Blogger down. WordPress up!

Posted: May 13, 2011, | Author: radiopatriot | . . . . .
UPDATE: As of midday ET, Blogger was back up and running.

When I began blogging, I chose Blogger as my platform. Friends were already using it, and it seemed easy enough to figure out and negotiate that its features didn’t get in my way. (That’s the header I used at the now defunct radiopatriot.blogspot.com)
Three years and thousands of posts into it, Blogger killed my blog, without warning. Without warning!!! One day I went to post and it was no longer there. In its place was the message of death.

For days, I tried to reach someone, ANYONE! at Google to restore “The Radio Patriot”, but to no avail. Google’s humanoids are sealed off from the world. I grabbed what I could from Google cache before that too disappeared.
I opened a WordPress account and have been here since. Happily. And good thing, as Google bloggers are gnashing their teeth. Google’s Blogger has been down for more than 24 hours, leaving its customers in the lurch. Here’s the story from Ed Bott at ZDnet:

The same week that Google made its strongest pitch ever for putting your entire business online, one of its flagship services has failed spectacularly.
Earlier this week, Google rolled out a maintenance release for its Blogger service. Something went terribly wrong, and its Blogger customers have been locked out of their accounts for more than a day. Google’s engineers have been frantically working to restore service ever since, although they haven’t shared any details about the problem.
A Blogger Service Disruption update contains four updates from the last 24 hours, starting with this one:

We have rolled back the maintenance release from last night and as a result, posts and comments from all users made after 7:37 am PDT on May 11, 2011 have been removed. Again, we apologize that this happened and our engineers are working hard to return Blogger to normal and restore your posts and comments.
That’s nearly 48 hours of downtime, and counting. Overnight updates promise “We’re making progress” and “We expect everything to be back to normal soon.”
My question is, “What if this had happened to another Google service?” Say, Google Docs? What if every document you wrote and saved on Wednesday was suddenly taken offline on Thursday, and you no longer had your presentation or your notes or your research for a client meeting today? How does this promise from Google sound now?

Your apps, documents, and settings are stored safely in the cloud. So even if you lose your computer, you can just log in to another Chromebook and get right back to work.
Google has owned and operated Blogger since 2003. It’s not like they’re still trying to figure out how to integrate the service into their operation. If it can happen at Blogger, why can’t it happen with another Google service?
Yes, Blogger is a free, ad-supported service. Just like Google Docs and Gmail. In fact, Gmail and YouTube have their official blogs on Blogspot.com (the domain used by the Blogger service). If either one of those teams announced any news in the last 48 hours, you’ll have to wait to read about it.