Shoes full of broken glass and nails for the cobbler’s children
Have you noticed just how awful at blogging people in the blogging business are? (He asked, conveniently forgetting that although he’s a blogging business gadfly, he takes unannounced vacations of five or six months every year.)
Take the Blogger Developers Network. I’ve been subscribed to the feed for it forever, despite the paucity of posts. Of course, I’d be a little less short of posts if that index.rdf feed wasn’t an unredirected ghost, which stopped being updated sometime between the January 22, 2004 post and the October 18, 2004 post, but wasn’t ever removed or redirected to the Atom feed.
Then there’s the posts since last October, which I didn’t know about because not only is the feed I was subscribed to a ghost, so is the “current” feed, and the HTML. The whole thing has moved to code.blogspot.com, with nary a hint of redirect or even a post saying “hey, this is dead, go there instead.” And if I had gotten suspicious that they might have moved, and googled for it, it wouldn’t have done me any good, since along with the wtf? of a <meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" /> they include a <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />, because who wants their documentation to ever be found? Those ROBOTS are awful, and who would know that better than Google employees?
It’s maybe not quite as bad as when they randomly banned themselves from crawling, but moving your blog every five or six posts, and changing the URL for your feed in between, all without ever saying anything about it, and hiding from search engines, is what you do if you’re being stalked, or hiding your journal from the ‘rents, not if you are documenting trying to build a platform.
Yes, actually I had noticed. Though my notice was more along the lines of ”Gosh, Person X used to blog quite a bit until they got hired by a blogging company. Now that they work for a blogging company they don’t seem to actually, you know, blog!”
Luckily the world needs people like us who don’t work for blogging companies and can bring up these issues from time to time. (Or does it?)
Heh, thanks for pointing these things out, Phil! (though I think you’re being a bit harsh… ;)
The
NOINDEX,NOFOLLOWtags are dynamically generated at blog publish-time, via Blogger’s <BlogMetaData> tag. While tweaking the blog for release, we had the Listing setting set to private, so it wouldn’t show up in our Profiles. I changed the setting and republished the blog, so this is fixed.MSSmartTagsPreventParsingis obviously a legacy tag, and could probably be retired.Regarding the redirects, that’s the result of a miscommunication (surprise, we’re human!), and they’ll be included with the next Blogger production push.
The old site remained inactive for a variety of reasons, but I’m hoping to revitalize it now that Steve and I are in charge.
Cheers,
-E
Yep, sorry, I’m afraid Harsh seems to be my middle name anymore. Thus the mongoose reading The Cobra Times thing.
The problem is, now you’re encouraging me, yet again. When I mildly suggested that Movable Type claiming in the Atom feed that every blog completely changes identity on January 1st every year wasn’t a very good thing, I was ignored (there, and in at least one other bug report). But when I called Blogger an ignorant slut (well, actually the second time), Ev fixed it. My archives are full of two classes of post: ones where I gently suggest that something might be better another way (”0 comments”), and ones where I bite off my tongue, spit blood, make my head spin around, and projectile vomit, nearly all of which include a comment from me saying ”thanks for fixing it, but you really oughtn’t to encourage me to write posts like this by responding to them.”
Sweet!
I’ve been on both sides of this kind of stuff, Phil, and I gotta say, one of the best things about the web is that it lets you ship something that’s imperfect and then rapidly fix it.
But (and I’ve been guilty of this) when you know you’re going to get a harsh blowback on something, you tend to wait forever until it’s ”perfect” before you release it so that you don’t have to face the wrath of the blogosphere.
I’d rather we praise the good parts (and Eric and team have done a lot of good so far, from what I can see) and then mention the bugs than accuse someone of being ”awful” at blogging. I’m willing to accept that they’re merely better than, well, 99.9% of the world’s companies are at blogging. And I’m a competitor. The thing that’s surprising is how many companies in the blogging space are really *good* at blogging. The percentage is astronomically higher than in any other industry.
— Nathaniel, Grosse Pointe Blank
Yes and no, yes and no. I do realize how fortunate I am to have you around, to smack me every second or third time and remind me that I ought to pretend to have manners. But…
When you make an RSS feed available at a particular URI, you are telling people ”just keep fetching this URI, you’ll find out when we say something.” While I don’t subscribe to the ”every permalink is sacred” school, and I’m more than willing to convert HTML to 410s when the need arises, I think RSS is different, especially when it comes to just silently changing URIs.
Rapidly fix it? /developers/index.rdf was apparently last published (at least according to the channel dc:date) May 9th, 2004, just over ten months ago. /developers/atom.xml was apparently published March 1st, 2005 (well, UTC, February 28th local), but without changes. Interestingly enough, the atom:id in it leaks, and perhaps explains part of the problem, since that blog’s apparently run off Google’s corporate install of Blogger. Still, no matter what I wouldn’t like the message, as a potential user or as a potential developer thinking about building on their platform, of ”we can’t control our webspace, or publish with our own tool, and we’ll just leave you hanging in space rather than keep bringing you along with changes.”
And of course ”just how awful” is carrying the baggage of all the people whose writing I’ve loved, who’ve either gone to work in the blogging biz, or made it big enough in the blogging biz, or gone to work for Google, and are now lost to me, from banjos or FlameBack or just twenty hour days.
I’m sure it’s a stupid idea, but I’d still like to see a 5%, along the lines of Google’s 20%, where everyone is required to write, on their own site or on a company site.
When I mildly suggested that Movable Type claiming in the Atom feed that every blog completely changes identity on January 1st every year wasn’t a very good thing, I was ignored
False! Don’t make me fisk you!
Bring it on, man, bring it on. You may call it fisking, but with the state of my memory, I just call it a reminder of things so far forgotten that I can’t believe they happened.
All I can remember is a blog post and a forum post. I looked in Mantis, but unless it was a bug someone else filed, and I hopped on, I don’t see any sign of it there, and unless I’ve lost the ability to read MT templates, the current template will change the /feed/id every year, every change of host, every change of path, and on a export/import or move to a new install that changes the BlogID. Entries will only change ID for every change of host, every change of path, every export/import that doesn’t preserve EntryID and BlogID, and the extremely unlikely case of changing the year in an entry date. However, in both cases the template makes unwarranted assumptions about ownership of the domain: if I create a blog in example.com/foo on July 15th, you can probably safely assume that I’ve at least got delegated tag URI forming rights for
tag:example.com,{date}:/foo, but only fortag:example.com,2005-07-15. You have no idea who controlled example.com on 2005-01-01 at 00:00 UTC.