phil ringnalda

There’s little doubt but what Blog*Spot sucks. It’s slow, often unavailable, and frustrating when you decide you want images or separate style sheets. The problem is, it doesn’t seem to be frustrating enough, or at least not frustrating the right people enough. Blog*Spot is absolutely necessary to Blogger: with Blog*Spot, a potential Blogger user, whether she is a tech writer for a major newspaper, or a potential investor, or an angsty teenager, can be publishing in a few minutes, for free, with no arcane knowledge of ftp. As I’ve said before, without a way to try it out quickly, for free, competitors like Big Blog Tool are never going to get the press and popularity of Blogger. Which is fine, if they don’t want it. Probably better, for their users: popularity isn’t always a good thing. But I digress.

The problem with Blog*Spot comes when users don’t get frustrated enough to leave. By the time you’ve been using it for a couple of months, or you’ve gathered enough regular readers that some will email you when your site isn’t available, you should be ready to move out, either to a free host that isn’t quite so limiting, or to a paid host. Somehow, even though Blog*Spot is sucking as hard as I can remember it sucking, we don’t seem to be getting to that point. Blogs like Instapundit and Samizdata and BlogSisters are great for Blogger, exposing lots of people outside the world of blogging to weblogs and to Blogger both, but from a practical standpoint, the last thing Blog*Spot needs is people getting tens of thousands of hits a day.

What can you, the ordinary Blog*Spot user, do? Every time you can’t get to your site, email all the big name, high traffic Blog*Spot users, telling them that you can’t get to their site, and asking why not. Don’t forget to mention that you read them five times a day, so you don’t see why they keep showing a full week of posts on their main page, making it horribly slow to load.