When you can’t login to your blog or when your blog is offline, do you have a physiological reaction in addition to an emotional response?


I confess when things have gone wonky over the hosted lives of
publishing this blog, my blood pressure has risen, my palms sweat and I
wonder what was lost and if I can ever get it back.

You are never able to retrieve the impulse blog commenter that can’t
find you when things blow up, but other than that I have been lucky to
not have any Catastrophic Blog Devastation during any of my blog
hosting setups.
Have you experienced any blogging maladies?

How do you deal with technical issues that won’t let you do what you
want to do when you want to do it?
What are the final straws that force you from one web hosting service
to another or from one blog platform to a competing brand?

27 Comments

  1. I started blogging using blogger. When it became a daily addiction ( about three months in) I would get twitchy if Blogger was playing up.
    Since Blogger introduced Beta, and transfered all their resources to the new system blogging on the old blogger became a hair raising experience.
    I tried support (no answer), tried the official blogger help forum (where everyone else had the same problem) – still no joy.
    In the end I migrated to WordPress.
    I also took part in an interview over the phone from New York with one of the journalists from Info World about the issues.
    If I cannot do something I always check it is NOT me – I am not very technical. Next stop is ask a friend, next stop is find a help forum.
    During this process it is advisable to keep me supplied with tea, not to ask me anything, stay out of hitting distance and do not under any circumstances ask “me hows the blog today?”

  2. Hi Nicola!
    I feel your pain, I really do.
    I love your interview link!
    It’s been a rough transition to WordPress.com. The first few days were stellar but since then I’ve had a lot of problems here with speed and updating and logging in and the rough part is I have to report the problem instead of endeavoring to fix it all myself.
    That’s a big change from being proactive and involved and having to settle into the “there’s nothing I can do” mindset until a fix is instilled behind the scenes.
    When I start the day and I can’t login or the site refuses to respond for a minute — I get very touchy and I have the need, like you, to strike out at anything within throwing distance!
    😀

  3. I hate to rain on you but since the blog hosting move it has been hard to read your blog. Sometimes everything just freezes up and I have to come back later if I have time. That sort of thing never happened before.

  4. Thanks for the feedback, Anne, even though it pains me to confirm what I already suspected.
    I don’t know why WordPress.com hosting freezes up and becomes unresponsive. I experience that as well. Sometimes I can’t even login to the site for some reason.
    The fact that you have to come back later to post a comment or read the blog concerns me because most readers pop in and out once-a-day — if that — and don’t come back to finish what they could not start. It concerns me but I don’t have an answer on this for you yet.

  5. You know I will always come back if I can but i can see how that might be a problem for your for new readers. You have them for as second and then they’re gone.

  6. Right, Anne! That’s my point. The incidental reader gets lost.
    WordPress.com support are always friendly and on-point, but sometimes there are problems that are hard to pin down. We’ll see how things progress.

  9. Touch wood I havent had any of those issues yet.
    My blog is much smaller and probably much easier to handle.
    I maybe benefit from being in the UK and being in advance of the USA time frame as well.
    What I have noticed is the rapid exponential increase in the number of wordpress blogs – it shows up when you log in ……. I wonder if this is stretching their capability ?

  10. Hiya Nicola!
    Yes, you do have the great advantage of being awake in the UK while the rest of the WordPress.com corps are sleeping so you should see a big boost in responsiveness and speed and that’s a good thing!
    There have been times during the day when I tried and tried to hit your blog and I could not because it would time out. I finally was able to read your post about car shopping but, by then, it felt too late in the game to post anything fun or to offer you good luck and heartfelt wishes for your success.
    I do find things lock up here quite predictably if I “go back in time” to edit an older article or to add Category comments. It doesn’t seem the database likes that very much — but I’m not going to give in to bad MySQL behavior!
    :mrgreen:
    The WordPress.com support forum is super if you need some help. Go to http://wordpress.com/forums/ and you can usually pretty quickly see if you’re alone in your trouble or not.
    You’re right that WordPress.com is seeing an explosion of new blogs! That’s a good thing for them and a bad thing for us if they don’t keep up with demand.
    There’s always a lurking “what do you expect for free?” response lingering in the background, but you really can’t use that as a performance excuse if you want to keep people happy and keep brining in new converts.
    The speed and reliability must remain the same for the free blogs as for the paid blogs if you want to be fair and successful in the market place or what’s the point of hosting free blogs at all?
    The baby gets oddly split when the hosting is free but you pay for additional services like domain mapping, private blogs and Custom CSS -– then you’re a paying customer on a free platform. That’s a bit schizophrenic.
    I think they’re adding new servers on a regular basis. I’m sure it’s always a game of catch-up instead of predicting the inevitable.

