Truth in Blogging

I somehow found myself navigated over Penelope Trunk's blog. In this episode, she related her World Trade Center trauma, as well as some worse disturbia. I know I have read some of Penelope's writings before. And I liked them. Now I know why. She has been through a lot. And she writes about it.

Can those of us with more boring lives compete with such a blogger? I would hope so. We may just not be as exciting. This then is the challenge. Be a strong writer/blogger to make normal life sound enticing. Or we could go out there and live that exciting life to write about.

This post goes out to Penelope. Keep writing about those personal details. They are precious.

Feedback Fail

I read a post about a site that blew up in terms of visitors because it was on a popular site. The developer had to deal with an overwhelming number of new visitors. One of the pains was the form submission. I never heard of the site. When I visited it, I saw a contact form on the bottom of the page.

However there was verbage that the contact form results were ignored. In fact, the form did not submit anything anywhere. Can you say fail? If you don't want feedback, then you don't have to have a place to submit feedback. But if you waste my time with a feedback form that you ignore, then guess what? I ignore you.

I won't even provide a link to this bozo's site. Don't want to drive any more traffic to it. Respect your visitors and users. Otherwise the bad karma will bite you in the end.

Blogging Platform

Just read a post about a guy trying to decide upon a blogging platform. He passed over Blogger due to a lack of control. Ummm okay. He tried out Wordpress but gave that up too. He ended up choosing Jekyll.

Generating a blog post for this dude under Jekyll amounts to redeploying his site. He needed to enter a bunch of commands at the shell script to do this. He patted himself on the back for sticking the commands in a script. There is just one problem. He needs to be at the command promopt to issue the commands. No blogging from a phone or through email anymore. Oh well.

I am all down for putting power in the hands of the blogging. However easy of blogging is tops for me. I should not have to pull teeth just to get out a blog post. No thanks Jekyll. Blogger is fine for me.

Blog Comments

I was reading the blog over at Betable. They were talking about great music from video games. I recalled some of the sounds of old from games I used to play. It was strange that nobody was commenting on this post. So I decide to add my 2 cents and chime in.

After entering my info, I the submit button. At first I thought that perhaps I did not click the button successfully. There was no feedback from the browser that it was waiting for the click to process. Then I saw that the Submit button changed its text to Submitting. That was 10 minutes ago.

Yep. This thing is hung. Left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I think this was the first time I visited the Betable blog. It was probably be my last as well.

New Bloggers

It is always nice to see new bloggers entering the blogosphere. Today I checked out a tutorial by Chase Gale. His layout is nice looking. I especially like how he tags the code to distinguish it and make it easier to read.

I recall back when I started blogging. I thought I was ready to take over the world. Blogging has helped me establish my voice online. Now I am not a Dot Net developer. So I am not going to be following the details of Chase's example. I can, however, enjoy a good new post and a newcomer to the blog game.

Service Unavailable

These days I find that Blogger is almost unusable. I get the same error many times when I try to sign in or add images to my blog. What the heck is going on here? Things were not always this bad. Blogger used to be tight. Now I can barely get a post up.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the new Google Blogs transition. I also hear that Blogger (or Google Blogs) is getting an upgrade. As for me, I would prefer the old version if it would be stable. These problems are in addition to issues I have with formatting when images are added. Sheesh.

I realize that Blogger is a free service. It is starting to feel like I am getting what I paid for this. Damn. I might have to search out some alternatives. Maybe a paid blogging service would guarantee better results. Then again, there are other free options like WordPress or TypePad. I will let you know what I find out.

Google Blogs

Pretty soon Google will be retiring the Blogger brand. Instead it will be called Google Blogs. WTF? Blogger is what we have been using all along. I know Google likes to put its name on stuff. But come on.

It looks like Google is doing the same thing for Picasa. The name is changing to match Google. The only thing Google has bought that is still safe is YouTube. At least YouTube will still be YouTube. For now.

All this name changing seems to be taking a back seat to the new Google +1 business. This is Google's answering to social networking. It is said to be a Twitter killer. The service seems more like FaceBook to me. For now I am ignoring the thing. But Google +1 is all over the news.