April 11, 2000

6:51 PM

Love that Blogger redesign. Normally I wouldn't blog about this here, but they leave me little choice. (Other than jumping ship and kludging some scripts together). I want my free service that I pay nothing for and should be grateful just to have now!

On a serious note, I love Blogger, think it's great, and use it myself, but is it bad to become dependant on a third party tool? You've basically placed the life of your site at the whim of the tool provider. Granted, Ev, Meg, PB, [that fourth guy], Matt, and now Jack seem like pretty nice people to be at the whim of, but wouldn't it be better to do it 'on your own?'

Just thinking out loud, as soon as it's back up I'll go to my little traveled corner of the web and stay there.
posted by alan (16 comments total)

I've gotta say, it's a little inconvenient, especially considering the timing of what I'm working on right now (thanks wendell).
I have a hell of a lot of links to put up on site right now, and can't do a damn thing. But then again, I have no-where near the right amount of scripting knowledge to even come close to an automated posting system for my site.
Blogger is a fantastic tool for those of us who don't have the scripting knowledge but have the creative urge and desire to post each day. I'll leave myself in the hands of PB, Ev, Meg, Matt, Matt and Jack anyday; if only because they're good sports.
posted by Neale at 7:01 PM on April 11, 2000

i think its working now.
posted by andy at 7:47 PM on April 11, 2000

I'm far too anal to use Blogger on my site. I like manipulating my own HTML documents on my own hard drive with my own HTML editor. Of course, I also liked the movie Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, so you can make what you will of that.
posted by Succa at 8:03 PM on April 11, 2000

Anal? That makes three of us.
posted by sylloge at 9:06 PM on April 11, 2000

Sylloge . . .
posted by alan at 9:11 PM on April 11, 2000

I love Blogger.

No, really. I realize I am jumping on the bandwagon very late here, and that whatever I do with Blogger will have been done a million times before and ten times better, and I am still fooling with it before I take my site live with it..um...very soon, but even after just fooling with it a day or two I love it.

And I am very appreciative of it, and the fact that it is free, and the fact that people I don't know worked very hard to make it so functional and easy to use, and that they are letting me use it. For free.

Dependent? No. I am not a profesional web anything, but it was easy enough to figure out how to use tags to manipulate text and create links, and if Blogger didn't exist, I would just be doing it myself, and taking longer. My website isn't dependent on Blogger, just made more convenient by it.

And if it is down for a little while? Well, it happens, and frankly, no one is looking to Weblogs to report the cutting edge news, just to link to it.
posted by sperare at 10:25 PM on April 11, 2000

This is what happens when you need to reboot a server remotely and the operating system shuts down the mechanism for remote access before popping up a dialog on the console (for some reason) that says, "Are you sure you want to shut down?", requiring someone to be there to press OK. Please, no OS flames, but does Win2K have a registry setting that means "Do what I tell you to do, and don't ask questions dammit"?

sync;sync;reboot;
Are you sure you want to sync the disk cache to be safe and then reboot the computer? (only appears on the console, not the terminal window I'm typing in)

Ha!

Seriously, sorry about the downtime. We are doing everything we can to minimize it.
posted by theothermatt at 11:17 PM on April 11, 2000

I don't know about a registry setting, but there's a wonderful program called "RTVReco" which does that kind of thing. And if you get the right version of it, it's freeware.

But I don't know if it will work under Win2K.

posted by Steven Den Beste at 11:32 PM on April 11, 2000

That rat Kottke stole my word!
posted by Succa at 6:43 AM on April 12, 2000

I just started using Blogger for a project I'm doing... thought I'd try it out, since it's sort of a blog-type thing, and I didn't really want to have any direct ties to the site itself (no FTP, no files locally... heh, sounds dirty, doesn't it).

It's pretty damned cool. I wouldn't ever want to do a whole site with it because I'm a control freak like that, but it's an amazing tool, and it's really convenient. Yep, I like it.

And it's free. That alone makes it great.

As for downtime... well, tough shit. This is the internet, folks. Things go down. Deal with it.

In closing: three cheers for Blogger!
posted by danwalker at 6:43 AM on April 12, 2000

"...is it bad to become dependant on a third party tool?"

Remember that Microsoft wants people to start doing this with more critical applications: word processing, databases, etc.
posted by harmful at 9:10 AM on April 12, 2000

(pissy Microsoft Quality Software comment goeth here)

No one much addressed the primary question, I don't think, which is, is it a good thing overall to mortgage your uptime to an outside provider.

My thoughts, somewhat stolen from Phil, read roughly as "put all your eggs in one basket, sure... but make it a really good basket.

Ok, yes, I know; I stole it fromn Heinlein, too, but it fits here. Uptime, security and integrity are really all an Application Service Provider has to offer; that *is* the topic at hand.

Cheers,
-- jra
posted by baylink at 9:34 AM on April 12, 2000

You aren't really mortgaging your uptime though, since your site will hold the most recently "published" version of the site - you just risk having to either
not update your site if blogger is down or
update it by hand and then copy the info into blogger later
posted by CrazyUncleJoe at 9:54 AM on April 12, 2000

Good point. I use Pitas, where that is the case; I'd forgotten that Blogger does it the other way.

Which is better, of course, depends on how good a server installation the pitas-like system is installed on; someone who's spreading the costs, like Phil does with his stuff, over a large enough, reliable enough, and well enough connected cluster, would be a better bet than many of the servers I might be pushing to from Blogger.

Cheers,
-- jra
posted by baylink at 11:26 AM on April 12, 2000

I *like* doing it myself. I've always been a D.I.Y. kinda guy, and when I started using the web I started to learn html, then scripting, cgi, perl, xml, etc. etc. etc...

I want to learn the good, the bad, and the ugly of creating my own content management system. People always say "Why reinvent the wheel?" Well, because then it's *my* wheel! Designed, and built to the exact specifications I create... And the whole thing is a learning process... yeah.

I think tools like Blogger, Pitas, and even (gasp!) Manilla are good things, and they are extremely useful to people who don't give a crud about learning about the technology behind building web sites. I don't fit into that camp.

posted by raster at 10:02 PM on April 12, 2000