I really don’t mean to be that negative person who has a trend of bashing blogger whenever my posts don’t go through and praising it when they do. If you take a quick read through my archives (which would be possible if they existed or if my permalinks worked) you would see that my relationship with blogger has been not a standard “love/hate” one but instead “love the community and the history of the service / hate the way the service works and the business is run.” I think at this point i’m almost resigned that blogger is going to wind-up a massive cluster-fuck like Geocities did when Yahoo! bought it, and it makes me feel awful for ever buying into the whole “independent solutions!” trend with my support for the new server and buying merchandise.


Whether Ev thinks it’s a real business solution or not, i would definitely pay $5 a month to get put on my own server with other paying customers if we got premium maitenance and technical support. The convenience, community, and history of Blogger is worth that to me. Of course, some people might claim that’s as bad as selling out to a big corporation – but, honestly, would you rather it stay free but get integrated with the millions of other (idiot) users with a corp like Microsoft or Yahoo or be supported by loving longtime users? It’s like PBS … everyone wants it to stay free and arty, but no one wants to step up and pay. Well, guess what, this is me stepping up. Ask me for money, Ev. You don’t even have to be polite.


I suppose the thing that really angers me is BlogSpot. Yes, it is a nice idea. Yes, it has allowed some wonderful voices to find an audience. However, with Blogger already knee-deep in its own server useage problems i don’t see where creating a new service that involves stress on the Blogger server as well as thousands upon thousands of daily thru-traffic hits is helping anyone at all. Not only are these people using blogger without paying just like the rest of us, but we can mostly assume that they were too lazy/dumb/apathetic/greedy to go out to Geocities, Tripod, Envy.nu, Freespeech.org, or any number of other free services to get their site off of the ground. Is using a free site a less than optimal option? Yes, totally. Is it a relief to have a site that will always accept an ftp request from Blogger that has a vested interest in staying live whenever Blogger is functioning. Entirely. Did i go out of my way to secure a decent server rather than stay with my free host when i decided blogging was becoming the central aspect of my page? Yes, i did.

Obviously i have more disposable income and time set aside for internet usage than some people (despite being only a sophomore in college), and obviously i am using this all for more serious and semi-professional ends than many people, but i am fed up with the “Blogger is free, so sit back and be polite” excuse when it comes to issues like these. If i feel entitled to be enraged after staying faithful for nearly a year while the rest of my site slowly but surely slid over to Newspublisher and GreyMatter, imagine how some people who are not only old-heads in the community but also walking advertisements for blogger feel! Some of them are high level enough to program their way around occasionally unpublished archives, but the level of indifference to Blogger itself seems to be reaching a new high with every passing week. It should not just be reduced to just a publishing service… that defeats the entire point. There are better publishing services to be found and hardly anyone denies it; it’s more than that. But, i think we’re letting that fact get lost in the shuffle, and we might not ever be able to find it again once we initially lose sight of it.

Either way, i just now managed to get savvy enough to program around my archive problems, but i really just need them to publish one or two more times before i’m home free. I’d just like to be able to see what i wrote last week again sometime in the near future. If anyone has any suggestions, i await them (with checkbook in hand).