Posted by Blogger, the web service used to maintain this website, is doing odder and odder things.
Our friend and early bird G updates the blog via email every morning with the Daily News Digests, but for a couple of weeks now Blogger has not been accepting the email. I have had to copy-and-paste to fix those posts the last couple of weeks (and off & on for longer than that), but I wish Blogger performed as advertised. I am sorry for the morning visitors to the blog who don’t get the Daily News Digest they are expecting.
Their service outages where no one can get in to edit or post are quite random and seem to be happening more frequently. One reason I am particularly glad to have my own domain name and server space is that when Blogger has outages that keep people from accessing their blogs, readers can still get here because it is not on Blogger’s servers.
Then this morning I find an unexpected post on the blog that was time-stamped 4:09 a.m. this morning that was a repeat of a post I put up ten days ago. Random. I think that it was a post that was not posted when I originally sent it by email, so I had to re-post it. Like I have done with G’s Daily News Digests. Which makes me wonder if Blogger is going to start randomly posting old Daily News Digests that G tried to send in by email. (I know this random post this morning is a Blogger problem and not an email problem because Blogger always gives a time and date stamp of when the email was sent, not when it was received.)
Which is all a long-winded way of saying when I have time to invest in the project, I will look at changing blog platforms. Suggestions? I really like the update-by-mail feature, so I hope to find that in a new platform.
Although technology often confounds the majority of us, I thought this an opportunity to thank you for your dedication to keeping this site up to date. It has become a daily stop of mine for news I might not ordinarily see. Again, thanks for your time and effort.
I really like WordPress. It’s completely self-contained on your servers, and it seems to be popular. The best thing about WordPress is the “plugins,” which are updates you can download and turn on. Plugins usually require no setup other than to upload them on your server and turn them on in the WordPress control panel. I know there is a plugin for email entries (and just about anything else you could ever want).
A good list of plugins is here-
http://www.wp-plugins.net/
If you’re any good with PHP, you can even make your own plugin and submit it.
You may want to get an opinion from Alablawg’s Wheeler. He just moved from blogger to WP.
Moveable Type is another popular piece of software.
about six weeks ago i switched from blogger to the free wordpress service (wordpress.com).
it is just as easy to use, if not easier, than blogger. i don’t know about the mail feature.
the best part: not yet have i had one outage, or other problem. wordpress is reliable.
Thank you for the kind words, anonymous! They are much appreciated.
Also, Dan and Wheeler, thanks for the good words about WordPress. That may be exactly the way to go. I will definitely look into it.