Blogging Baptism

8 CommentsSaturday • December 16, 2006 • by michelle

*Warning: Non-bloggers will most likely not give a whip about this rant. Neither will many bloggers. But it’s my blog, and I’ll rant when I want to.

Twelve days into blogging, and I’ve experienced my first bug. Actually two glitches, and they both happened early this morning. I think this means I’ve been baptized as a blogger. Maybe. Advice welcome.

The first problem was something I was readily expecting having read others’ blogs for months. My trusty Blogger in Beta (up until now) wouldn’t let me add pictures. How rude is that? But even more inconsiderate was that it didn’t actually say “We can’t add your pictures right now” or “Please try later.”

There was nothing out of the ordinary to even warn me. Instead, obviously in denial of its own shortcomings, B in B acted like nothing was wrong, like we were peaches and cream, like, well, you get the picture.

It let me put in the link, it let me click “Upload Images.” It even told me that the picture was added and that I could publish it to my blog by clicking “Done.” All the same stuff it normally says. Only there was no picture.

Can I add here that I’m on a dial-up connection, so it took a good chunk of time just to learn that I was wasting clicks? Because, of course, then I had to try sixty schmillion more times to be sure.

Even if it doesn’t seem so, I assure that I’m pretty much over this one now as things are back to normal. But this minor snafu *did* throw off my posting intentions. Now you’ll be a day behind forever! But moving on…

The other problem was much more disconcerting. I use Google Analytics to keep track of my number of visitors, where they’re coming from, etc. I clicked this morning and there was *no* data. I’m not just talking from yesterday or even the day before. All of the data that had been collected from when I started blogging was gone. Zeros. Donuts. My blog is a big fat nothing, and I have the columns of inadequacy to prove it.

Now, to be clear, I’m not very concerned with the number of visitors, but I do find it interesting to see where my readers are, where they’re directed from, and how many return. Thank goodness I now have that nifty map over on the right for partial backup at least. (Kudos to Katerina Fiore for the silent inspiration!)

So I emailed Google’s help desk or whatever, and I got back a form message of potential causes of the problem described in my message, which no one even read. One of the possibilities was that all those goose eggs may be because of routine maintenance, and that everything should reappear and be back on track within 72 hours.

Uh huh. Ci credo quando lo vedo.

So, fellow bloggers, I feel initiated now. I feel baptized as a blogger. But my question is this: should I? Or are there more “normal” problems I should be prepared for before I get my wings?

I don’t like to expect the worst, but I do like to be prepared.

For now, though, I just kinda feel like doing this: