Ed Bilodeau

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This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Bad software morning : First, delicious isn't working. My patience has just about run out. Time to start looking seriously at alternatives. Great idea, but not ready for prime-time.

Second, for some reason, in Blogger edit-mode, Ctrl+D does't open the Bookmark window, but reloads the current window, deleting your post in progress. Probably a 'helpful' hotkey built into the UI. Thanks for nothing. (I know, what business did I have trying to bookmark something while editing a post? Not the point.)

Third, Blogger decided that I had left a required field blank, when they were all clearly filled. That's just wacky software.

[Update]

Fourth, the Yahoo RSS aggregator doesn't seem to be reading in all the RSS feeds properly. For example, the post from IEBlog (What have you guys been doing since IE6?) isn't listed, even though it is within the display parameters I've set.

So, my bookmarking, blogging, and rss reading software are on the fritz this morning. The ironic thing is that in all cases, what they do, the functionality they provide, is bone-simple. Now I know why people roll their own.