It’s a bittersweet necessity, but I just can’t abide the MESS that Google has made of Blogger, post-acquisition. While blogger-status.blogspot.com repeatedly reminds us that “beta users are not affected by this outage,” LONG TIME LOYAL USERS are both AFFECTED and UNABLE TO MOVE to the new platform. So, since the dawn of blogging, I’ve been using Blogger but will now move to WordPress 2.0; in large part due to WP’s wise development of a content and comment import system based upon the work of Andy Skelton.

What’s worst is that I’ve continued to sing the praises of Blogger for Ease of Use to friends and family, far and wide. When products blow it like this, they affect the reputations of those who trusted them and defended them. These things can be difficult to recover from.

For those whom I may have convinced to use blogger, please keep in mind the following hierarchy of reliability:

1. Blogger Beta – http://beta.blogger.com/ – If you set up an account recently and are using this, you’ll probably be just fine. It’s probably safe to ignore my curmudgeonly cursing.
2. Blogspot – http://yourblog.blogspot.com/ – If you have a blogspot blog on the old, apparently unraveling system, you’ll still have much better success than scenario 3.
3. Blogger with FTP / SFTP to your own domain – If you have been using blogger’s SFTP or FTP function to publish to your own site, welcome to blogger hell. And if you violate any of the criteria for migrating to beta — like running a long established blog with lots of posts and loyal readers — then you are out of luck. Depending upon how blogger feels, you may or may not be able to post reliably.

Might I return to blogger some day, post-beta? Perhaps, though not likely. As I get familiar with the extensive management and configuration features WordPress, this could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me as an amateur blogger. Certainly, I could only ever reverse course if there were a simple to use import system to bring my content back over from WordPress, should that [unlikely] day ever arrive. In the meantime, I’ve now got grunt work to do. Thanks, for the Halloween Horrors, Google Blogger.

metavalent, blogger blows it