The connection has timed out

It's bad enough getting these timeout message from the SAIX news server, but now it's happening with Blogspot blogs as well.

The connection has timed out

The server at www.blogger.com is taking too long to respond.

* The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few
moments.


Is anyone else getting these messages, or do we just have a slow connection?

WordPress versus Blogger

I have three general blogs on three different blogging platforms, and occasionally I compare them to see which is most popular.

The blogs are Notes from Underground on Blogger (this one), Khanya on WordPress, and my LiveJournal. The graph from Amatomu below shows that the oldest, the LiveJournal one, has the fewest readers, while the newest one, the WordPress one, seems to have the most readers. Is this because readers prefer WordPress to blogger?





Actually the comparison is not quite fair to LiveJournal. Most liveJournal posts are read by friends on feeds, and very few people read the actual blogs themselves. Nevertheless, it does seem to indicate a preference for WordPress on the part of blog readers, though as a blog writer I find it has several limitations, notably that it does not support Javascript, so all sorts of widgets and things just don't work.

But knowing which one readers prefer also affects the way I write. I now tend to be more careful about what I wrote on the Khanya blog, knowing that more people will probably read it. Notes from underground tends to get used for quick 'n dirty posts, and the LiveJournal even more so, or even just for pointers to posts on one of the others, if I think some of my LiveJournal friends might be interested, and I hope that some of them may comment.

Have fascist Israeli Zionists hacked Blogger?

Normally I would regard this kind of suggestion as a way-out conspiracy theory, but the timing seems to suggest that the following comment may have some merit

The reason I checked was because a friend suggested to me that I might be under attack for voicing concern for the Palestinians. He was right. He too had apparently been targeted earlier and kicked off WordPress for violating policies. He had supported the Palestinians' human rights (without being anti-Semitic). The political Zionists conflate their views with Jewishness, leaving anything that disagrees with their position outside Jewishness, which is a position designed by Machiavellians (liars) to appeal to the weak-minded. It's akin to many in the U.S. who claim that to be anti-war is anti-American. Well, whether they like it or not, I'm a seven-generation-plus American (signifies with the American Indians) and I'm also anti-War!

The comment was sent to me after I said I could not read my Blogger blogs, or anyone else's.

In the absence of any response from Google, it seems to have some merit.

Blogspot problems

Blogger problems persist, even though I have tried it with two different browsers and three different computers, I still get a "403 forbidden" message when I try to read any of my Blogger blogs of Blogspot.

I get the same message when I try to read any other blogs on Blogspot too.

I have already moved my family history blog to http://hayesgreene.wordpress.com/, and will move this one too if the problem persists.

In the mean time, I'm still blogging at Khanya blog.

End of the road for Blogger?

For more than a year now I’ve had a blog on Blogger and one on WordPress, and have posted about equally on both. I found it hard to decide which platform I preferred, but this just about clinches it.

Tried to log in to my Blogger blog a few minutes ago, and got this charming message:

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

If you’re continually receiving this error, you may be able to resolve the problem by deleting your Google cookie and revisiting Google. For browser-specific instructions, please consult your browser’s online support center.

If your entire network is affected, more information is available in the Google Web Search Help Center.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

It seems that I can post, but the moment I try to read my posts, I get that message.

If that’s lasts any longer, you certainly won’t be seeing me much longer on Blogger.

And obviously, if I can't read my blog, I can't read or respond to comments, so if you would like to comment on this, please do so on my WordPress blog.

Interpreting Amatomu

Today this blog reappeared on the Amatomu radar for the first time in more than a month -- it was ranked 200, and my other blog, Khanya was ranked 150 -- nice round figures, so I thought it worth remarking on them.

For more than a month now this blog has been ranked somewhere in the 230-240 range, so why did it suddenly shoot up to 200, and reappear in the top 30 in the News and Politics section? Not because there were any more readers, apparently. The number of readers has remained fairly constant for the last few days. So it must be because there was a drop in the number of readers of the other blogs on Amatomu, no doubt caused by the long weekend, and blog readers going away to where there are more interesting things to do than read blogs.

So where have all the blog readers gone?

I somehow can't imagine that most of them have gone to Moria, even though a very large number of South Africans do go there on the Western Easter weekend -- the top bloggers on Amatomu somehow don't seem to be the type. No doubt from today until the end of the week we will be able to read on their blogs what they have done, and this blog can sink back into obscurity again.

The other question raised by this is why the number of readers of this blog, even though it did not rise, apparently did not drop off as much as some other blogs. And perhaps that is answered by the Amatomu stats as well. Nobody seems to have read much that I have posted in the last week, and there haven't been many comments on recent posts. The most popular post, by far, remains one I wrote several months ago, commenting on a list of books to read before you die. It's still top with 232 reads over the last 30 days. The second one, Easter - Christian or pagan, which was posted even longer ago, has shot up, with 111 reads. Perhaps that explains why there hasn't been such a drop off.

The other thing that needs some explanation is why my Khanya blog, which I started a year ago, is more popular than this one -- it is ranked 150 on Amatomu, whereas this one is at 200.

