Response to Blogger Buzz: The Blogger Outages (a novel)

Since Blogger Buzz, the official blog from Blogger, has an explanation and apology of sorts posted in Blogger Buzz: The Blogger Outages (a novel) but they don't accept comments (only links to the post) I am writing my feedback here.

I am delighted to see this message, and glad to get some background story. This is exactly what we need to see on an ongoing basis from Blogger to keep people like me calm.

Here is why:

- Earlier this week I expressed my frustration to other bloggers who I saw in person, especially regarding no explanation coming from Blogger about the problems. The consensus was that Blogger isn't a good tool and that I should switch. This also confirmed the suspicions of those who weren't already using Blogger.

- I am in the process of looking for a blogging tool for a group of professional colleagues, their first foray into blogging. They have a fair bit of clout and the first experience is important. They will influence potential blogging by untold hundreds of our colleagues to follow. Since I didn't know what was going on with Blogger, would I want to choose it and risk giving them a bad user experience right from the start? I think not!

- I have been sort of itching to try other blog software. Just because I like to learn new things. Gee, with all that is going on, maybe now would be a good time to explore my options?

Multiply these types of issues with those of hundreds of thousands - nay, millions! - of bloggers out there using Blogger, and you might have a problem.

But I digress. I have only been half-watching the Beta Blogger information coming out. My feeling is that I didn't want to risk changing everything over to Beta if it is not ready for prime time, so to speak. But the new blog post points out:

We foresaw the need for the long-term solution, well, a long time ago. Long enough ago that it’s almost done, and you can use it as the new version of Blogger in beta. If you can switch to it (see requirements) you really should. The new version of Blogger is better in almost* every way, including reliability. (It’s worth pointing out that none of this past week’s trouble affected the new version of Blogger or its blogs.)

Okay, well, I had no idea that life would be sucky if I didn't switch over, and that the new system would be unaffected. Why didn't you SAY so? Heh. Thus the importance of saying things in everyday language in blog posts instead of officialgooglespeak in emails (if there was one--can't remember now).

So, finally, a few more suggestions for Blogger if they have managed to stay awake and read this far:

- open up the comments on your blogs so we don't have to post these gripes on our own blogs and leave these bad impressions of Blogger with our individual blog readers.

- have a link from the front page of Blogger to the status page so we can easily find it. Blogger news on that page has status info that is stale - a year old! That looks really bad.

- keep on posting about what is really happening. Are you more frustrated than we are? Gee, I had no idea because you weren't telling us.

Thank you for this post. Hang in there, and keep it up!