My Geekdom

This is my new look-and-feel to my blog and homepage. I made the switch for a couple of reasons. First, I've been trying to play around with different web technologies (I've already blogged about Google Apps, and AddThis.com) and there's no way to learn something like using it. Second, Google hosed me and refused to help.

So how did they hose me, you might ask. Well the story begins about a year or so ago when Google bought Blogger. Since then they have made ongoing incremental integrations between Blogger and Google. As they were doing this small stuff, they were working on basically a rewrite of Blogger to make it integrate with the Google's new page web editing features (used in Google Apps, and Google Page Creator). They've run an extended beta and, sometime in March or so, started practically begging me to switch to it. 

I (and this was probably my mistake) decided to switch my existing http://smithline.net/mygeekdom blog to check out the new features. Instead, I should have created a new blog to play around with the new blogger and then, if happy, switched my site. That being said, Google did promise things such as full compatibility and easy conversion and such.

So, I switched to the new Blogger and was very disappointed. It is not that Google Page Creator is a bad tool, it just doesn't have the flexibility I wanted. It does integrate well with Google Gadgets which are growing at an incredible rate. But I really wanted more flexibility.

The big difference is that the original blogger works by having you basically create a page in HTML. The trick though is that rather than putting in specific data such as the title of your blog entry or your blog's data, you enter "template tags" such as <$BlogTitle$> and <$BlogEntry$>. This allowed for nearly infinite customization of your blog. On the down side, you were not just stuck with nasty HTML, but nasty HTML plus nasty custom tags (by custom I mean non-standardized - each blog engine has its own version of these nasty tags). That being said, I'm a geeky programmer and I preferred the control over the drag-and-drop-but-nearly-featureless functionality of Google Page Creator.

So I decided to switch back to Blogger basic (as I believe they are now calling the original version). This did not work. Blogger would not let me switch, nor would it even allow me to reconnect with my original blog (I had been hosting it on my own server and not on Blogger.com. When I tried to hook my blog back up to my own machine (http://www.smithline.net) I got this error:

I'm sure there is no other blog registered there as I own the site. My blog had originally been registered there but when I upgraded to the new Blogger, it was moved to a Blogspot URL. And I do own the domain and have for years. But, as I said before, I'm a big Google fan, so I decided to post on the blogger help forum - no answer. So, I decided to email the blogger team directly:

They never replied.

From my viewpoint, the Blogger team had strongly encouraged me to change to their new system, their system was broken, I used their preferred help system (the blog), then an alternative help system and never heard back from them. All this time my site was at least partially down. That was it. I washed my hands of them. I had been looking at MovableType.org's blogging system. So I switched. They, like blogger, offer hosting such via LiveJournal.com but I decided to self-host as I'm working on another project and will want the self-hosting feature on that.

Well, enough for now. I'll talk more about MoveableType, my new project (still top secret), and I've promised to say a few more words about my experiences with Google Apps.