The only reason I can think of is that WordPress blogs are more popular than Blogger blogs. I started the Khanya blog on WordPress at a time when many of the blogs I read were switching from Blogger to WordPress, because of the "new and improved" Blogger, in which many of the features no longer worked, and there seemed to be a mass migration to WordPress as dissatisfaction with the reduced functionality of Blogger increased.

But that doesn't explain why readers seem to prefer WordPress blogs to Blogger ones, and the Amatomu statistics don't give much of a clue about that. They reveal the phenomenon, but they don't explain it.

Any ideas?

Blogger is broken -- again!

Just when I thought it was safe to use Blogger again (at least in the mornings -- it won't let you post in the afternoons and evenings), it breaks.

The "Blog this" and "Link to this post" no longer work. Oh yes, you can mark the text all right, but the "Publish" and "Save" buttons are hidden, and if you enlarge the box to reveal them they disappear before you have time to click them.

Backtracking on secularisation? Archbishop of Canterbury and Sharia law

Father David MacGregor has linked together a number of reports in his Contact Online blog about the Archbishop of Canterbury's views on introducing Sharia law into Britain, which has set a herd of cats among the pigeons.

Post truncated ... read the rest here.

Moved to Wordpress blog because of Blogger bugs

This post was actually posted at 6:00 pm, and should have appeared above the post above this, instead of below it. But Blogger has a bug that only allows it to post in the mornibng, and an ything posted after noon is moved 12 hours back.

Maybe they will fix this bug next year, or the year after, but until they do, read the rest of this post here.

Blogger: now mornings only

It seems that Blogger is now "mornings only".

If one posts after noon, the time of the post reverts to 12 hours earlier. If you have already posted a blog entry in the morning, the afternoon post appears after it, out of order.

For a while it was possible to correct this manually, for example by clicking on "Post Options" and entering the time as, say 18:15 instead of 06:15, but now if one does that it says one must enter the time as hh:mm. Never mind that 18:15 IS hh:mm -- one simply cannot get the correct time stamp on a blog posting, so afternoon posts appear out of order in the blog, and also don't show up on blog aggregators.

Yet another reason to switch to WordPress, I suppose.

Blogger, WordPress and LiveJournal

Today my Khanya blog on WordPress caught up with my Blogger one (this one) on Technorati. They are now running neck and neck with "authority" of 100, and a "rank" of 66360.

It's nearly five years since I started blogging on LiveJournal, with a post on Arthur Shearly Cripps and St Herman of Alaska.

I found LiveJournal interesting, with its "friends" system making it possible to share blogs with people of overlapping fields of interest. Actually it was more a journal than a blog, so the name LiveJournal was accurate.

Two years ago I discovered Blogger, almost by accident. It seemed more like a true blog, a web log, and what persuaded me to start using it was the "Blog this" feature, which made it easy to record and comment on memorable blog posts.

But quite soon after I started using it, a new and "improved" version of Blogger was introduced, in which most of the features that attracted me to Blogger in the first place no longer worked, including the "Blog this". And as functionality was reduced, more and more Blogger users migrated to WordPress.

Eventually in February this year I started a WordPress blog, called Khanya, as an experiment. It didn't seem to have many of the features I missed in the "new" Blogger, but it did have a "trackback" system for linking to other blogs, which worked (sometimes).

I found that if I wanted to blog on something in WordPress blogs, I used the WordPress one, and when I wanted to comment on Blogger blogs, I used the Blogger one, at least for the ones where the "Link to this post" feature was enabled. That was for more than straightforward comments, but rather a spin-off post inspired by an idea in another blog.

Now Blogger has improved, and most of the missing functionality is back. The "Blog this" feature has been improved, and now works with any web page, and not just Blogger blogs. The only thing missing, at least that I notice, is the "Search all blogs" link at the top of the Blogger page. But there is a workaround if one goes to Technorati.

But just at the point where Blogger has regained most of its missing features, my WordPress blog has overtaken my Blogger one, not only in Technorati links, but in page reads as well. The WordPress blog, Khanya, has caught up to this one in just eight months, in terms of "authority", and surpassed it in number of visitors. Has Google left it too late?

Khanya							33	113	1,879
Notes from underground							26	91	1,425

Those are visitor figures for today (so far), yesterday, and for the month so far.

It's also interesting to see where visitors come from:

Khanya

	Num	Perc.	Country Name
	216	53.07%	United States
	47	11.55%	United Kingdom
	41	10.07%	South Africa
	19	4.67%	Canada

Notes from underground:

	Num	Perc.	Country Name
	200	45.15%	United States
	90	20.32%	South Africa
	38	8.58%	United Kingdom
	23	5.19%	Canada
	9	2.03%	Korea, Republic Of

Notes from underground (this blog) gets twice as many South African visitors than Khanya.

As for LiveJournal, responses in the form of comments have dwindled to almost nothing. I now use it mainly for personal stuff and family news and pictures.

