Dear LazyWeb: I tried to help my friend
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward with
some problems he’s having on his blog, and managed to completely screw things
up. I would sure appreciate a word or two of wisdom from someone who
understands Blogger.
[Update: Problem solved. I created another FTP-only account on Alex’s
hosting service and told Blogger to use that and it seems OK. I gotta say,
my first serious experience with Blogger has been kinda pukey.]
[And hey, Alex
wrote
about it, elegantly.]
The symptom is that when you try to upload or publish anything, the
blogger.com “Status” screen says “Publishing files to your blog...” and shows
the little spinning indicator, but nothing else happens. When I click the
“Show transfer details...” link, nothing happens. I have looked at the
FTP-settings screen till I’m cross-eyed and tried running FTP manually
and it works fine. I don’t have permissions to look at /var/logs
on the server to see if there’s any evidence there.
Does anyone have any ideas as regards next steps? A thousand thanks in advance.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: LazyWeb (Apr 04 2008, at 17:03)
If it were me, I'd point the thing at a local server where I can investigate everything and see if I can replicate the problem.
Barring that, there's always Ethereal.
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From: Derek K. Miller (Apr 07 2008, at 01:14)
Blogger.com has had flaky FTP pretty much since the beginning (I've used it for my main blog since 2000). Quite often, an initial publish on a post will work fine, but if I edit it within a few minutes, I'll click Publish and it will either sit there or say it's "taking longer than expected."
The changes do publish eventually in my case, but it can take some time (maybe 15 or 20 minutes). Rarely, publishing will fail or happen "with errors."
I've never had an explanation why this is so, especially since when the problems occur I can always connect from my machine with an FTP client. But since it does generally work and I have such a big legacy of stuff in the Blogger database, I still stick with it.
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