Today, I'm noticing something in the Blogger help forum that went up on May 15, announcing "some exciting updates coming soon to Blogger" along with "simplifying the platform." Updates includ some things I understand and some things that mean nothing tome:
- Changes to features: G+ widget integrations, OpenID, and Localization & Blogspot ccTLDS.I hope that the problems I'm having are temporary, a consequence of Blogger's being in the middle of tweaking things. But I do have to worry that they are not maintaining a platform for a blog as big as mine (50,000+ posts). For years, the backup function hasn't worked for me, and Google tried to help me and admitted that it simply took so long that the software "thought" the process had simply gotten hung up and responded by ending it, as if I could try again later. But, of course, I never could.
- Retiring features: Third Party Gadgets, Next Blog, Polls Widget, and Textcube.
- Introducing new features: HTTPS for Custom Domains, Multilogin, Spanner, Google Takeout, and Video Management....
Q: Why are you making all of these changes now?
A: Blogger has been working hard to incorporate some exciting updates to the platform, so we thought it made sense to retire features that had very low usage and update some of our current features to coincide with these upcoming changes....
Posts
67 comments:
The better to spy on you, my pretty.
- The Big Bad Google-Wolf to Little Citizen Riderhood
It's the phenomenon known as bit rot. What you wrote that used to work no longer works because idiots upgraded the system.
It's the reason I use XP at home.
Software engineers always feel they can do better what former engineers have done. The truth is that it isn't better because it makes no difference, but it breaks a lot of old things.
It's all geek to me.
rhhardin said...
Software engineers always feel they can do better what former engineers have done. The truth is that it isn't better because it makes no difference, but it breaks a lot of old things.
There is a well-known article that touches on this topic
The basic message is: "It’s harder to read code than to write it."
"The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive."
They have to add even more spyware and trackers.
Your contribution is on the bottom of their list--except when they want you out.
"It's the phenomenon known as bit rot. What you wrote that used to work no longer works because idiots upgraded the system."
If it's really true, as they say, that the idea is simplifying, removing lots of underused things, might it be a fight against bit rot? Earlier idiots added a lot of features, tarting things up, justifying new things and flaunting "progress," but wiser people are aware of the problem and stripping it down?
The problem is that whatever the old system did, somebody wrote stuff relying on its behavior, and that somebody stuff is now broken.
The somebody stuff is what suffers from bit rot. What used to work no longer works.
Making code idiot-proof presupposes a finite supply of idiots.
The more Blogger "improves", the wonkier it becomes. I guess that's one interpretation of "exciting".
See? You should have made the jump to a more gargantuan blog suitable blogging platform the last time you had issues with Blogger. Or better yet, the time before that. Or even better yet....
I’m so old I can remember when you were going to create Althou.se
Just wait until Google decides to shutdown blogger. It'll be okay, they'll say, just backup everything and migrate to wordpress.
I as a commenter have used Open ID for a long time.
Why doesn't Blogger simply let people continue to use it?
Blogger says it's discontinuing Open ID "due to low usage of this feature".
That's not a good reason. What problems does "low usage" cause for Blogger?
”Software engineers always feel they can do better what former engineers have done. The truth is that it isn't better because it makes no difference, but it breaks a lot of old things.”
There’s a reason we used to call them softheads.
A few months ago the html code for embedding a link, <a href=..., stopped working for me. I get an error message when I try and use it. I got the impression it didn’t like “https” anymore.
O Mike, if you're dropping those links into an https template, you might have an extra space in the template you are pasting to.
EDH - Thanks, but I’m not using a template. I type it out by hand. At first, I assumed I was mistyping, or misremembering, so I painstakingly checked my work, but no joy.
It’s still possible, perhaps likely, I’m making a mistake even though I had been doing it for years trouble free. I just paste the link now, even though it always annoyed me when others did that. Life’s too short to fight with computers.
“Althou.se”
That’s when I tried to extract the whole content of the blog and could not. I gave up.
Ancient Chinese curse: May you live with exciting software updates.
It'll be okay, they'll say, just backup everything and migrate to wordpress.
Chicagoboyz is having problems with Wordpress. It's not saving ID in the comment template.
I've tried to update my standalone blog:
http://narcisoscorner.blogspot.com/?m=1
looks like I have to create a new one
Maybe you should hire a high school student this summer to start at the beginning, open each post and its comments, highlight the whole page, copy it, and then bung the page and comments into a Word document. On posts with multiple pages of comments, keep going until it's done.
Then back that up to iDrive. You would at least have the data in a searchable format. Could get fancier later if you want.
A kid who wanted to earn some money could get that done in a summer. Don't let the bastards at Blogger take your work again.
Google Takeout
AKA Google Takeaway in the UK.
unz.com probably has the best posting/commenting software, at least from the posters' perspective - dunno about backups, etc. IIRC, Unz wrote it.
Earlier idiots added a lot of features, tarting things up, justifying new things and flaunting "progress," but wiser people are aware of the problem and stripping it down?
