Saturday, April 18, 2009

Damn Blogger

Blogger just published an unfinished post I was working on (which I then deleted). Sorry about that. Blogger seems to have become increasingly flaky over the last year or so. For example, I lost the ability to moderate comments. Then the functionality for notifying me of comments went kablooey - now I only get notified of comments that I myself write on my blog (thanks very much, blogger). Today the word verification functionality went screwy, so that as I'm writing a post (which I have to be logged in to do) I can't save my writing until I type the word verification letters. When I did that just now, damn blogger posted my unfinished writing.

It turns out that blogger has flagged me as a spam blog, which is a blog that is auto-generated to post advertising messages. I have sent a request to blogger to take me off the spam list.

It seems to me that my blogging problems started with Blogger 2.0, but I may just be feeling burned about new versions because I upgraded to Skype 4.0 last week and it is crap compared to v3... I'm having all sorts of problems, and since I have an online phone number with Skype and use it as my home-phone-away-from-home, and since I'm away from home more often than not, it's a real pain to suddenly have it downgraded to alpha-level usability. Skype phone numbers are cheap and have unlimited long distance and free voicemail, but I guess I'm getting what I paid for.... which appears to be the case with my free account on blogger, as well.

Update: Reading the blogger help pages, I see that they say spam blogs "can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text..." Now that's just mean! ;-)

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7 comments:

Oxford County Liberals said...

I've not had a single problem with Skype 4.0. It's interface is certainly different, but I think I'm getting better call quality with it (though I just use it for Skype-to-Skype calls; I dont use it with a unique phone # like you do). Have you sent in a compaint to Skype tech support?

As for Blogger and blog functionality, why not try setting up an experimental Wordpress blog to compare the 2?

Yappa said...

Hi Scott,

All excellent points. I would follow your advice on Wordpress if not for Newton's first law (inertia). Maybe, while pretending that I know something about physics, I'll also use the word entropy to describe my state (in the sense that there is a steady deterioration in functionality). Or maybe the situation is more like a horse that comes up on an obstacle and balks... as in, "that horse won't jump".

One of these days I should probably do something though. It's probably just a template issue, but I dislike the fact that there's no "Older Posts" button at the bottom of the home page of my blog; the only way to look up old posts is to click on individual months.

Ferd said...

'I would follow your advice on Wordpress if not for Newton's first law (inertia).'

But that's the one that says a body in motion remains in motion...

Yappa said...

... and a body at rest stays at rest. I think though, that while Newton might have thought of velocity and rest as equal aspects of his law, the word inertia has come to mean sluggish.

But I thank you for your comment, Ferd. I will endeavor to be more precise in future!

Bert said...

Yappa, I promise I won't say anything about what Blogger says about spam blogs. ;-)

Yappa said...

HI Bert!

Nice to see you back. I hope you're enjoying Spring.

Bert said...

Hey Yappa. Yes, spring is great. The weekend will be VERY nice. Time to do lot's of outside work & BBQ'ing.