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.

Friday, October 07, 2005

Google Reader Falls Flat : I tried to experiment with Google Reader by importing an OPML file of 20 or so feeds. It promptly choked on it, not crashing, but taking waaaaay to long to import it. That done, the UI was so kludgy and slow as to be unusable.

I wasn't even able to delete my feeds to see if it would work with just one feed. I was taking so long, and the AJAXy interface was really so bad, jumping around, slow, slow, slow.

From what I could tell, you still need to look at the posts from one feed at a time, and even then you have to click the title of each item to see the contents...

My recommendation: don't bother wasting your time with Google Reader.