Ed Bilodeau

<< Back to Home

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, Update : OK, for the hell of it I decided to give Google Reader another try. The responsiveness seems to be much better now. Still not sold on it.

The main problem is how it lists the posts to read. It does at least seem to interfile them, but I can't figure out exactly what it is doing. When I use "sort by date", there are posts that I know should be at the top, but aren't. I pay around with it, and all of a sudden there are a few newer posts that appear. Scrolling through the list I see an item from September, then one from October, then another from September. What date are they sorting on? The plutonium calendar? I can't see exact timestamps on anything, so I have no way of verifying whether or not the feeds are up to date. Important functionality for a news reader to have, IMHO.

Then there is "sort by relevance". What does that mean? relevant to what? I'm guessing it is some sort of post ranking similar to what they use in search. The problem here is that I'm not searching, I'm browsing. Would I like some sort of relevance indicator displayed? Yes. Do I want posts to be hidden from me because the blogosphere hasn't bothered to link to them? No. Useless.

Beyond that, there is no functionality available. I guess you might say, "There's no functionality, but its all cool and AJAXy! So that's good! Please send me targeted advertizing!" Or you might say, "This is pretty lame."