When trust is lost...

We're out of beta, the sign said, so after months of avoiding the dreaded migration to the new Blogger, I clicked bravely on New Year's Day. A new dawn, I reckoned, I had held off long enough. Alas, I was fooled. If it ain't broke don't fix it, well, I figured they would eventually force everyone to move anyway. So I took that step. Big mistake. Within a day, I received an email from a friend saying he couldn't post a comment. He was correct, the visual verification wasn't working, there was no image so you couldn't see what characters were required. After scanning many posts in the Blogger support forums, I was disappointed that many others experienced the same problem with no fixes insight. Sure if you click often enough, the image would appear but how many visitors to your blog would refresh your comments page 8-10 times until the image would appear.

I was disappointed on four counts, firstly, I couldn't find any reference to the problem on the Blogger site, secondly, there were no replies to the folks who had the problem (either a fix or an acknowledgement), thirdly, after lots of sweat and tears and some more luck, I stumbled upon the page where I could report the problem. I'm not holding my breath for the answer. Finally, this the bold declaration from them, "we're not longer in Beta". For a company with a multi-billion dollar market cap and a boatload of money, the problems they've had moving to the new Blogger is astounding. Especially when you consider Blogger represents a sizeable chunk of the free blog hosting market. The new Blogger has finally caught up with the other blog hosting solutions but by no means exceeded them. To be fair, it seems to be better executed and their custom domain solution that allows your domain to be primary reference to your blog is a killer feature.

Now to figure out why Newsgator no longer puts the entire post in my Outlook email like it used to but now I just get the blog entry title and a link... rendering my archival strategy obsolete for now. Coincidently (I think not), this happened after my move.

This customer is certainly not delighted, in fact, right now I feel like a lemming...