January 28, 2005

Blogger can be such a pain in the ass sometimes.

I run my other blog with blogger's software, and while most of the time it works just fine, when it doesn't, it can waste hours and hours of my time without any reason at all.

Take last Wednesday for example. After a small too-much-work-related hiatus, I decided to put up a new blog post to keep the site fresh. I labored away at it for about half an hour, then trustingly pressed the "Publish Now" button.

Instead of the happy little green twirly thing, I got an error: 001 java.net Connection error, Connection refused.

Instantly I thought that the ftp server my site sits on was being whacky and refused access for some reason. I went and doublechecked all the publishing settings in Blogger, and made sure the username and password were correct. All was well. It turned out too that I was able to smoothly login to my server via SmartFTP and the server's control panel - without any problems at all. So this couldn't be it.

Scouring the already pretty thin online troubleshooting guide Blogger maintains turned up - yepp, you guessed it - absolutely nothing. If they have codes like 001 for their error alerts, shouldn't they have some sort of knowledge base for them, at least with an explanation what the error means and why it occurs?

The brief thought of emailing tech support at Blogger crossed my mind, but that was quickly discarded in light of a recent email exchange with them regarding another problem that only wasted my time and never brought a resolution. Not to mention that it took them 2 days to respond to my initial email, asking for help.

So I did the only thing left to do: I abandoned my quest to update the blog, and let it just be for a couple of days. Time heals everything, right? In this case it did. Logging back into Blogger today, I was able to post new stuff without a single hitch. No more error messages.

Odd.