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I Hate Blogger

I Hate BloggerI Hate Blogger Hosted on Zooomr

So on another post of mine two Thomas Hawk readers are complaining about only getting partial feeds in their RSS readers for my blog. But if you look at the screen shot above you will see that I’ve got my account at Blogger configured to provide full feeds, not partial feeds.

This is not the first time this has happened to me. I’ve had readers complain in the past about partial feeds and yet I’ve never told Blogger to publish anything but full feeds.

What’s worse though is that Blogger’s service is just crap. It was kind of getting better for a while but the past few weeks or so it’s just been awful. It’s been difficult to publish stuff (it acts like it’s publishing but just always says 0% uploaded) and although I think it might be fixed today for the past few weeks their auto password / blogger ID thing has not been working.

But here’s a place where technology sucks. I did try to transfer my blog to WordPress once but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. And then I’ve been told by others (perhaps erroneously but I’m not sure since I couldn’t figure it out) that it’s difficult to transfer both your blog and all of your existing comments over to WordPress.

So I guess I’m stuck with crappy Blogger for the time being still. What I really want is to have my blog at thomashawk.com on WordPress or Moveable Type and then have a nice photoblog at thomashawk.com/photoblog. Someday I’ll get this all set up.

In the meantime if you are getting partial feeds to my blog, sorry about that. I wish you were getting full feeds, it’s nothing intentional on my part.

21 Replies to “I Hate Blogger”

  1. I noticed the exact same thing recently (partial feeds from my own blog appearing in my FeedDemon aggregator). As you can see in my rant on the discovery it appears to be the ATOM feed getting screwed up. They apparently have an RSS feed now (used to only be atom) and it’s simply blogurl/rss.xml.

    I told my 3 subscribers to resubscribe to the RSS feed until I can transition to WordPress in the coming months. Sucks there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to convert though – will have to do more research.

    Try your RSS feed and see if it’s better. I’m about to change your feed address in my FeedDemon – thanks for the reminder! 🙂

    Good luck!
    N2

  2. I commented earlier on this but it seems to be fixed now. This post and the last couple have been full feeds as normal.
    I guess it’s just technical problems with Blogger that where causing the issue… but thanks for checking in to it!
    I use wordpress (host them myself, not he service) for my family blog walkerpad.com and my photo blog edgeshot.com. I can’t comment on importing but I like WP and all the great mods that get cooked up for it.
    Now my understanding is that 2.x is pretty good about importing everything and comments, though this used to not be the case with older versions. Though why import right away? You can cut over and worry about the back hall later. The current blog can stay up and is cached to heck by google right. Just a though, consistency with the history is nice but new stuff can go anywhere any time.
    I did have to get spam karma working on the family site. It’s a small site serving a tiny population and yet I get a thousand plus track back and comment spams a week. It’s just insane. I have have understood how anyone can think there is profit with that nonsense.

  3. Thomas, it is really, really easy to transfer from Blogger, including your existing comments. However, I did it before the recent Blogger upgrade, so I don’t know if it still works as smoothly.

    I have some posts about how I did it over on my blog, here and here.

    The one thing that took a long time to change was my Google listing…

  4. Thomas,

    I noticed that as well. I don’t know if it has been fixed like griffon said. This is what I’ve been having to do (and shouldn’t have to!)

    1) publish post.
    2) go into my Blogger account Dashboard and then select the “Settings” tab,
    3) Select the “Site Feed” option.
    4) Verify that “Full” feed option is selected (it always is),
    5) Save the setting again.
    6) Republish the Index.

    And the full feed returns to my RSS feed view.

    I’ve been doing this after EVERY post I’ve made to retain the “Full” feed and keep it from going back to short.

    What a nuisance. Hope this is fixed, but this was working fine for me as a “workaround”.

    Regards.

  5. I moved to wordpress awhile ago, because I was fed up with Bloggers inability (at the time) to organize posts into categories. I just didn’t have the kind of control (nerd) I needed.

    I lost all of my comments in the process and it was a pain transferring my posts because my hosting service didn’t support the backend app script that needs to be present to use WordPress’s conversion from blogger tool.

    I assume there are lots of hosting services where it is super easy to do this, because I have heard of people transferring successfully, it just didn’t work in my case.

    As for the separate photo blog, you might want to look into Movable Type as your platform if that’s what you want. For you to publish two separate blogs (without any type of advanced plug-in filtering) wordpress requires two seperate installations to have two independent blogs. Movable Type is much more flexible in this respect, but with the kind of user-driven reponsiveness WordPress has, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is coming soon.

    I was publishing my regular blog with WordPress and my photoblog with Blogger until I figure I’d just combine them anyway. Bloggers inflexibility was probably the tipping point.

    On a related note, I think you should keep everything here in one place. Just my two cents.

  10. As mark said, the blogger import script in wordpress works pretty well. I encourage you to try moving to your own domain and WP again. If you have any questions about the migration process, let me know. Blogger wasn’t made with professional blogs in mind.

  11. Hey Thomas:

    Interestingly enough, I just moved a Blogger blog over to WordPress this past weekend. You’re right, It’s not as easy as it should be, but with a few simple tweaks, I managed to get it done.

    Feel free to email me if you like, and I’ll help you make the move quickly and painlessly.

    Best – Michael Pollock

  12. I completely agree with you on Blogger, it’s exactly why I made the move to WordPress. It’s pretty painless, and I’d be happy to help you through it if you need a hand.

  15. I did the migration from clogger to wordpress about 8 months ago. It DID take three attempts to get everything moved (incl. comments), but ended up fine in the end.

    (P.S. – still no word from Dish about what they are going to do for existing customers with DVRs…)

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