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Saturday, December 02, 2006

What a complete disaster. For the past few weeks, I've been resisting the request every time I log in to Blogger, to switch over to the all-new 'Blogger Beta', on the grounds that I really don't have time to learn anything new, and I'm quite happy with the way things are, thank you very much. But having been asked for the umpteenth time this afternoon, and been told that within a couple of months everyone will have to switch anyway, I decided not to postpone the inevitable any longer, and merrily transferred my blogs across. Big mistake.

The Blogger Help section says this:

"Does upgrading change my account, profile or blogs in any way?
The only thing to change will be your login information. Everything else about Blogger remains the same: your profile, your display name, the addresses of your blogs, etc."


Not true. At least not if you've been with Blogger since 2002. Back then, the standard format was to automatically create an archive page with links to each month's posts. You can access it by clicking on 'Blog Archive' above, or 'Archives' to the left. Or at least you could. Not any more, because Blogger doesn't use that format these days, and appears to have completely forgotten that its original customers still do, because switching to Blogger Beta has instantly erased my archive page. Meaning that loyal Bloggers like myself, who have been here from the beginning, now have no access to their archives.

But it doesn't end there. My template was one of the original Blogger templates, with images hosted by Blogger themselves. They stopped offering this template to new users years ago, but obviously continued to host the required images for people like me who use this layout.

Not any more. Blogger haven't bothered transferring those images across to the new servers, meaning that the moment I agreed to have my blog upgraded, it could no longer find the required images (the top left picture, etc), replacing them instead with blank white spaces.

Fortunately, I've managed to locate the required files on someone else's website, and have uploaded them to my own server (obviously people without their own website are stuffed), so with a bit of tinkering I've succeeded in getting my blog to display more or less correctly. As for my archives, the posts are still there, I just have no way of accessing them. Which means a lot of work adding dozens of links to the sidebar. And there was me thinking I didn't have time to upgrade. I am not happy.

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