Off-Line for Longer Than I’d Anticipated

Okay, so I’d fully planned on being out of contact for about a week there. Alas, it turns out that during my absence, Blogger went ahead and introduced a whole new interface for ’blog entry and management — which they’ve rather simply dubbed “New Blogger.” They’d actually been rolling it out for the last month or so, but have finally gotten around to transferring my ’blog over. First impressions are pretty good: It’s certainly simpler, more intuitive, and — most impressive — it works under Safari (just in time for that browser’s official 1.0 release).

Unfortunately, there appears to be one rather significant bug...

IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY WORK.

I’d call that a pretty crucial oversight. When I publish my ’blog... oh, I don’t know, but I kind of expect it to actually get published. Right now, I can post to my heart’s content, but the actual page is stuck at June 24th. New Blogger says it’s publishing just fine, but as near as I can tell, it’s basically just lying. And so far, no response — at all — from Blogger’s support team; the issue has been “logged,” but nobody’s even taken a look at the support request yet. I may not be paying a lot for this service, but I am paying for it.

I also suspect the RSS feed is hosed — in that they’ve actually taken away some of the capability to manipulate the settings there — but I won’t know for sure until I get the basic publishing issue resolved. So I’m figuring about double the as-yet-indefinite service time before that’s fixed.

I had recently signed up (and been accepted) as a beta tester for the new TypePad service, Six Apart’s ’blog hosting arrangement based on the Movable Type platform. Unfortunately, the beta-testing period has overlapped with a combination of my vacation time and a pretty serious work crunch, so I haven’t been able to do a whole lot to try it out. But given that this New Blogger is starting to sound a lot like “New Coke,” I think I’m gonna have to start looking at it a lot closer.

In the meantime, it looks like folks will be reading my entries — this one included — substantially later than I’m actually writing them. And I can’t decide if it’s better to hold off on writing, or just post and let them be published... whenever. Particularly problematic in that I’ll be taking another week’s absence next week.

Of course, by the time anyone reads this, I suppose the answer will be evident.