Now, It's Gone For Good

The invitation, that is.

There's no invitation here.


I had to update an article in The Real Blogger Status (Classic), but I had just restarted my computer. Upon starting, I went to login to my dashboard, and that is what I saw.

No warning.

Just as I predicted, not so long ago (but didn't really believe would be this soon).

OK, I got it done. Some warning would have been polite, but accusing Blogger of being polite is never necessary.

So now, I have to update all of my newly migrated blogs with the shiny New Blogger template features, when I'm not busy helping with the stampede, that is.

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Monolithic Errors

Long ago, on a computer that exists only in the memory of its users, you might be running a program and everything would come to a screeching halt. And the system console would print a brief and fearsome message

MLTP EAC

And what that cryptic message told you was that you were done. You had done something so stupid, that the computer, with even its infinite (!!) wisdom, could not recover. There were only 2 actions possible now.

• Power the computer off, and back on, and restart. And pray.
• Call the IBM Service Engineer.

And neither action was guaranteed to be 100% effective. But for a MLTP EAC, those were the choices.

Later, when Microsoft Windows was just becoming the dominant operating system on personal computers, it was even more unstable than it is now. If you had just installed new code, or tweaked the system settings to unacceptable values, occasionally the system would likewise throw up its hands in anguish and refuse to go any farther.

That was called a Black Screen Of Death. Unlike its predecessor, the MLTP EAC, the BSOD provided a puzzling series of letters and numbers, that could be translated by your super geek in residence (were you so lucky to have one) to indicate that your hard drive had died, or that you had loaded a bad driver for the latest installed accessory card.

In the newer Windows, Windows NT, 2000, XP, and now Vista, the black screen of death was replaced by something just a bit more user friendly, the Blue Screen Of Death. Using the official colour Microsoft Blue, you're told, in a more friendly way

Your're Done.

With Blogger, we are recently seeing two monolithic errors too.

• 404 Page Not Found.
• We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.

This puts us in mind of the old

MLTP EAC

If there's anything in the Blogger experience that causes FUD, it's these two errors. When you see one, there's nothing you can do but fill out yet another problem report, and join the gang at Google Blogger Help - Troubleshooting.

Doing the former, you fill out a form, and wait for botmail in your Inbox. After you reply to the botmail, you wait some more. Maybe one day things will start working again, and maybe not. After a while, you move to the latter.

In Google Blogger Help - Troubleshooting, troubleshooting is slightly more interactive. There, you describe your problem, and one of the Google employees who occasionally enters the forum will ask a few questions to diagnose the problem. If you're lucky, an answer may be in the latter article.

If you are lucky, a Google employee will later reply in your thread

You're good to go.

Another monolithic response for sure.

You check your blog, and it's working.

Now, both the Black Screen Of Death, and the subsequent Blue Screen Of Death, offered just a small bit of detail. Detail that let you diagnose the problem, and at least decide whether you might have caused the problem by installing a bad driver, or a memory module just went belly up. At least save you the time spent downloading and installing a new driver, when you should be traveling to the nearby computer store for another memory module.

With the current "Page not found / unable to complete your request" messages, we're back to the MLTP EAC level. Nothing to do but call the engineer.

We need the ability to figure out what we are doing wrong. Without knowing whats going wrong, any of us may be subject to either problem, at any time. And that is the FUD.

Let me put this briefly.

We need to know what is going on, so we can avoid causing the problem.

Right now, all we know is

We are using Blogger as a web site.

And the only way to predictably avoid the problem is

Don't use Blogger as a web site.

As solutions go, this one sucks. Please give us just a bit more diagnostic detail, instead of

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Come on, Blogger, admit the errors, so we can avoid making the same ones over and over. Don't make Blogger like the Sword Of Damocles.

(Note 2/1): Please tell us that the below mentioned fix wasn't the one applied 1/31 late evening!!??

(Note 1/11): Blogger Buzzer states

Your blog is affected by a bug that hit others also and it is being worked on. Expect a fix in the next few days.

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Now You See It - Now You Don't

I got the tap on my shoulder last Friday, 12/8. I took a picture of my dashboard the following morning.

It's a rule of thumb, in IT, to avoid making major system changes on the weekend, when you depend upon other organisations for support. Unless you can get some performance guarantee from them, anyway.

So I spent the weekend thinking about my migration. And I studied the Blogger Help forums, and observed the many duplicated experiences therein. And I asked myself several questions.

