Stardate 20011011.1003 (On Screen): Several of my favorite web logs have gone silent for a couple of days, then reappeared with a sudden burst of backlog activity and a sheepish apology. Apparently the problem was that the Blogger server got wedged. This betrays the biggest disadvantage of
Blogger as a tool: irrespective of how nice it might be to use (I don't know; I've never looked at it) it represents what we engineers call a
single point of failure. By contrast, people using
Graymatter or certain other systems continued without problem. In the case of
USS Clueless everything is self contained. For me, Graymatter runs locally on the same server as Apache, and the only external system I rely on is my name server. It is probably a bit more crude than Blogger, but it is much more reliable.
The flip side of this is that Graymatter requires certainservices and server privileges to run, and not everyone has those available. Blogger will work with any place on the web that provides storage; everything else is remote. But if Evan ever decides he's tired of paying his own money to provide a free service to other people, and throws in the towel and shuts Blogger down, there are going to be a lot of people dead in the water. I guess you pays (or don't) your money and takes your choice. I paid about $1500 for my own server so that I wouldn't be vulnerable that way, but not everyone has that kind of pocket change to toss around for a hobby, let alone easy access to broadband. (discussion in progress)
