I haven’t been able to publish a blog post for a three or so weeks now because of a problem in the Blogger FTP publishing operation. The last post was queued up in the Blogger database wasn’t able to be written to the web site. The Blogger error output had lots of repeated lines similar to the following (after a long timeout period)
/blogger_ftp/archive/2007_05_01_archive.html java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out
/blogger_ftp/2007/04/silverlight-based-on-microsoft-net.html java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe
/blogger_ftp/2004/06/microsoft-developer-target-profiles.html java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe
There’s a bunch of FTP related problem descriptions on the Blogger group pages, but no real consistent solutions. There were entries like “created another FTP account and then it just started working”. I sent a couple of submissions to the black hole that is Blogger support. In the end I decided to set up a Linux FTP server using dynamic DNS and then reconfigure Blogger to transfer to that temporarily. All the FTP transfers succeeded, so attention moved to the web hoster.
At first the hoster response was something along the lines of “document step by step how to reproduce the problem”. Sometimes it seems that support staff and software or software service companies don’t actually read the first couple of emails you send them. I do get incredibly frustrated when support people ask for a step-by-step instruction set on how they can reproduce the problem even when the contact email explicitly indicates that the problem can’t be reproduced at will by the support person and the reason why.
In an effort to resolve the problem, I quickly looked at alternative blogging platforms. Wordpress was very promising. It was easy to import all the Blogger posts, but the big problems for me were the inability to embed flash content in posts or import third party themes. I had a quick look at Community Server and dasBlog, but didn’t really want to go through the setup and ongoing maintenance hassle. Wordpress hosting solutions were an option, but they cost as much as my existing web site. In the end, the approach taken was to user Blogger custom domains. Yes Blogger is a dog of a blogging platform that is moving glacially considering the resources that Google has available. Regardless its a pain to move the blog elsewhere.