Wednesday, September 8, 2004

Journals and Blogs and Much Frustration

On another Navigator tab at this very moment, I have the following:

There were errors. (Hide status messages)

001
java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out


This arises from an attempt to add links to my sidebar on my Blogger fiction blog. I've been trying since last night to "publish" that blog, but as of now I don't think it will load at all, much less update. Is it Blogger that's at fault, or my code?  I'm waiting to hear. This is, of course, the same service now used by a former AOL-J cartoonist who famously ran into TOS difficulties. I like Blogger okay, but it's glitchy.  Some browsers show old versions of a Blogspot page hours after it's been updated.

Similarly, I upgraded my LiveJournal blog last night. It's the one I use to write about writing and keep in touch with a few friends. I supposedly went from a free account to a paid one in order to make it more customizable. The last step of the "checkout" payment process glitched, and at last look I was still listed as having a free account. Was my credit charged?  I don't know. Can I customize? Not yet!  Again, I like it okay, but it's not perfect.  It also has a readership of four people, myself included.

You want to complain about AOL Journals?  I don't.  This one is the most full-featured, the most stable, and the easiest to use of the lot.  That's part of why I use it so often.

Karen

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, Karen,

They all have their problems. AOL sometimes doesn't let you update and the alerts stop functioning, and they don't let you use certain html coding. But I'm not complaining. I wish they would offer more to stay competitive. AOL is a latecomer to blogging, so they need to keep improving. And I wish they could get 12 pt to work properly.

With Blogger, it's been not working since late last night. I fiddled with 2 templates and haven't been able to republish, and now I have entries waiting publication for all three active blogs there. There was nothing on the Blogger Status site, so I emailed them about it. But I didn't get an error message when I tried to publish, just the zero that never changed for portion published. sigh.

One thing you should do tho if you don't want to lose your template there is to copy the template and save as a Word or WP document. I have mine saved on my hard drive and on disk. All you need to do is right click in the template box, choose Select All, then right click again, then choose Copy. So that way, if Blogger is buggy, you won't lose your work.

Anonymous said...

Oh, yeah, Shelly, I saved several HTML docs in Composer last night.  I'm relieved to hear it's not just me! Thanks for your help!

The way I've found to get a decent size in AOL-J is to toggle from text to HTML and manually add Size=3 to the font tag.  If there is no font tag, I make one.

- Karen

Anonymous said...

I have a blogger too!  Sometimes very difficult to POST.  Keeps going around and around.  I downloaded the files to add pictures...as of yet have not had the time to teach myself. AOL is very easy, but I can not spell and like that part of Blogger...along with the Preview Post.

Anonymous said...

Yes, that's exactly the problem, Alpha. It finally worked early this afternoon, but how annoying!  I don't mean to imply that AOL-J is perfect, but the frustration quotient seems to be much lower for me, especially recently.

I write most of my entries in Netscape Composer. This works pretty well for AOL-J, not at well in Blogger. Spelling's not a problem for me, only typos - and none of these programs help me with that! :) Karen

Anonymous said...

I was doing the html fix for 12 pt, but every time I had a link or font change, I had to change the size code. AOL adds a lot of unneeded code and I kept missing spots so the entries kept switching font size in mid-sentence, a real pain. Someone on the journals board said that 10 pt is really 12 pt, or close enough, so that's what I've been using. 12 pt seems to be 10 pt. It's simple enough that you'd think they could fix it.