Featured Photos


Baseball Hall of Fame - 8/23/11

Featured Video


Avery's QuEST Project - It's Healthy!

House Construction


The Completed Home Renovation


Home Renovation - Complete!


Our House Construction Photoblog

RSS Feed


« | Main | »

Oh Blogger, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

By Brian | April 21, 2008 | Share on Facebook

Yes, 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…

Topics: Blogging about Blogs | 3 Comments »

3 Responses to “Oh Blogger, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?”

  1. jason says at April 21st, 2008 at 12:45 pm :
    And here I was thinking you’d just run out of things to say. :)

  2. Brian says at April 21st, 2008 at 1:11 pm :
    When that happens, it’s time to notify the next of kin…

    (And oh, by the way, Blogger’s down again, so I’m hoping that at least the comments can go through…)

  3. Ilya says at April 22nd, 2008 at 7:32 am :
    Well, I am paying a hundred bucks a year to host my site with a provider, and I certainly get a 24×7 and expedient service in return… Come to think of it, though, a six-day forced outage would not be unwelcome as I am running out of things to say occasionally :)