Monday 19 September 2022

The Google Blogger gnomes are at it again

I don't know what is going on (again) behind the scenes at the esteemed "Google Academy For Making Pointless Tweaks to Things That Were Working Properly But Now They Don't Because We Broke Something Else", but loads of people are reporting problems on Blogger lately - everyone's blogs are loading slowly; some people (Mr DeVice included) can't get to their "Layout Editor"; loads of people on the forums are experiencing a problem that Mistress Maddie's had, in that their "Blogroll" widget in the right-hand sidebar is updating only a handful of their own followed sites.

I am particularly aggrieved that my most recent posts have not appeared in that broken mess that passes for the "Reading List".

I've looked all over for a clue to the problem, and some help websites suggest it might be simply that my blog "feed" is simply too big - a not unreasonable suggestion, given I have fifteen-and-a-half years' worth of posts here for that Reading List to manage. However, the fact that Maddie posted just today that her blog is itself fifteen years old, and that post appeared in the self-same Reading List may suggest otherwise.

I guess we'll just have to wait for one of the gnomes to fix whatever cable another gnome has cut through with his pinking shears, and hope it all gets back to "normal" in due course...

Sigh.

10 comments:

  1. I see lots and lots of gin in the future.......... I too cannot access my layout feature either to update my blogroll, which I haven't been to add or delete to in months. Just Saturday night I updated my blog header, and the next day, I couldn't and still can't. Some blogs in the blog roll when clicked on still show a white page of nothing HTML. I use my reader, but it's the guest readers I feel sorry for who click on the blogs to visit and get nothing.

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    1. It's just getting silly, now, isn't it? Somehow, somewhere, some idiot is tinkering with things that have worked for us forever, and until they fix it we all lose the ability to communicate with our readers - which is what this site is supposed to be all about. It's not exactly a "social media" site per se, but even so, we don't post what we do in complete isolation, do we? People like reading our stuff, and if they don't know it's there, then the site fails completely!

      I have posted this rant (into the wilderness, it seems) - but also this and this - and I shouldn't need to have to flag these posts up, when that's what Blogger should be all about! Jx

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  2. Hurrah! (Partially) fixed! Posts appear in the Reading list, but without their thumbnail picture... Jx

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  3. I posted a screenshot of what it was like to visit your site on my site last night, as I was greatly concerned. Even the sites I could access were slow to open. Glad things are back to normal.

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    1. I couldn't access Maddie's either.

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    2. Something very odd was going on. If you scroll right down to the foot of your blog (or anyone else's on Blogger - except mine, as last night I found a "tweak" to hide it from view) there is a hardly-noticeable bit of small-print "Subscribe to Posts (Atom)". Click on that, and you'll see a page identical to the screenshot you posted. That's our blogs' "feed".

      I have no clue why, but over the weekend that "Atom" feed link was substituted for blog URLs in the "blogroll" widget (and as Mads and IDV both noted, not every blog link was affected). Bizarre. I've no idea whether that glitch also affected my temporary disappearance from the Reading List, but at least both appear to have been fixed now. Jx

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  4. Thank goodness for that I thought I had done something wrong due to fiddling.

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    1. Even your fiddling couldn't have caused such a major "outage", Mitzi! Jx

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  5. Bugger Blogger! To paraphrase George V. Over on Wordpress there are similar annoyances. I thought it was merely a greedy campaign to make me upgrade to a paid site, but sometimes the monkeys chuck a wrench in Scarlet's blog, too.
    I shall brew some restorative coffee...

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    1. I think there's some kind of conspiracy going on to make all "social" media sites as annoying as possible just for the hell of it. Not that I use any such site except Blogger, but I hear the shouting... Jx

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