Week 43 of POOP

The "leap before you look" mentality at Google continues - and now it's spread to Google-owned Blogger, which hosts this very blog.

Last night, I started getting an error message when trying to post new entries here. The error message told me to check Blogger's status page. But it would have been nice if its status page had updates that were newer than 3 months ago.

Because "Customize" had been replaced by "Design" in the blue box at the top of my blog, it appeared as if the outage was caused by some change in the editing features. It looks like none of these features even add anything to Blogger's functionality. All it does is make it harder to use - even without this now-familiar error message. But the more important point is that this proves Blogger didn't even test its new features before unleashing them.

After much struggle, I found Blogger's help forum, where hundreds have people have complained about the same problem since last night. But remember, Blogger is run by Google, so tech support is virtually nonexistent.

Hours after the problem began, the Google/Blogger peeps claimed it was fixed. That was a lie. I woke up this morning to find it was still broken - and people were still complaining about it, to no avail.

When your business depends on your blog, you can't have shit like this happening. You just can't. A brief outage would be understandable, but this lasted a day. Worse, Google lied about it being fixed and gave no timetable for fixing it. It's bad enough to have an outage, but for Google to lie and to not even respond to hundreds of people is inexcusable.

Kind of like with the other problems I've reported regarding Google for 43 weeks now.

Another note: People were still able to post comments on Blogger blogs, even while blogmasters couldn't post new posts. This included spam. I just love the fact that a spam bot could post, but we couldn't.