Purveyor of Iniquities

Blogger is really easy to use. We’ve used it for the past year and a half on dartlog.net and only once or twice has anyone asked me any questions about it or had any problems (aside from its being down from time to time). It lacks a lot of the features and polish of MT (used on this site) but is great for group blogs where many of the users can’t be bothered to figure out how to post (not that MT has a steep learning curve, either).

Blogger recently decided to upgrade their service to a new publishing platform, which actually seems to work pretty well. All in all it’s a great improvement of a service that was pretty good to begin with. Still, there have been a couple problems with the change. The first is Blogger’s new RSS-output implementation. The new files are much more comprehensive, but the change broke my RSS parsers (and, yes, they were XML parsers, not regex hacks, but pointed at now-missing tags). Fortunately, that problem was easy enough to fix. The other problems were that a few settings didn’t get transferred and that a few settings are understood differently than on the old system (mostly to do with FTP path–>URL mapping). Again, no big deal to fix once I understood what the problem was.

But, here’s the thing. A lot of people who use Blogger are not technically inclined. In fact, probably most aren’t; that’s what makes it such a great service. I predict that, over the next week or two, there will be subtle Blogger-related bugs popping up all over the place and, with them, not a little bit of consteration. Sure, everything will get ironed out quickly, but this sort of breakage is still unwelcome. It would have been nice and easier for everybody if the changeover were more gradual and not forced (esp. for paying customers). I realize that Blogger the company wants to end support for the old service as quickly as possible, but paying customers deserve more continuity than they’ve been given.

Fixing the couple blogger-related bugs on Dartlog.net gave me the opportunity to make a few changes I’d been meaning to do for a while. But if the Blogger change had come next week instead, things probably wouldn’t get fixed for a month or more.

Guess we just got lucky, eh?

Blogger’s changeover highlights the importance of fixed interfaces, whether programmatical, user-related, or interchange-related. How the backend system works is their business, but how I interact with it is mine and all other Blogger users’, too. Had the Blogger folks paid a bit more attention to the ins and outs of their software, they could have caught these problems and not so tarnished their excellent reputation for usability.