My second complaint is that the search facility doesn’t work. Many times I put in something that I know I have blogged about and I don’t get any response. It says no results for that word when I know – and sometimes subsequently trace the hard way – that I have blogged a post on it. I find it really frustrating in my book blog where I want to see what books of a series I have reviewed. The Powerscourt series of David Dickinson, for example. I knew I had blogged about some of them but I can’t find them without going through month by month. I think Mark suggested an answer to this at one stage but at that time I wasn’t having any problems. A reminder would be useful, Mark.
Same problems here, and it's taken several tries to comment.
ReplyDeleteI've posted about the problem on "Help" page, but no-one has returned with an answer....so frustrating.
~Jo
Yes, GB mentioned the same to me earlier today and I told him that I, too, am having trouble with Blogger. They are making changes again with the dashboard and when making changes, things tend to get all messy for a few days - with the search bar as an exception, that was always been very unreliable to me, but I thought that it was because I've made so many changes with my blogs for the years that I've been here.
ReplyDeleteSo, I guess not :/
The search facility is a bit hit and miss. Tags don't help.
ReplyDeleteUsing a 3G Dongle there is rarely any difference day to day but if I'm connected to a landline then it always seems to slow about four thirty and at weekends........I assumed it was children using the system for gaming and instant chat in real time.
Adrian, That's one advantage we insomniacs have - we're on at a less busy time as a rule. We need some pay back for being awake at ridiculous hours. What I don't understand is with it being international shouldn't the peaks even themselves out?
ReplyDeleteI suppose they should. I just assumed it was BT landlines running short of room. I'm amazed it works at all.
ReplyDeleteYes Blogger was definitely having a day off yesterday, I kept getting "Service Unavailable" messages whenever I tried to do anything related to posting, uploading images, or commenting. It was really quite annoying.
ReplyDeleteAs for the search problems, the default blog search is terrible, partly as it fails miserably to index labels and title of posts, or comments. If you search on my blog you can however find posts via their labels. For example try searching for PhotoGrid. Not only do you get the posts where I talk about the software, but you get those where I've used PhotoGrid to generate the images and so have just added the label to the post as well. This all works because I use Google Custom Search. It is fairly easy to configure but I did also document my experiences in a blog post. Of course if you go this route then you will need to add a search box to your template rather than relying on the one in the (ugly) navbar.
The problems I had leaving comments were only for that one day about a week or so ago, and I have never observed a general slowness at certain times.
ReplyDeleteWell, living in the rather affluent (not me, but generally speaking) South of Germany, I am on one of those superfast internet connections and maybe therefore I do not get the slowdown.
Regarding internationality evening out the "rush hours": hmm, without having consulted any official statistics, I think the majority of bloggers (both readers and writers) are in the US, closely followed by the UK and Western Europe. Also, it may not all be found on the same servers, and possibly the servers the majority of your favourite blogs are on are located in your same time zone, when plenty of people access the system at the same time.
Google has been a nightmare recently - not just blogger. Calendar is very hit and miss and I keep having to write things down to add to it when it's next working.
ReplyDeleteI recently went through your whole book blog from the beginning and made a list of the books you've read. Will email it to you.
Thanks Mark - I now have a Google search facilkity (there's one in the gadgets for anyone who is interested).
ReplyDeleteYes. I've provided a search facility via gadgets for years and it is a lot more use than the toolbar one. But you'll notice that it's headed 'Search this Blog - Good Luck' because it's still not 100% reliable.
ReplyDeleteAnd PS, yes Blogger is 'free' in that we don't pay but Google have plenty of other ways of making money out of it. Collecting statistics and reaching the world being but one of them.
ReplyDelete