The trouble with blogger

I use blogger.com from the good folks at Google to maintain this site. While very convenient and generally well designed, I have run into a number of issues that have frustrated me greatly.

I have my blogger account setup to FTP my blog to my hosting provider. So when I add a blog entry (what I call articles) through Blogger.com through their form, I should just have to hit the publish button – then it “publishes” the content to my webserver. This is where things often go awry. The “Your files are being published” screen will often hang at some percentage (lower than 100%)… It’ll keep reloading for ever – stuck at 60% (or 23% or 80%). At this point, anything you entered into the blogger form is lost (generally speaking).

The reason? My theory is that blogger is very popular and when you try to publish in the evening (the busy time).. their servers are just overloaded. I only run into this problem at night.

So.. I write all my articles/blog entries in my word processor, save them, the paste the into the form before hitting the publish button. If it all goes wrong - not the end of the world. I just try again later.

Blogger allows you to submit entries by email. I tried before - a long time ago - and it failed... The entries never showed up. So this is a re-attempt.