Day: January 29, 2008

Nancy’s post for today “Blogger You’re Fired” is found at Blog-World Watch. You’ll want to click in and find out about publishing problems using Blogger’s custom FTP settings.

Nancy’s post for today is at Blog-World Watch and is on the problems with custom FTP and Blogger publishing.

Don’t go there too quickly this morning. Blogger will not publish my post on my Blogspot blog! Try mid morning.

That’s right, we’re firing you Blogger. Frankly, you should take note of this post. For sites that have complex custom blog templates and are using Blogger custom FTP, the issues with blog post publishing are getting so bad that we are migrating many of our clients to WordPress.

Here’s a real world example:

Stern Environmental Group has a complex blog design. It is done in compliant CSS and using Blogger to FTP the posts to the www.SternEnvironmental.com/blog. In the last two months we have had nothing but trouble since our client’s new template was installed.

At first, we thought it was an issue of too many labels. One of our blog writers created a new label for nearly every post. We took time to clean up the labels and instituted a new procedure where labels were predefined for the writer. Still we had publishing problems and they were getting progressively worse.

This past week, even after Blogger had fessed up that their new update had impacted sites like this one with complex templates, and that they said they had corrected the problem a post from Wednesday did not appear until Friday. On top of that a post from Friday did not appear on the blog until Sunday. Mind you, I had been in to the control panel numerous times during this period trying to get Blogger to publish the posts.

In fact the problem was so bad, that the Friday morning post arrived to me via email via Feedburner, and the link to view the post online was broken; as Blogger had still not gotten its act together to publish the post. Good grief!

So, Blogger, you’re fired. Stern Environmental Group is moving to WordPress.