1. What was the change in FTP path? Why all of a sudden are folks being told to change "/" to "."? Enough folks do it, and it works, so we know that's a fix. But they add "I've had this account for over a year - why am I changing it now?".
2. What was the "Clear cache and cookies" bit to revive the post editor and photo upload scripts? It's good that clearing cache and cookies is a working solution, but remember that people do access other websites besides Blogger / Google. Clearing cache and cookies affects access to all websites (short of clearing just Blogger / Google cookies under Firefox - and we won't even start the FF / IE debate just now).
3. What's with the repeated "I just migrated my account, and now my blogs aren't in my dashboard", followed by the online procedure:
   • What is your account and your blogs?
   • OK, the problem's fixed - you're good to go.
   What was fixed there? Is this another episode of The Silence?
4. What's with the team blogs, where the order of account migration seems to affect blog accessibility? Does it relate to the original owner account being migrated first or last? How does the original owner of a Classic blog affect migration overall?

Too many questions. I'll migrate during the week - when the problems surfacing during the past weekend have been identified and laid to rest.

And that's where my fun started. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday - I did my regular work, and updated my blogs. Repeatedly. And each time I published a change, I would see the normal

Your blog published successfully.

with a twist.

Now, you can do even more with your blog!.

In other words, I got the tap on the shoulder. I was being initiated into the secret invitation only Beta migration.

OK.

From my schedule, I concluded that Wednesday would be the best day of the week to migrate.

Tuesday, I prepared for the migration.

• I froze changes to the blog contents (a standard business precaution).
• I removed all non-essential administrators from each blog (no team blogging to confuse issues).
• I backed up my blogs.

And I got up Wednesday morning, and looked at my dashboard. And it was as it had been a week ago. No Beta notice.

The tap had disappeared. No migration this week.

(Edit 12/13 23:00): It's back.
(Edit 12/15 17:00): It's gone, again.
(Edit 12/16 12:00): Still gone. Added the pinned Migration Status indicator at the top.
(Edit 12/17 12:00): Still gone. And, noting a Comment below, I don't appear to be the only one being played.
(Edit 12/17 18:00): Still Off. And apart from this game, I am nervous about migrating with Christmas coming.
(Edit 12/18 13:00): It's ON! Had a very interesting chat with AMR, and she clued me in on this post from Buzzie a week ago, too.
(Edit 12/20 23:00): It's OFF!
(Edit 12/21 08:00): Still OFF.
(Edit 12/23 14:00): It's back - ON again!
(Edit 12/25 08:00): OFF again.
(Edit 12/26 10:00): ON again!
(Edit 12/30 08:00): Still ON for me, though discussion in the forums suggests that it's not on for everybody.
(Edit 1/17 08:00): OFF again.
(Edit 1/17 10:30): ON again!
(Edit 1/25 18:00): Now, It's Gone For Good and the stampede has started.

Waiting For The Tap On The Shoulder

I'll be honest here. I was a nerd in college (and I am one even now). So this story is one that I've only seen in movies - neither I, nor my friends ever got this far.

College Secret Societies
Some of them have no name even. There are no published entrance rules - membership is by invitation only, and rules are communicated by word of mouth. And the initiation process starts like this:

• The prospective members are blindfolded, and led to a dark room.
• The prospective members are put into a circle, in silence.
• The prospective members wait, for what will happen, they are told nothing.
• Periodically, one prospect will feel a slight tap on the shoulder. In silence, he / she will be taken by the hand, and led into another room where they will join the elite.
• And eventually, those who don't get elected will open their eyes, remove the blindfold, and find herself / himself in a small group of rejects, all waiting (hopelessly) for that tap. The tap that never comes.

And that's what we are waiting for, to migrate to Beta (New Blogger). The tap on the shoulder. For some of us it comes. For me, it comes and goes. And finally came back, and now I am done. My sympathies to all of you still waiting.

Migration To Blogger Beta - The Final Chapter?

In my previous series Migration To Blogger Beta - Evaluation, and previously, I've discussed the practical issues surrounding the migration.

Today, in Blogger Help Group: Publishing Trouble When will all Blogger accounts be switched to Blogger beta?, we see the third statement by Jordan, aka Blogger Employee

Yes, a few months, max.

One week ago, in Google Blogger Help: An Open Question to "Blogger Employee"

We're looking forward to migrating all users to beta in the next few months, so, as there's limited time left with regular Blogger,

I just hope that there's some window of opportunity provided to all blog owners, so nobody goes from

Sorry, we can't allow you to migrate.

to

You have to migrate this week.

in the same week.

