An Open Letter To Blogger

Dear Blogger:
You created the service that got many of us, including me, to get into the nanopublishing business. Now every man, woman, and child, could get into the web publishing business focusing on any topic of their choosing. Even without a topic, we now could share with our readership the daily going ons and grind of daily existence. And best of all, Blogger is free; you'll even host the site for us if needed. In short, Blogger has been at the forefront of the Web 2.0 services.

We, here at the TechNudge family of websites (TechNudge, TechNudge Live, and TechNudge Live Reviews) are heavily dependent upon Blogger and its interface. Over the last several months, we have experienced many issues however.

One issue is the frequent outages that don't allow us to get our posts out. We cover the highly dynamic technology field, and our readership wants the latest news. It is frustrating to us to not be able to publish our stories in a timely fashion. In the meantime, our readership's eyeballs are heading over to any other site where they can stay up to date with the most recent developments. No one expects zero downtime but sometimes you guys seem to be just a bit cavalier about the whole thing.

Then there's the photo uploading. Just about all of my posts require an image. Many have several images to support the text. You have one of the best image handlers we've seen, when it works. More than half the time, I can't get photos.blogger.com to upload my images. It simply hangs on the upload screen, and never accepts them. I use the excellent Flickr service, and have them host the images. This workaround does get the job done, but it adds steps, and it's kind of pathetic that we need Flickr to do what a blogger feature should be doing. Also, Blogger will only accept JPEGs happily. It grudgingly accepts GIFs and PNG files but chokes most royally on BMPs, which have to be converted first as a preliminary step.

Another problem is that Blogger is rather restrictive. The simple interface is great for setting up a new blog in short order. In a single evening, I can have a website up and running, with all the trimmings like counters, ads, and links. However, when you want to develop the site further so folks can get to all that content, there's just no way. You can't put categories onto the posts, nor can you organize them in any way except by date. Blogger simply cannot grow with us as our site does.

The final issue is that we have been experiencing problems with Word verification getting turned on. Word verification is a feature that requires a word to be typed from the graphic letters before comments, or, as we've experienced, the posts themselves can be posted to the blog. Bill has sent emails to the Blogger folks notifying them that we don't want Word Verification turned on, but it keeps happening. What was the last answer from them? It was a good one: They told us that we're posting too often, and that's creating the problem. In other words, if you use Blogger too much, than it makes it more difficult for you to do so. Again, a service that can't grow with you.

Right now, we're not hosting our sites on Blogger. They're hosted on an independent ISP to whom we pay actual money. We're only using Blogger's front-end as an editor for the post content. That shouldn't cause all of the problems we're experiencing. Whatever bandwidth usage Blogger may incur is minimal --or at least of its own making.

If you folks at Blogger want to restrict yourselves to being just a competitor to Guest Book, then you're doing a great job of it. On the other hand, if you actually want to live up to your "Publishing at your fingertips," slogan you should be working to resolve at least the issues I enumerated above. Our feelings here are that Blogger, however blessed with good intentions, has failed to anticpate or react to the amplitude and direction in which online publishing is going --a chain of events that it arguably put into motion itself.

There used to be a top-tier computer reseller named "Zeos." Key words here are, "used to be."

Sincerely,

--Jonas

Welcome to the Blogger headaches here.

Tell us about your web publishing issues below.