  11. FYI:
    To try to regain some page load speed here I removed the Akismet Counter and also the Reader counter. Losing those two sidebar widgets knocked a second off the load time.

  12. FYI2 —
    Oh, and I removed the “Most Popular Posts” sidebar widget as well and that also resulted in knocking off an additional second from page load time.

  13. Looks as though I ought to go and do some spring cleaning as well then.
    Sorry it locked out on you ……. goes to tidy up ……….

  14. Hi Nicola!
    The lockout wasn’t your doing — I think that’s sort of the hallmark problem WordPress.com has been having lately — slow response times to page requests and locking up and just sort of general server malaise.
    😀
    I don’t know if cleaning would have any effect. Time it and see if you get any speed increases…

  15. Have removed Akismet counter – seems to be quicker.
    Do you need a special plug-in to see how fast the page loads?

  16. Hi Nicola —
    Are you using FireFox? If so, you can download an Add-On called “FasterFox” that will speed up your browsing and also give you a page timer in your status bar at the bottom of your browser. Just make sure every time you do a test that clear your browser cache so your browser has to load the page from scratch each time.

  18. Enjoy!
    If you’re really feeling racy you can download and install the “MR Tech Local Install” Add-On for Firefox — that will really give you a lot of innate, neat, features for Firefox.

  19. Not sure I could cope with that – one step at a time…….
    Might have to go and look as I seem to be having a *techie* moment.

  21. Faster Fox is installed, Mr Tech is a bit above me at the moment – but I did grab ForecastFox – I now have my local weather forecast on the tool bar.

  22. Cool! Don’t enable pre-fetching in FasterFox. Some websites will ban you for that. Turn everything else to Turbo and go!
    😀
    Forecast Fox is Super! I love it.
    Do you have iTunes? If so, FoxyTunes is another must-have.
    There’s also a “Clear Cache” button you can add to your toolbar to clear your cache with one click. Super handy to have on hand.

  23. I wont touch any buttons until tomorrow ……….
    I dont do I-tunes either ……… I think I will have to go and lie down after all this technical stuff.

  24. I wont touch any buttons until tomorrow ……….
    I dont do I-tunes either ……… I think I will have to go and lie down after all this technical stuff.

  26. Hi David.
    I too started out blogging with Blogger. I was rather quickly addicted, sometimes posting up to 4 times a day! Then Blogger began to go downhill. I couldn’t get to my Dashboard, I couldn’t post, and worst of all, I couldn’t upload photos. Anything or anybody within throwing distance was in extreme danger. And if you heard the things I shouted at the screen!
    *Bites bottom lip and looks suitably ashamed of herself*
    One day, I tried and tried to upload 3 photos and Blogger just wouldn’t let me do it.
    That’s when I moved to WordPress. I haven’t looked back since.
    Honestly, since you moved to WordPress, I haven’t personally noticed any problems with your site. Maybe I’m just checking at the right time of the day 🙂

  27. Hi Dawn!
    Thanks for sharing your personal experience with blogging!
    I wonder why Blogger went downhill so quickly? Isn’t there a great purpose and reason for keeping Blogger alive and well? It must have been hugely frustrating to not be able to do what you wished to do.
    I’m so glad WordPress.com is working out for you! I have never had one second of trouble trying to hit your site and I appreciate knowing you’ve been able to get in here when the moment struck.
    I live in my blog all day long — 18 hours of doing stuff all the time — so I am extremely sensitive to unresponsiveness and “Waiting for Urban Semiotic…” is a phrase that makes me crazy as I sometimes wait and wait and wait for the site to finally load…

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