You never go clean things up. You only write new stuff, which doesn't fully handle the whole situation, IMHO. If people cleaned things up, there would not be laws on the books in some states that make it illegal to kiss your wife on the front porch.
this was part of the last post I tried to post there,
the events in the kingdom regarding the reorganization of the regime raised some interesting details, re the prime target prince talal bin waleed, who came up earlier in the context of the ground zero mosque: http://www.islamicpluralism.org/1627/on-the-ground-zero-mosque-and-saudi-prince , in addition to his contributions to academia. Which have shaped a certain narrative, re the middle east relations with the west https://harvardmagazine.com/2006/03/a-saudi-princes-controve.html not to mention his sizable investments in cutting edge enterprises like lyft and scandal plagued deutsch bank https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/23/saudi-prince-alwaleed-bin-talal-invested-in-lyft-over-uber-heres-why.html there are also some more murky associations: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/11390705/Saudi-princes-supported-al-Qaeda-before-911-claims-twentieth-hijacker.html but the are more in the realm of conjecture, the is probably why his arrest has raised concerns in the west from the likes of the once talented david Ignatius, and his favorite foreign interlocutors
this was the other half:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/11/05/saudi-arabias-crown-prince-is-acting-like-putin/?utm_term=.fbd68664ee05 and some even more uninformed observers: https://newrepublic.com/minutes/145673/trump-approve-saudi-crown-princes-bloody-purge ( the last was legendary for misinterpreting straussians philosophy, while at the national post,) now the whole thing can appear like an arabian version of game of thrones, specially in light of his father, then prince salman’s involvements in events in the Balkans, as I noted in passing: http://narcisoscorner.blogspot.com/2016/05/jabberwocky-injiddah-2-so-why-was-there.html?view=flipcard but then one can allow for more pragmatic figures, like reformer alexander 2nd, coming after hardliner czar, Nicholas the first, one of those other caught up in the roundup is mohammed bin nayef, a reformist son of a more reactionary figure in his late father, well connected to the American and uk intelligence communities http://narcisoscorner.blogspot.com/2012/05/portrait-of-yemeni-spyby-narcisoit-is.html?view=flipcard who was his rival as crown prince, in the previous regime
is that too linkheavy, or should I change it.
One of the things Google did in removing OpenID is also to strip the identity of anyone who had used OpenID and just label them "Anonymous". That's how all my previous comments here read, but on blogs where posting by Anonymous are disallowed, all those comments seem to have just disappeared altogether with no trace.
Not a fan of Google's heavy-handed approach here, they've basically corrupted the historical comment threads but are assuming nobody's going to care about stuff more than a couple days old. At some point with all comment IDs now required to be a Google account, they will probably engage in banning/stripping/deleting profiles of people making comments they don't like. Best from Google's point of view, it will make such posters either anonymous or make it seem like the blog author is the one deleting content.
The only reason I have a google account is to post here. I’ve never even looked in the associated gmail account. Lord knows what’s in there.
I had to create a Google account to post here.
Aside: I looked for a tag menu on the homepage, I cannot find any way to search tags. 4 different ways to shop Amazon, but no tags.
wget has thousands of options and can fetch entire sites to your HD. Or preferably somebody else's HD.
You'd certainly have to learn more than you want to know about how blogspot organizes its site, though; and they may defend against it.
wget has some options to trick defenses as well.
I use wget only to fetch single files, so have no expertise in other uses.
”Aside: I looked for a tag menu on the homepage, I cannot find any way to search tags. 4 different ways to shop Amazon, but no tags.”
I don’t think there is one. I’ve always assumed only Althouse can search tags.
Don't worry Ann, NSA has it backed up out in Utah.
“A few months ago the html code for embedding a link, <a href=..., stopped working for me. I get an error message when I try and use it. I got the impression it didn’t like “https” anymore.”
Don’t use a quotation mark after the <a href=
I dropped the quotation mark and it worked perfectly.
Right along side the 30,000 emails.
The Real Origination Story of the Trump-Russia Investigation
Woo Hoo it worked, you’re welcome.
Hey, it worked!!! Thanks, Inga!
That is a change. I used the quotation marks for years. Thought they were required, and maybe they were back then, but not now.
Bit rot, indeed.
HTML does require that the URL be in quotes. Don’t know why they are violating the protocol.
”Don’t know why they are violating the protocol.”
Who would ‘they’ be? Google? Blogger?
My links stopped working a couple of months ago. But it should have happened to everybody here, but that doesn’t seem to be the case since others don’t seem to have had a problem.
I add the href and the quotes, and the post is not accepted.
"Aside: I looked for a tag menu on the homepage, I cannot find any way to search tags. 4 different ways to shop Amazon, but no tags."
I could put all the tags in the sidebar for clicking but there are thousands of tags and It think it would slow down page loading.
If you click on a tag on a post you can see all the other things with that tag, but if that's not the situation, I recommend using the search box to find a post that has that tag and then clicking on it from there. That's what I do.
