Tetherd Cow Ahead

Well, that was ridiculously simple.

The combination of Dreamhost and WordPress made it the work of minutes. It’s still pretty basic as you can see, and there is a bit of tidying up of internal links ands so forth, but that doesn’t seem like it should be too hard.

And I did it all in my coffee break.

I will sort out all my links stuff as soon as I have a moment. Anyone who subscribes to The Cow RSS feed will have to re-subscribe to the new site.

Huzzah!

Folks, I’m really sorry, but Blogger continues to be stuffed. It all seemed to be working this morning and now I’ve noticed the Comments page isn’t loading again and I’m having further formatting problems.

Blogger technical people are being spectacularly unhelpful. There is no information forthcoming about what the problems are, the magnitude of them, or when, or even if they are likely to be fixed. Blogger Status information continues to be completely useless (they haven’t even changed the message in two days).

This is immensely frustrating as you can imagine. Because of the bizarre and intermittent nature of the problems, I can’t even tell if things are working from one moment to the next.

I’m also extremely busy at the moment and I don’t have time to execute my preferred option, which is to migrate The Cow across to some other platform.

As a result I’m going to put the blog on ice for a week or so, so you won’t see any posts.

I simply cannot convey the measure of my extreme annoyance at this poor service from Google/Blogger. I can only reiterate what I said before: Google is cruising for a fall. If they can’t reliably look after something like Blogger, why would you ever trust them with anything valuable. You have been warned.

Adios for a while.

The Reverend.

So now, I’ve lost all my sidebars and some other utility from my xml template for The Cow. Even though Blogger says the filer is fixed. On checking the Status Page, I got the above, very reassuring page load.

[pulls hair out]

Then I tried to upload this post and got:

Yeah, this looks fixed to me.

So anyway, yesterday I was in this bike shop near where I live and I heard this conversation:

Bike Shop Assistant (to woman browsing racks and racks of bikes): Can I help you?

Woman: I want to buy a bike.

BSA: So, you want to buy a bike?

Woman: Yeah, I want to buy a bike.

BSA: OK. OK…. A bike?

Woman: Yeah, I was thinking, like, maybe I should get a bike.

BSA: Right. So. A bike.

Woman: Yeah, a bike.

These people vote.

Dear All,

I apologize for the idiotic behaviour of The Cow over these last few days, even though it really has nothing to do with me. Blogger/Blogspot is having some kind of spak attack and all manner of craptacular behaviour has resulted. I checked with the Status Page just now and apparently ‘everything is back to normal’.

Well that’s a new reading of the word ‘normal’ anyway, which seems to include the fact that the formatting on The Cow may or may not work, you may or may not be able to make comments, and if you do, they may or may not actually appear.

This is just another incident in a long line of crappy service that has occurred as a result of, or in coincidence with Google’s takeover of Blogspot. It seems that Google has hit that inevitable part on the rising curve where companies (or Empires) get too big too fast and everything goes to shit.

I’ll probably port everything over to an independant site pretty soon, to my great regret. I am philosophically very much inclined toward this wonderful egalitarian model of free shared information, but Google of all people should be aware how important reliability is to such endeavours. And now they’re gunning to get us all to trust them with our personal data.

Well, not me chaps. You just blew it. You were doing good for a while there, and I used to be a big fan. Now you’re starting to look just like any other money-hungry capitalistic venture.

If you have been trying to make comments on The Cow and have been thwarted (by lack of any facility for doing so – wha??), once again I apologize. Please don’t stop visiting me – you’re the only friends I have.