My educated guess tells me that this isn’t Yahoo’s problem, though, because Blogger is only trying to FTP to the site – it’s not using any database functionality. And I’m able to FTP to the site using Yahoo’s tools, as well as my local copy of Microsoft FrontPage. So the likely answer here is that I’m dealing with two problems, and only one of the companies is helping me solve one. Not quite a high bar for customer service, but beggars can’t be choosers…
More to come (hopefully…)
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Blogger’s Back . . . AGAIN!!!
Sunday, April 27th, 2008After another 5-day outage, Blogger appears to be back & publishing again. Forgive me for being cynical, but we’ll see how long it lasts this time.
And for what it’s worth, still no response to my Blogger support e-mail request, nor any mention of it on Blogger Buzz or any of the message boards I’ve been able to find.
Oh, and lest you think I’m only bashing Blogger here, I went to Yahoo’s support page (my site is hosted at Yahoo), filled out the form, and got a Failure to Deliver e-mail back, telling me that the e-mail address the form used doesn’t exist in the Yahoo domain.
What gives? Did the world agree to abandon all tech support while I was asleep one night?
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Oh Blogger, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?
Monday, April 21st, 2008Yes, world, the long and horrible wait is over.
On the afternoon of April 14th, after posting a humorous entry on the Plainview Library’s schedule of events, I went to edit my recent post & found that Blogger wasn’t letting me FTP files to my server (the specific error, so the Google Gods pick this entry up, was “Your publish is taking longer than expected. To continue waiting for it to finish, click here”). That happens from time to time, and given that they interact with hundreds (thousands?) of third party hosting services to do FTP publishing, I can imagine that fixing it would be a complex task. But this time, the lights went off for SIX WHOLE DAYS!.
The message boards lit up with people complaining about the problem and threatening to migrate to WordPress or the like. This particular thread got particularly vitriolic, especially after a Blogger Employee suggested that users 1) Read the help file on FTP publishing, 2) clear their browser cache and cookies, and 3) “Head to the kitchen, grab some comfort food, and then try again a little bit later.” Poorly worded post, to be sure, especially given that this was the only response from Blogger itself on the whole thread (or on any other thread I could find). Even the official Blogger blog, Blogger Buzz, didn’t mention the problem – not even in their most recent post entitled Updates and Bug Fixes for April 18th.
I realize Blogger is a free service, and you tend to get what you pay for in this world, but this was truly frustrating. And I say that as someone who was just going through the normal blogging withdrawal. Others on the messageboards were complaining about lost business, missed media opportunities, difficulty communicating with their customers/business partners, etc.. Blogger (and Google in general) have historically been very responsive to problems, both within the company and by making use of the “Army of Davids” that their user base represents. This time, though, they acted as if they weren’t even aware of the problem. I even went to the “Contact Us” section and filled out a problem report, for which I was promised I’d get an e-mail response. I’m still waiting…
In any case, the problem seems to have subsided – at least for now. If I vanish for another six days, though, you’ll know why.
Oh, and if you’ve arrived at this page because you’re having the same problem and you were hoping I’d shed some light on how I solved it? Well, I waited for it to go away and eventually it did. How’s that for entirely unhelpful?!? If anyone has a better idea, please leave it in the comments? Thanks…
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 3 Comments »
How People Found Me – March Edition
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008Another monthly summary of how people found their way to Familygreenberg.com in the past month.
Categories: Blogging about Blogs | 2 Comments »
Familygreenberg.com Health Check – March Edition
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008| Metric | February | March | % Change |
| Visits | 1,436 | 1,486 | +3.48% |
| Pageviews | 2,059 | 2,079 | +0.97% |
| Pages/Visit | 1.43 | 1.40 | -2.43% |
| Avg Time on Site | 0:45 | 0:37 | -17.04% |
| Bounce Rate | 83.36% | 83.92% | -0.67% |
| % New Visitors | 86.28% | 89.43% | +3.65% |
March was basically the same as February, albeit with two extra days to make it happen. I consider this a good result, given that I took the entire last week of March off for a family vacation. When I did that in December, the numbers dropped off dramatically, and took two months to recover. So hopefully, there’s some momentum around here going into April.
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How People Found Me – February Edition
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008My monthly analysis and commentary on how people made their way to Familygreenberg.com:
Read the rest of this entry »
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Familygreenberg.com Health Check – February Edition
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008| Metric | January | February | % Change |
| Visits | 1,245 | 1,436 | +15.34% |
| Pageviews | 1,803 | 2,059 | +14.20% |
| Pages/Visit | 1.45 | 1.43 | -0.99% |
| Avg Time on Site | 0:49 | 0:45 | -9.31% |
| Bounce Rate | 81.77% | 83.36% | +1.94% |
| % New Visitors | 86.99% | 86.28% | -0.81% |
Well, after two months of down statistics, I guess it’s hardly an accomplishment to say you grew month over month. Then again, the trend could have continued, so I guess I shouldn’t look a gift pageview in the mouth.
Onwards & upwards…
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