Common courtesy would require that those with larger, and maybe more complex, blogs, be given an appropriate amount of time to decide when to migrate. I would hate to interfere with some blogger employees coffee break time, but maybe it would be right to think of the unpaid employees slightly, and cut the breaks just a bit shorter.

Please.

Please Help Translate This

The latest post in Beta Known Issues:

Today we pushed a new version of Blogger beta that contains a significant number of bug fixes, most of them concerning issues that users reported to us. It would be too much detail to list all the specifics here but we hope they will improve your beta experience. We're continuing to work on the other issues that are listed on this blog, and if you find new ones please let us know.

I'm taking a stab here. Comments are invited.

We made a bunch of changes - we aren't sure what, nor are we sure if they will fix anything. If you see any problems, let us know, and we will continue to ignore you. We'll make more changes later, and won't tell you about them either.

Well, the BKI blog mentions the Page Element adding problem as fixed. Earlier, the “We’re sorry but we’re unable to complete your request” errors were fixed on Labor Day (but possibly not completely). Anything else anybody can see as fixed?

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This looks like more of the silence. We are now seeing Beta Known Issues getting the same treatment as Blogger Status.

Welcome to K-Mart. How may I ignore you today?

Known Beta Issues - Being Acknowleged

So this morning, I see a comment in my RBS Classic The Problem Here Is Not The Problems, It's The Silence.

...just the day after I read this very post about their silence, I found this - http://knownissues.blogspot.com/ ...A known issues page, made up by the staff. Available through the beta logon/dashboard page.

This is an improvement. It shows some effort, anyway. Let's see if it's maintained properly.

(Edit 9/13): The BKI blog, upon examination, appears to be robust both in depth (number of issues being tracked), and in breadth (blog layout). The blog has, in its sidebar, direct links to 3 key problem resolution resources.

• The Blogger Help Form.
• The Blogger Status blog.
• The Google Groups: Blogger Help forums.

All in all, a significant improvement, and complementary to the improvements in Blogger Beta itself.

Guess What?

The Real Blogger Status Beta joined the ranks of the unhappy Bloggers, but just temporarily.

In my case, it was a feed problem. I removed 2 feeds, saved settings, and it's back online.

And I reported the problem to Blogger Support. Just got a reply, which looks to be from a person:

Thanks for letting us know about this bug with Blogger in beta. You were receiving this error due to Blogger not recognizing the URL you you entered into the Feed page element as a valid feed URL. We're looking into it and hope to have it fixed as soon as possible. In the meantime, to avoid this problem simply remove this page element from your blog and it should appear correctly. We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,
Danish
The Blogger Team

Restore The Main Page Link To The Title

For every seasoned Blogger, whenever you setup a Blogger Alpha blog, and go to view an individual article, selecting the title of the blog would always get you back to main page view. That is one of the most standard features in any Alpha blog.

Not so with Beta. And since you can't edit the template, you're stuck. Right?

Wrong. You can't edit the template itself - raw template access isn't provided. But you can edit the individual page elements.

Go into Template - Page Elements, and edit the element with the title in it. In my case, I find

The Real Blogger Status Beta

and I select the Edit link. I see the Configure Header window. It has the Blog Title

The Real Blogger Status Beta

I add a hypertext link, and make it

<a href="http://bloggerstatusforrealbeta.blogspot.com/index.html">The Real Blogger Status Beta</a>

select SAVE CHANGES then SAVE. When I select View Blog, I see my blog now as before, but with one difference - clicking on the title now takes me to main page view.

Having said that, I note several exceptions.

• The title is now clickable from every view (no more distinction between main page view, article view, and archive view).
• The length of the title is critical. See the above setup for my title? Try adding just 2 more characters. One more may add, but a second won't. You won't get an error - unless the necessary character is a control character that affects the syntax, as mine was. Here's a hint: the title of this blog used to be
  

  The Real Blogger Status - Beta

  Do you see the difference?
• Look at the entry in the dashboard. Not too neat now. I can live with that, though, to have a clickable title. Can you?
  

All in all, it's a workaround. But, until BS gives us raw template access, or puts back what should be there in the first place, we're stuck. But this still beats Blogger Alpha.

(Edit 9/2): While surfing, I just noticed that many blogs don't have this limitation any more. Another fix provided in silence.