back to article The Prisoner of Blogger

I am not a free man, I am a number - number 27950736 to be precise - on Blogger, the village cloud application I've been trying to escape from for the past year. Oh, it started out great in 2006. Seemed like a nice thing. But a year and a bit in, the Blogger machine's FTP service began stumbling. FTP publishing isn't …

COMMENTS

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  1. Stevie

    Bah!

    If your FTP accumen is the same as your limerick scansion then Blogger has the right of it - it *is* your fault.

  2. Brian Miller

    Solution: a little HTML and your own site

    I really don't understand why people bother with these blogging services. Is HTML really that horribly difficult to learn? And if it is difficult for you, aren't there a number of commercial applications that will help you with it?

    I don't bother with any of the blogging services because I thought that all of them stank. I know how to write HTML, and I don't have any personal problem writing a page, and transfering it. I really think that it's less effort to write HTML by hand than bother with a blogvertising "service."

    Remember, they don't care about you, they care about their advertisers, who are paying the bills.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Try something that works

    Wordpress seems nice, but I've personally never used it, and now I'm kind of glad I didn't.

    Blogger? No thank you.

    Try Drupal - it's very flexible, regularly updated, and if something goes wrong the error messages are verbose enough to greatly ease solving of any problems. Plus the community is helpful and the documentation is top notch.

  4. Disco-Legend-Zeke

    Your Money Cheerfully Refunded

    or, as john Arbuckle says, "you get what you pay for"

  5. SImon Hobson Bronze badge

    If you don't need dynamic ...

    Does the blog **need** dynamic content ? Ie content that is conjured up on the fly from a database. Or can it be done with static pages ?

    My own site is static pages, but it's build using an off the shelf tool (RapidWeaver). It looks like a blog, but it's all static pages. I can update it as often as I have reason to, and RapidWeaver will update any changed pages for me. I don't support comments, but I believe they are supported if the server does php.

    All the source is on my own computer - so I can keep backups how I wish. If the web server goes tits-up, or I switch server, I can just upload it all again.

    We've got some Wordpress sites on the servers at work, and they are all consistently slow !

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    WP full of holes

    That's how all those security guys got pwned just before the recent convention. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

  7. Robert Synnott

    Hosted Blogger

    I've been happy with hosted Blogger for the last few years... But then again, I am not bothered by the search box up top; your mileage may vary.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is Dick Destiny a porn star name?

    If it isn't, it should be.

  9. Pyros
    Boffin

    Strange

    If you're knowledgeable in pHp, you can, given a day or two of nothing else to do, hack up a simple blog-like system with your webserver and mySQL database. (Not that I'm interested--I already have a different pHp project.)

    I used to briefly run a Blogspot (see Blogger) name, but I no longer really see the point of a blog--forums are more fun, and when you're a moderator, you can permanently pin and lock a journal thread of your own if you desire to.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So what the hell...

    was the install file still doing on the server?

    >Apparently, if the database is missing entirely, WordPress assumes that it has not yet been installed and loads the Installation Page.

    Deleting the install file is the first thing you do once it's uploaded and working. With every script that has an install file and accesses a database.

  11. Jeremy 2

    Re: So what the hell...

    Unless the 'incident' happened within mere moments of the initial setup then yes, agreed. It's been a while since I've played with WordPress (see comments by Simon, Brian above) but I'm pretty sure that when you log into the admin system after installation, it puts up a big red box telling you to delete the install scripts for (bloody obvious) security reasons... I'm pretty certain that nuking/corrupting the DB doesn't cause the install scripts to magically re-materialise on the server.

    I've not much sympathy for people who ignore big red warnings about Bad Things and then complain that the Bad Things happen to them...

  12. Dane Pack

    Re: The Big Red Box

    Wordpress no longer prompts for removal of the install.php script. While it is obviously a good idea to remove the install script, I had to check if this was still good practice after noticing the warning was no longer displayed. My first thought was that the install scripts were being deleted automatically now - not the case.

    This kind of makes the "Oh, it's so obvious, you deserve whatever you get for not deleting the install.php file" look a little like commenting from the ignorant rather than ivory tower.

    Regarding slow wordpress sites, you can speed up serving with wp-cache.

    Losing your site because of database connectivity sucks, but you can create/copy simple backup scripts that should at the very least minimize downtime.

  13. Moritz Schroeder

    The problem isn't a problem, or is it?

    You can get rid of everything you don't want on your blogger blog, including the navbar / search bar, the favicon, even the blog post listing itself and only publish some "gadget" boxes. You just need to switch to one the "new" blogger layouts and play with the HTML/CSS. If you want to publish at a different FTP provider or combining it with your website, why not simply use iframe, or pull the info using RSS?

    To protect your articles from disappearing / censorship / corporate decisions you should anyway always keep a copy when using a third party service. And that certainly inludes Google as well as any normal commercial Webspace / Internet provider.

    With blogger you have many ways managing the "data". One includes using Google Documents to publish on your blogger / blogspot blog. I haven't heard of a case, where Google deliberatly deletes / censors docs. The Google Doc publishing works also with wordpress and other services. Advantage: It even allows for edits and updates. Otherwise, as the simplest form of an independant archive, you can get an email of every post and comment to an address of your choice.

    So what is the problem?

  14. Jason Croghan
    FAIL

    Yahoo hosting??

    If you ask me I'd imagine all of your Blogger FTP problems are probably coming from that. I've used Yahoo! hosting in the past and found it one of the most unreliable services I've yet to encounter on the interwebs. Use a company whose sole business is hosting and hosting you shall receive. Pay a company who really don't know what they're doing or where they are at the moment and bullsh!t is what you get.

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