Saturday, October 28, 2006

Blogger update and help

So by now, I'm settling into Blogger's slightly more user-friendly but less flexible format, and am getting close to a decision to stay here, but I have a few questions for those who have been on blogger for a while...
  • How bad is the spam problem once you're more established?
  • Do you do all of the visual layout modifications yourself, or has someone helped you renew the look of your blog...If the latter, any recommendations for someone who can help me revise the look of this fairly ugly template?
  • How frequently does blogger go down and leave you blogless?
Any feedback would be great.

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

(1) I've only ever had one piece of comment spam. Maybe I'm just lucky :)

(2) I've done mine myself, but I didn't want anything really fancy. With a new Beta template most changes are a lot easier (colours, fonts, etc).

(3) Occasionally (3 or 4 times in the nearly 1 year I've been using it) Blogger has gone down for more than a few minutes. Each time it has been back up within the day. It frequently (once a fortnight or so) does weird shit for a minute or two, but is usually fine if I keep trying.)

Good luck!

Dr. Crazy said...

1) I use the word verification thing, and I only have gotten spam like once or twice. In other words, spam pretty much isn't a problem.

2) I had Clare (Ink and Incapability) do my most recent template because I suck with HTML and because she enjoys playing around with templates.

3) What Styleygeek said about blogger. Generally it's very reliable.

Horace said...

Thanks for the advice. I've gone over to Blogger Beta, and with the combination of more templates, more flexibility, and my limited mark-up skills, I think I now have a blog that looks like I want it to.

I have a few things I want to work on (moving the body of the blog down a bit; getting a few spaces between the end of the post and the posting info; cleaning up the image blending in the banner, etc.), but I think I can stop fiddling with it for a bit.

JM said...

Just a note: the recent Blogger issues have been on the non-Blogger Beta side of things. The infrastructure underlying Blogger Beta is far more robust (specifically so), and even with the recent spate of issues on Blogger (non-Beta) they've been almost a non-issue in the last 2+ years.

If there is a system-wide issue or scheduled downtime, the Blogger team provides updates and notices at http://status.blogger.com/

Dr. Crazy's right on with the word verification/spam answer.

Bardiac said...

I'm with Dr. C about the word verification; it seems to work well for me.

I haven't switched to Beta, so no help there, but I rarely find Blogger down when I want to post.