“I add the href and the quotes, and the post is not accepted.“
Does it work without the quotes?
no it didn't it did with the previous example,
”That's what I do.”
You don’t have a list of tags?
”no it didn't it did with the previous example,”
What?
let see if it works from here:
https://wordpress.com/post/narcisoscornerw.wordpress.com/154
Test
Link
Link
Speaking of Clinton’s emails, I didn’t know about this:
”...now that the State Department has begun dribbling out more than 30,000 missing Clinton emails,”
So the Russians don’t have them (or are not talking), but the State Dept. does. I do vaguely remember that the State Dept had Clinton emails that they were slow-walking, but didn’t know they were the vaunted 30,000.
Could be an entertaining summer.
What about the admonition to warn about cookies? Blogger said it would add something to my web site, and didn't, but they also told me if they didn't I had to. So I said if you don't like cookies go away and if you live in the EU, emigrate. Do you think that is sufficient?
Regards — Cliff
The old method with quotation marks still works for me, but then my computer is now 6 years old (Windows 10, though). The new method also works.
cyrus83: At some point with all comment IDs now required to be a Google account, they will probably engage in banning/stripping/deleting profiles of people making comments they don't like.
Yes, that seems likely.
I’m using an iPad and iOS 11. And using quotations marks does not work. I just tested it again.
I wonder if the change ocurred when I upgraded from iOS 10 (17JAN18) or iOS 11.2.2 (03MAR18)?
I normally comment from my Wordpress account, but that option has indeed disappeared.
Google has a history of creating a good and useful service used by millions, then dumping it because the entitled employees don’t find working on it cool enough. This was displayed most notably in the destruction of Google Reader, the RSS reader that made the universe of bloggers easily accessible, which hastened the rise of Facebook and destroyed a much more thoughtful online community. They may have just wanted G+ to have less competition. Then Picasa, a photo editing program many (including me) had spent a lot of effort using to tag photos — POOF, all your work deprecated. Google’s Play service is disastrous for both buyers and sellers of digital books.
This is a horribly mismanaged company that accidentally cornered the market on search advertising. Everything else they’ve invested in has turned to crap.
I won’t put any more work into this comment since I don’t trust it will be posted. Thus illustrating the problem with Google.
Bruce Hayden said...HTML does require that the URL be in quotes.
There are quotes in the page's code (view source).
With quotes
Without quotes
Both look OK in the Preview.
Both look OK in the Preview.
And both have the URL enclosed in one set of quotes (") in the page source.
While not directly related to Google, the digital age is turning up some nasty surprises for businesses that didn't bother to read the fine print on things like cloud computing.
To use an example from work, we decided to change from one cloud platform to another some time ago. It turned out there was a little snag in this plan - the only mass save option for our work on the old platform was to do a massive CSV dump, which wasn't guaranteed to get all the details we needed. If we wanted PDFs of the data, they would have to be saved one by one before we terminated the service, as the database would be deleted once we stopped the subscription. We determined it would be cheaper to retain the old service for the requisite 7 year retention period than to try and pay somebody to manually archive the data (and of course who knows if the provider will be around for those 7 years).
Incidentally the new cloud service's data retention policy is even worse, as we only have access to records for 18 months before they get tossed into an archive that conveniently only the cloud service has access to. They'll let us have temporary access to it if needed at a minimum charge of hundreds of dollars per instance.
Apple "Smart" quotes, people.
Whoa. All my old comments are now by "Anonymous." That really hurts.
Thank goodness Laslo and his doppelgangers didn't use OpenId.
Is Blogger making everyone do that captcha in which you have to select all the squares with signs or vehicles or whatever? It's making me do it every time.
What I really hate is when it's ambiguous. One, time it told me to select all the statutes. One square had a stone arch -- I'm pretty pretty sure it was the one in Washington Square. However, the photo was from a distance and grainy, and nothing I would call a "statute" was visible. Blogger wouldn't let me in until I clicked that square, though.
And then there was the time it told me to select all the vehicles. The rear view mirror of a white pickup truck in one square lopped over into the adjacent square. I clicked the pickup but not the rear view mirror; apparently that was the right answer.
“Whoa. All my old comments are now by "Anonymous." That really hurts.”
Oh, no! It shouldn’t be retroactive.
Expect "fun" from this point forward.
"Don't be evil" was a motto used within Google's corporate code of conduct.
Following Google's corporate restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc. in October 2015, Alphabet took "Do the right thing" as its motto, also forming the opening of its corporate code of conduct.[1][2][3][4][5] The original motto was retained in Google's code of conduct, now a subsidiary of Alphabet. In April 2018, the motto was removed from the code of conduct's preface and retained in its last sentence.[6]
--wikimania
"'Whoa. All my old comments are now by "Anonymous." That really hurts.'"
"Oh, no! It shouldn’t be retroactive."
Well, it is. For me, at least. And apparently for cyrus83 (see his/her comment above).
You should hire a high school or college kid to archive all your posts, one month at a time. That might work. It would hard to save, maybe, all the embedded links.
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