Why I hate Blogger – my miserable weekend
I am a huge Google advocate and when I first heard that they were acquiring Blogger, I thought only good things could come. However, Blogger has always been a joke of a platform among our community, and it has only gotten worse. I was forced into an upgrade from the “Old Blogger” early last week and everything has gone wrong since. Google you have lead me astray and now I am pissed.
Essentially, I am a lazy bastard that brought this onto myself. I put up MarylandMedia.com in late 2005 with the anticipation of changing jobs. It was a quick decision and the site was a result of that – was designed, built and deployed within 48 hours. A few weeks after deploying the site, I decided to put together a Blog – I always had strong opinions on certain topics within our industry and instead of bitching about it over lunch with colleagues I thought I would share with the world. The honest truth is that I put together the Blog, because I thought it would get me indexed faster and increase my PageRank. It worked and I quickly went from 3 visits a month (thanks to my co-workers) to now a thousand, plus or minus, a day (thanks to 9rules and StumbleUpon). So, I picked Blogger as my platform of choice for two reasons. One it was ridiculously simple and required very little to get up and running (while maintaining strong customization). Two, I also knew Google had recently acquired it so I assumed it inherently would get me listed within Google faster and upgrades to the platform would be right around the corner.
This was at a time when Google was deploying apps almost every single day and all were pretty breathtaking. Needless to say, the new Blogger is nothing to write home about. I lost the ability to have a customized comment box within my site (instead of using Blogger’s forced registration and/or pop-up). I also now have lost the ability to edit any post that was entered prior to the new system (this is something they don’t disclose before “forcing” you to upgrade). I’ve been putting off the upgrade for several months now (much as I have been with my Yahoo! ID and Flickr) – but last week an upgrade was required to view my dashboard or do anything with my Blog; so upgrade I did and headache I got.
I’ve read around town that the upgrade is only getting worse; slowly but surely all Blogger accounts will have to be hosted on blogspot.com and the ability to host the Blog within your site will be gone shortly. I am pretty sure all new accounts do not have the option to post to their site — going from fully customizable to completely restrictive.
So, needless to say the Blog has moved and I am finally on the WordPress platform. There will be a small transition period but I will try and maintain both URL’s to the Blog and the feed as long as I can.
The new blog: http://blog.marylandmedia.com/
The new feed: http://blog.marylandmedia.com/feed/
I hate you Blogger
- February 6th, 2007
- 22comments
- I am a proud member of the 9rules network
oh, dude.
blogger is absolutely the worst hosted application ever, in the history of the world.
i had problems with them a few years ago, and i switched to using wordpress on my own site.
the worst part of it is that when blogger doesnt work, it just lags and hangs and gnaws at your feet, like some troll with a grudge. ugh, i hate blogger. have i said that it’s the worst ever?
i agree - the problems have only gotten worse. in fact, i’ve noticed a lag when using many of google’s services in the past few months - reader, gmail, groups, etc. - ever since they updated the blogger site to the “new blogger.” perhaps, they merged some server space, or rearranged how the servers work. at any rate, blogger still sucks, and google appears to have contracted at least some of blogger’s suckiness
Thanks — I still have a damn headache
I understand your headache. That said I have found blogger to be ok if I want something up quickly. I also have a “feeling” Google gives Blogger a little bit of a priority in terms of indexing and results in Google Search. Anyone else have this “feeling” or is it just me?
Thanks for the info Martin.
I also use Blogger and host it on my own site so I’ve been very reluctant to upgrade to the “New Blogger”.
Sorry to tell you after the fact but the “forced upgrade” only happens because you are automatically logged in to your Google account. If you go to any Google page and log out before going to the blogger page, you can login to the “Old Blogger”.
I’m not a big fan but it is (was?) easy to get up and going. I did a lot of customization afterwards and fear the upgrade will be painful. For that, I might look at Wordpress.
Wrong here. You just had to go Settings/Sitefeeds to generate the code to feed your own page. I, personally, think Blogger is just fine. One of the nicer interfaces, imo. I think WordPress is boring. LiveJournal is getting better but it’s still clunky in some way. DeadJournal is dead. Yahoo! 360 is busy and so is Myspace/Facebook/and the like. Tribe.net only lets you use text, no formatting. Free-Association is very insular, and it’s such a small and drama filled community I sometimes don’t log in for weeks.
I think the new Blogger is one of the most flexible and customizable interfaces I have ever seen. But then, I took the plunge to the beta the first day it was offered and never looked back.
Ignore the dandy mustache, and check out the “blogger importer” from WordPress.com. May it help you (when it’s available for standalone WP blogs).
I just saw that this morning. WHAT GREAT TIMING! Lets all pretend that my post had something to do with it — my strong strong industry influence, HA.
Oh, btw, I offer this information as a web designer with 12 years experience. I actually owned my own web development company in the late 90s, Dancing Spider, Web Weaver. I agree edmic, though, if you really want control, get your own webpage. Plenty of CMSs out there to choose from and you can use whatever you want in the way of ads and stuff. I would counsel avoiding PhP Nuke, unless they have made some serious improvements to their security. I used it a couple years ago and was hacked several times before I switched to Joomla! . . which you can see I am still using.
