My Blog is Cursed!!

Blogger has been breaking down for over a week.. this weekend and Monday, it his the file server that stores my blog. Broken blog off and on all morning.

Now HaloScan is offline.. and they handle my comments.

Off to find a virgin to sacrifice to the blogger gohds...

Update: Well HaloScan is back. That was fast. All I had to do was sleep on it.

Deb L. asked if the problems might be caused by going "off the reservation" for services like Flickr or HaloScan.

I think the problem with downtime at both places (Blogger and Haloscan) is the rapid growth of blogging. With a reported 25000(?) new blogs every day (a number I find suspect), the people providing the services don't have time or necessarily money to maintain/upgrade the equipment they use.

I doubt my recent cursed situation was complicated much by going "off res" for my comments (I don't use Flickr to upload photos, don't even normally use Hello.. just the basic Blogger upload option), except that it means there is one more place for equipment breakdowns.

Then Deb wondered why I chose to use HaloScan instead of stay with Blogger's comment system. I use HaloScan for several reasons:

1. I have friends who read my blog but do not have blogs themselves; they could not comment with blogger without setting up a "profile", so they wouldn't comment. With Haloscan, they don't need to register with anyone. Just comment. This was the most important reason. (yes, Del, Deb and Jennifer, this means I did this for you! Do you comment? No.)

2. Blogger still doesn't allow for trackbacks. I don't get them often, but I would use them more with other people's blogs if I could. Still it's not an option that Blogger offers.

3. With HaloScan I can block trolls and sploggers without requiring legitimate commentors to do that whole word verification thing every time they comment. Can't tell you how I dislike having to do that all the time. Since switching to HaloScan I've had to remove/block 2 comments total without word verification.

4. That pretty looking comment box that matches my blog.

I waited for Blogger to make these kinds of changes on their own, they didn't. I'm seriously thinking about jumping ship on Blogger; when I switch will I stay with HaloScan? I don't know. It depends upon the comment service offered wherever I go.