What kind of liberal am I? Blogger pulls ahead

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Peace Patroller, also known as an anti-war liberal or neo-hippie. You believe in putting an end to American imperial conquest, stopping wars that have already been lost, and supporting our troops by bringing them home.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

I posted this on my WordPress blog, and somehow it just didn't work out. It seems that there are some things that Blogger still does better than WordPress, and graphics is one of them.

The MyBlogLog widget, which used to work OK in WordPress no longer does so, and there's a stats counter that seems to display a whole lot of code. So I'm not going to move this blog to WordPress yet, though I'll continue to play with the WordPress one.

Concerning the test itself, I noted over on the WordPress blog that it was very much American centred.

Consider, for example, the last question:

If you could pile any three people into a naked pyramid, who would you choose?

1. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld
2. The CEOs of Exxon, Chevron, and Shell
3. Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito
4. Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow,and the ghost of Ken Lay
5. Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh
6. Revs. Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Ted Haggard

As a non-American, I can tell who the people in the first question are, and I know that the second one refers to oil companies. I've never heard of any of the people in questions 3 or 4. I've heard of one of the people in question 5, but I'm not really aware of their significance. I've heard of the people in question 6, but I'm not sure what the difference is between Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan. I know Dobson has written books about families, but I haven't read them.

So faced with those questions, I chose question 1, because those are the peo[ple I've heard of.

That's how the test is skewed by its ethnocentrism and chauvinism.

WordPress versus Blogger

A few months ago it seemed that half the blogs in my blogroll were switching from Blogger to WordPress.

I could understand why, because when I switched to the much-hyped Blogger Beta, lots of features no longer worked. Nine months after it was announced that the "new" Blogger was introduced, and that it was now "fully-featured", most of the features that didn't work in the Beta version still don't work, and a few more have got broken along the way.

As a result of that, I started an experimental WordPress blog, called Khanya, back in February, and now for the first time, it has passed this blog in the number of people reading it in a day.

Yesterday Khanya had 64 readers, and Notes from Underground had 47. Khanya was ranked 145 on Amatomu, while Notes from Underground was 167. That may just be a temporary thing, of course -- Notes from Underground still has far more links to it from other blogs (according to Technorati), and so perhaps it wouldn't be a good idea to move this blog to WordPress because it would break those links.

They also seem to have different sets of readers, according to StatCounter:

Khanya readers:

	Num	Perc.	Country Name
	197	43.20%	United States
	144	31.58%	South Africa
	33	7.24%	United Kingdom
	18	3.95%	Australia
	14	3.07%	Netherlands
	12	2.63%	Canada
	7	1.54%	Philippines
	6	1.32%	New Zealand
	5	1.10%	Mauritius
	3	0.66%	Greece
	2	0.44%	Cyprus
	2	0.44%	Unknown	-
	2	0.44%	Malaysia
	2	0.44%	France
	1	0.22%	Finland
	1	0.22%	Iceland
	1	0.22%	Namibia
	1	0.22%	Spain
	1	0.22%	Albania
	1	0.22%	Romania
	1	0.22%	Suriname
	1	0.22%	Chile
	1	0.22%	Turkey

Notes from Underground readers:

	Num	Perc.	Country Name
	157	33.76%	South Africa
	150	32.26%	United States
	39	8.39%	Canada
	26	5.59%	United Kingdom
	12	2.58%	Thailand
	11	2.37%	Germany
	9	1.94%	Australia
	7	1.51%	France
	7	1.51%	India
	5	1.08%	Netherlands
	4	0.86%	Philippines
	4	0.86%	Mauritius
	3	0.65%	Barbados
	3	0.65%	Malaysia
	3	0.65%	Unknown	-
	3	0.65%	Greece
	2	0.43%	Switzerland
	2	0.43%	Austria
	2	0.43%	Russian Federation
	1	0.22%	Suriname
	1	0.22%	Puerto Rico
	1	0.22%	Togo
	1	0.22%	Poland
	1	0.22%	Slovenia
	1	0.22%	Lebanon
	1	0.22%	Algeria
	1	0.22%	Hungary
	1	0.22%	Mexico
	1	0.22%	Chile
	1	0.22%	United Arab Emirates
	1	0.22%	Argentina
	1	0.22%	Malta
	1	0.22%	New Zealand
	1	0.22%	Nigeria
	1	0.22%	Ireland

So perhaps the time has come to move this blog to WordPress, as so many others have done.

I'm still not sure though. Most of the features of Blogger that no longer work were never part of WordPress anyway. And the Blogger template is still easier to edit than WordPress.

Blogger features I miss most:

1. Blog this!
2. Search all blogs
3. Click on interests, books, movies in user profile to find those with similar interests

Annoyances:

When you're at the Dashboard, you can click "Dashboard" to get there when you're already there, but when yuou're at the blog, you have to click "Customise" to get a place where you can click to get to the Dashboard. This not only wastes time, it wastes bandwidth, having to load another page unnecessarily.

When you click "Link to this post", the "Edit HTML" no longer works -- you have to save the page and then edit it, loading two more pages in the process -- wasing more time and bandwidth.

So I'm still in two minds about whether to switch. Perhaps when the next thing breaks in Blogger.