I know, I really need to work on my own page. But Joomla! does have a fairly high learning curve and it’s just so much easier to put stuff in one of my communties where it will get more attention. :D
All the more reason to host your webpage yourself (or through a paid hosting company) where you can install your own software. If it’s important, and you truly want customization, I’d never hang my hat and hopes on a free solution. It make work for awhile, but at any minute they can change the rules and there’s not a thing you can do about it!
Last year I moved my blog from the paid Typepad service to Blogger, hoping it would drastically improve my indexing with Google. I was wrong there.
In fact, I’m starting to think that with all the Splogs being generated at Blogger, Google is not paying that much attention to indexing their own blogging system.
About two weeks ago I switched from the FTP option to the regular Blogger-hosted option, and now the blog is loading extremely slow at times.
It has gotten very frustrating, so now I’m in the process of moving to Wordpress, and I think it will be the right choice in the long run. I love Google’s products, but Blogger has a long way to go.
I’d say over-all Blogger is a sub-par product for someone wanting a lot of flexibility and customization. It appears to still be a solid product for those just needing a simple blog. However, my big complaint is about the transition from Old Blogger to New Blogger — it is a miserable one. I can’t edit old posts, that is an issue. I also had a blogger account set-up for a pro-bono client and they can’t easily copy-and-paste from MS Word anymore — the ‘ doesn’t convert any longer.
I am sure there are work-a-rounds and solutions to many of my issues, but that isn’t what I signed-up for. The bottom line is that Blogger was better off prior to Google and I have left as a result of that. I am day-two into Word Press and love it. I’ve used it before but see no reason why Blogger would even be an option any longer (for me at least).
Exactly! And, besides, they frequently go “for pay”. Which is not unreasonable, in my mind. Few folks can afford to stay free forever, eventually the cost of bandwidth adds up. You are just better off, given how cheap most hosting is now, to get your own.
Then I think you really ought to go out and get your own website. For less than $100/year you can have one hosted.
Odd, I just did that. I didn’t have any problems. (I did go in and clean up the code, I hate all the crap MS WORD puts into html but I needed to do a find and replace and already had WORD open.) What browser is s/he using? IE is notorious for interfering with copying and pasting of text and graphics. I use Firefox.
Well, ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I’m thoroughly content with the performance of my blogs and the ease with which I can customize not only the interface but use hand coded html to force my entries to do what I want them to do. In fact, I write poetry and I’ve never had such an easy time getting the poems to format they way I want them to. And I really appreciate that they do all this work for free.`
Gwenny, I am not going to change your pro-blogger view — so I won’t try. All I can say is that I am happy you are content with the performance and that things are working positively for you.
I just had a really bad experience. It might have been that I didn’t give it a chance or that my needs were different than yours. My personal opinion is for people to stray away if they are in the same boat as myself.
I hate blogger and that is that. I wish those using it all the best — but I can no longer recommend it as a blogging platform.
I didn’t think you were trying. I would hope you recognize that unless you are Leo LePorte or Ed Langa I’m not likely to take your advice about my web presence, anyway. :D I’m not trying to change your anti-blogger views . . .just trying to keep this honest.
Fine. Go find something else. I wasn’t saying you shouldn’t. I gave you some suggestions. I was trying to let anyone else who wandered through this thread know that your experiences were not shared by everyone and that going and finding out for themselves is a good idea.
i used blogger for a year and constantly had to deal with ssssslllllllooooooooowwwwww loading time, timeouts, failures, lost info, etc.
most of the “industry” people i know would agree with martin’s assessment that blogger is a joke. every single blogger blog i read (or subscribe to) has had multiple events where the author(s) need to post that they were sorry that they werent posting as frequently as normal because of problems with blogger.
i do recommend a user-hosted solution. blogger is fine for posting a couple of times a week. anything else, bleh.
[…] was a slew of posts not too long ago about why Blogger sucks - the usually opinionated blogosphere were extremely […]
Hello.
I’m sorry to disappoint most of you but I believe Blogger is still the best free site where you can create blogs with no annoying ads. Unlike any other site, they either require payment for hosting your blog or they will place ads on it. I’ve been using blogger for 2 months and so far, I haven’t encountered any problems with it.
I love BLOGGER! http://www.pinay-ladies.blogspot.com
Simple Filipina,
I agree that Blogger has its place — I personally just don’t like the lack of control. Perhaps that is a designer’s stand point. The inability to customize how my comments look is what really annoys me lately. It is the reason I am on WordPress now.
None…
None…
Hi Martin,
Actually i don’t know what the use of blogs?
M sorry but m not agree with you can you please tell me any other free hosting service which gives you this much room and facility for building sites??? if there is any host definitely I’ll switch to it however these is none of hosting free and without ads. How about bandwidth ?? blogger not redistrict the traffic most importantly we can design custom templates which is not offered by wordpress platform so still m loving blogger…