February 1, 2007

We're Sorry, But We're Unable to Build a Reliable Blogger

The jury has reached a verdict: people from Blogger are simply unable to build a reliable blog software. The old version of Blogger had a lot problems and it's interesting to read this blog post from the Blogger team written in October, last year:

You need to look no further than our status blog or perhaps your own experiences to know that Blogger had a significant number of unplanned outages this last week (forgive me my euphemisms?) and a handful of planned ones to clean up from the unplanned ones. (...) We really regret these outages, which were a nuisance (or worse) to you. The past week's performance was not representative of the kind of service we want to provide for you. (...) More importantly, though, what are we doing to prevent this in the future? (...) In the long term, we're developing a new version of Blogger with some great new features that is built on technology and hardware that has proven, Google-quality reliability.

You can notice the "Google-quality reliability" by trying to view a blog post from almost any Blogger blog. An innocent message will tell you: "We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request."


If you'll be able to actually view the post (refreshing the page might help), the slowness of the page will show you the power of a "technology and hardware that has proven Google-quality reliability".

It's also very hard to contact Blogger, because they don't like to link to direct contact forms like this one. Until they fix this new error, my apologies if you can't read my posts.

12 comments:

  1. It's funny, I had this same issue last week and I do wanted to contact them but I didn't find the contact page.

    Thanks for the link and reading in my mind about this one.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oddly enough while I can't get to your older posts through the links you provided in a post they will come up if you Google them and click on the link there. Not the cached links, just the normal links.

    So, for example, I search via Google with inurl:how-to-add-search-to-google-reader and click on the first entry that comes up. Takes me straight to the article. But if I click on the link to that same article from your later post at:

    http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/12/script-for-google-reader-search.html

    I get the error message.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dead on. I had to refresh to get your blog to show up. Then I had to hit refresh 3 more times to get this comment form to show up. Never thought I'd say this but perhaps I'm lucky that I'm still stuck on old blogger.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I am not trying to defend Blogger but all blogs (including this one and mine) is working perfectly fine (not even with delays). Yet, I find that Blogger is indeed unstable at times which makes all those enthusiastic bloggers pissed.

    P.S. I am in Hong Kong so the overseas servers might be fine. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Talk about stability, Blogger can't even manage to solve the problem of "custom domain" for blogspot.

    It seems that "custom domain" only works for only one URL eg. http://mydomain.com and not both URLs (for http://mydomain.com and http://www.mydomain.com)

    It is either for http://mydomain.com or http://www.mydomain.com. But not both. Pick one!

    This is definitely NOT google-usage reliability!

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  6. @problogger :
    its up to the user to setup a correct DNS cname for the www subdomain.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Blogger's suggestion deserves an Oscar:

    "Some users see the error code bX-vjhbsj when trying to view a blog. We have identified the source of this error and will push the fix to the site shortly. In the meantime, hitting Refresh in the browser may workaround the problem. We apologize for the inconvenience."

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  8. Is there a way to have a back up option so we can maby save them to a local Hard drive or save them all to the doc area?

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  9. Personally I found it deeply ironic that I got this error from Blogger just as I was attempting to import all our old posts into Wordpress. Blogger, I ain't missing you at all.

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  10. I've always thought your Blog is an excellent source of Google information. I appreciate your hard work.

    I was inspired to write about my disappointment with the new Blogger and have linked to your article on my audio blog.

    Thank you so much!

    http://gweggy.blogspot.com/2007/02/countdown-to-when-i-leave-blogger.html

    Gregg Scott
    www.GWEGGY.com

    ReplyDelete
  11. i want to ask you something about blog sites;
    if the site includes some copy or pornographic materials,what can we do about the site ?
    i mean i know a site which includes this kind of things and i have suffered the bloger site's photos,
    how can i declare this person to google?

    ReplyDelete
  12. Blogspot was terrible, back in those days, wasn't it? Can't say I've experience any problems for ages, now, though...

    ReplyDelete

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