I’m on this mailing list for Blogger Pro users. Most of the messages are of the “why the (insert favourite four-letter word here) doesn’t (insert random Blogger function) work?” variety. There is a lot of slagging off of the Blogger service in general. I started this diary in March and used Blogger (the free version) for a few months. It was great. I lost a few posts, but mostly because my internet connection went down while I was typing without me realising. I could blame Blogger, but I think it would be fairer to blame my ISP or my own stupidity. I got used to typing my entries in a notepad document and cutting and pasting them in. It works fine. I always have anything from 2 to 10 notepad documents hanging around on my desktop anyway, with names that are variations on the word “kladd” (“draft” in Norwegian). Currently, I have “kladd.txt”, “kodekladd.sql” (“codedraft”, easy innit?), “kodekladd.txt”, “sql.txt” and “blogger.txt”. They’re handy for storing random bits of text and code that I may or may not need later. Like random web links. Or the lyrics for Complicated. Or the result of “select table_name from all_tables” from our database. “Blogger.txt” contains the backup for my blogger templates. But I digress, where was I? Oh, yes. The only other problem I ever had with Blogger was the couple of days back in the summer when everything went haywire for almost everyone, and all the custom templates were lost (this is why backups are a good idea) and the archives weren’t publishing at all. The problem was solved more quickly on Pro than on the free service. This seemed to upset a lot of people. For my own part, I figured it would be a good time to give Pro a try. Since I upgraded I haven’t had any problems. I still lose the occasional post because my internet connection drops, but as I have the text in notepad, this is no longer a problem. I just thought I’d mention it. Blogger is getting a lot of bad press (or bad blog, rather), and I think it’s a cracking service. The free version is cracking, not least because it’s FREE. The Pro service is even more cracking, and almost as good as free, anyway, at 30ish dollars a year.
Touch wood, by the way.
Voice in my head: Patience of Angels (Eddi Reader)