The 100,000th hit will happen....

.... in the next 12 hours but I won't be on-line to see it. The counter is down near the bottom, and you can even click the little planet icon to get some semi-anonymous type statistics. I'm just amazed at how far this blog has come.

I could thank Technorati, but they have contributed all of 96 hits since we went live on 17 October 2004, Digg has done much better for me. In fact, I've been on a roll there these past few days with some traffic to my Family Guy Jumps The Shark post. I've finally added "Digg This" buttons to my blog, so if you like something you can share the love more easily.

But really, who could have imagined? That's huge. It's been 845 days since I started this blog, which means I've had on average 118 hits per day -- though at our peak we were getting 358 hits per day. We started slow, and there have been slow days, but I never expected popularity. Not like this.

I'd like to make the next day even more popular. If you have a real blog, I'd consider trading links back and forth between our blogs (subject to content review). I'd like to get more eyeballs, but more for the sake of getting people to comment. Even the enormous blogs such as Wil Wheaton gets precious few comments with ten times the traffic. I'd love to hear any ideas people have about getting people to comment.

I'd like to know who my users are, because the count is not reflective of my friends and family. Give me a shout out, tell me who you are, why you're here. If a public comment is too scary for you, try e-mail.

And more importantly, thank you all!

Why Blogger Beta Sucks

1. This was reported over one month ago via the Blogger contact mechanism. I never got any reply. I understand it's free, and I guess I'm getting what I'm paying for.
2. This problem happens only with New Blogger (Blogger Beta that is not theoretically Beta any more -- it was not an issue with the Original Blogger). I can FTP normally from any other service and with any FTP client. This issue ONLY affects New Blogger.
3. To publish a single (short) post takes 3 to 6 minutes or more. Prior to beta it took about one minute normally, sometimes two on a bad day.
4. I tried to republish my blog yesterday which used to take 10 to 15 minutes under Original Blogger. It has been over FOUR HOURS. Same result again today. Started at 1705pm and it's 2008pm and nothing besides the "taking longer than expected" error message.
5. I'd have switched to Wordpress but Blogger Beta doesn't convert properly yet using normal channels. I'm sure you may have seen my previous post about conversions. And there is now a solution, which I may try -- though I much prefer someone do it for me if there are volunteers. The problem is, I'd have to get my blog to republish for it to work and it's not working.
   

SOMETHING IS BROKEN WITH BLOGGER'S FTP PROCESS. My blog is hosted on my own website (Dreamhost is the hosting company) and I'm connected to Blogger via HellSouth DSL but that shouldn't really matter since Blogger connects to DreamHost directly and it's not actually through the blogger's computer.

I really would like some sort of answer and a fix from Blogger, another DreamHost customer, or anyone out there in the world who uses New Blogger. My frustration is enormous and Blogger has ceased to be fun or useful. Please, please, please help.

You can also contact me via e-mail at darsys (at) AOL (dot) com

(I was going to tell everyone how happy I was to have added Digg buttons but since everything is munged right now, I'll have to pass. Some pages have managed to work, though, so you might start seeing them eventually).

Blogger Beta and Wordpress

I have made a decision to switch to Wordpress because Blogger Beta pretty much bites ass. It's slower and has too many quirks. All my e-mails to tech support resulted in a 100% response rate: zero. And all of the bugs remain and now they've announced they're coming out of beta and going live. It will be a disaster. But enough of that, I like Blogger and wish them well.

To that end, I installed Wordpress and it works. However, I've got a glitch. The import tool for Blogger doesn't support the Beta version and there's no way to roll back to the unBeta version. So, I can't make the switch. I really want my old posts (100s of them) and comments to come over. So, I'm stuck with Blogger for the moment.

If anyone out there can help, I'd appreciate it. I've spent hours with Google and Wordpress' online support looking for a solution but there doesn't seem to be one at this time. The only solution online that seems to work requires installing two versions of Wordpress (1.x and 2.x) and moving your posts through one at a time. I don't have that much free time on my hands. I'd rather stick with Blogger.

Ah well. There you have it so far.