Weird AdSense Ads

I author a number of blogs. Currently they are all hosted on Blogger. And for the most part, I have Google AdSense ads displayed on these blogs. A nice ad format is the 160 x 600 shown directly to the left. This format is a tall one that lends itself to the right or left of a blog nicely.

However I have been noticing that sometimes one advertiser takes up the whole 160 x 600 ad like the one shown on the far left. I really don't like that. It does not look as good, since there is a lot of empty space. It also provides less ad options for the user to click.

So far I have been adding the URLs in the weird ads to my AdSense competitive ad filter. Google will then prevent these ads from displaying on my blogs. But this is still a weird effect. I also think this is wasting my slots in the competitive ad filter list.

This is really more of an AdSense issue than a Blogger one. I just wish there was another way to eliminate this weird ad distribution of one in a 160 x 600 ad format.

Spell Check Broke Again

This morning I tried to work on a new post for a new blog. Got a couple paragraphs of text. Hit the spell check button. All that happened was that I saw a couple strange messages in the Internet Explorer status bar. And the text of my post was not spell checked.

The funny thing is that this did not stir me up. These days I fully expect Blogger to bomb out on me. When I tried publishing my non-spell checked post, it actually worked. My expectations are getting really low for Blogger now. Just sharing the state of Blogger in my mind with you.

The Google motto is to do no evil. This is supposed to be in direct contract to Microsoft. However I have found that most Microsoft products I use are mature and seldom have blatant bugs like I have been experiencing in Google. Come on Google. Don't be evil man.

P.S. It appears the spell check worked for this post. Ironic.

Blogger is Broken

Had a couple of blog entries to write this morning. Blogger refused to work. Could not even start the blogging process. I don't think this was limited to just adding new entries. Some blogs that I have served up by Blogger were unavailable for viewing this morning. Maybe that is why I have not clicks on my ads.

This is very frustrating. Why is this happening? Blogger should be a mature product. And Google should have the resources to maintain it. Maybe it is not a high enough priority for Google? Maybe all of the original Blogger staff has retired. I do not know. When things go wrong, users like me who get the shaft start thinking all kinds of crazy thoughts.

Yeah. Blogger is a free service. Nobody is forcing me to use it. I guess the question I have to ask myself is how important is up time and working functionality? Or more directly, how much is this worth to me a month? I don't have tons of data or viewers for my blogs and web sites. So I imagine it would not cost me a lot to get good service from an ISP.

P.S. I have just discovered the Blogger known issues page. Maybe Google will let me know what the heck is going on with this service.

Falling Apart

Blogger is really starting to fall apart on me. One of my blogs is starting to get some good content. So I decided to add a blog roll to it. I chose to add a page element from the layout view. Clicked on the Link List item to add. Nothing happened. I tried clicking a few more times. Finally I got some error page. This kept happening. Luckily my latest changes to the layout were saved. But this was still a pain in the neck.

Finally I decided to get out of all my Internet Explorer sessions. Closed down all my windows. I even killed any process that was "iexplore.exe" on my machine. When I logged back in to Blogger, I no longer had the problems. The crazy thing is that, when I got the errors, Blogger gave me a unique error code to help the Blogger Team identify the problem. But there was no link on the error page to contact the Blogger Team. WTF is up with that?

When I am blogging or making changes to my page layout, I don't want to worry about when Blogger is going to bomb out on me. I want the focus to be on content creation. What is a blogger to do? I am starting to think that Blogger needs to be renamed Bugger.

Lost my Entry

I had this great idea for a blog post. So I sat down and typed my thoughts into Blogger. I went back and made sure my thoughts were well organized. I even clicked the spell check button. Should have known something was not right when it took a long time for spell check to complete. Then when I thought I was done, I hit the publish button. Blogger just gives me an error message and code.

Apparently I had lost my entire post. This can't be happening to me. OK. So I just hit the "back" button in my browser. It brought me back to the post in edit mode. But all my text had disappeared. I am starting to really dislike Blogger. I have heard about this happening to other people before. But I thought that was some type of personal problem. Well now the problem has found me.

So what is a blogger supposed to do? I for one typed this current blog entry in Microsoft Notepad. Then I copied the text to Blogger. I cannot afford to lose another whole post to some Blogger type error. I thought Blogger was supposed to save my draft automatically. Guess when it rains it pours. If spell check has troubles, and publish post does not work, of course auto save is going to be broke down too. If the current trend continues, I'd say it might be time to experiment with another blogging solution like Wordpress. My time is money. And I don't like people stealing my money.

P.S. I had to LOL when Blogger spell check decided that "Wordpress" was a misspelling.

HTML by Mistake

There is one nuance of Blogger that gets me frequently. I write a post about some facet of HTML. And I include the actual HTML markup in the text when I am in Blogger Compose mode. It all seems to go well until I try to Publish the page. That's when Blogger complains that I have invalid HTML.

The problem is that Blogger is treating the text itself as HTML. And when there is HTML in my text that is supposed to be just text, Blogger treats it as markup. I guess there must be some way to quote out the text to indicate that it is indeed quoted text. But shouldn't that happen by default? I am in Compose mode to start with, not the Edit Html mode.

I have had some hangups with Blogger in the past. However I need to keep my perspective. This is a free service. And overall I would say the service is pretty good. I would hate to think about the pain if I had to roll my own blogs by hand with HTML. Ouch. Hopefully the people who invented Blogger are rich and celebrating out there somewhere.

Blogger Problems

Recently I have been noticing more and more problems with Blogger. For quite a while I had been unable to to Check Spelling. When I clicked the button, I would just get some error message in the status bar of my Internet Explorer window. This is not a huge deal. But spell check helps my posts look more professional.

Another problem that Blogger seems to have is that I cannot always use the Add Image functionality. I click the button, but nothing happens. My work around has been to publish my blog entry without images. Then I would go back, edit the entries, and add images later. This is a pain.

I am not sure why Blogger has been degrading in quality. These guys are owned by Google after all. There should be resources that are working to increase quality. This is troubling because I have a number of blogs that are hosted on Blogger. I have invested a lot of time on these blogs and don't want to start over on a new domain. I plan to carefully monitor Blogger before I make my final decision. And I guess if I was a good user, I would open trouble tickets with the Blogger Team. But I have a business to run. My goal is to use a tool that works which does not require my help in debugging the product.

P.S. Thankfully the error check functionality worked for this entry.