New Editor WAS broken - twice at least

The new editor for Blogger is NO LONGER (as 1645 on 10 May 0630 on 14 May  broken as far as this blog is concerned. Neither is the more complete disaster of Friday 13th evident.  However the following is kept on the blog since there are a couple of useful links therein.

I have updated this post and included comments on a couple of side issues.

Problem of 10 May

I am unsure whether this merits a net Brickbat or a net bouquet.  It appears to have been an intermittent fault (so fairly large bouquet for fixing in <24 hours) but there was no information generated by Google (so a brickbat).  I also suspect it was caused by some geek in Google trying to fix something  that wasn't broken (another brickbat, but a small one because that is what geeks cannot help doing). Of course they have an on-going bouquet for providing the service anyway.

It appears from a post to the help pages under "Known Issues" http://knownissues.blogspot.com/ that the problem only affects some blogs. They say

"We're aware of the issue preventing the post editor from loading for some users. Our team is investigating this right now and we hope to have this sorted out as soon as possible.

Thanks for your patience in the meantime.

— latest update on Monday, May 09, 2011 "

Until Google solve the problem (or the glaciers melt completely) the solution is not too bad:

1. Go to Dashboard
2. Click "settings" and go to the bottom of the page
3. Select Old editor.
4. Save the settngs.

This will leave you with the old editor (which I reckon is way inferior) but at least you can keep on communicating.

Problem of 13 May

This was more serious in that one couldn't get into Blogger at all through the Dashboard.  It was possible to read blogs, but only if you had - or could get - the URL some other way.

I tracked this through the day using the 'Something is broken" element of the Support Forum.  It was quite obvious that some of the people posting on this had forgotten their medication (or needed the dosage adjusted) and that others seemed to be spending their time at work blogging, rather than the tasks their employer expected of them.  Blogger did keep up some information flow during the day, but not as often as one might have expected.  However as I have seen single-client computer systems turn turtle and take several days to recover, getting it back after less than a day (apparently 20.5 hours) is pretty good.

Side issues
The first  side issue which arose was the use of AdSense on blogs.  I had always assumed this was a small system designed to let Bloggers imagine they were heavy hitters in the IT world.   Not so: as Wikipedia shows this system generated 28% of Google's revenue.  Also the blog owner only gets a portion of the revenue generated by clicks on the adsso Google also benefits!

A second side issue is that of doubleclick.  I have for sometime noted that when a page is slow loading a status message appears to the effect that "waiting for ad.doubleclick.com".  I wondered why this was so pervasive until I read another section of the repository of most knowledge.  It turns out to be a big chunk off Google - the company cost $3.1billion when acquired by Google - and a major player in online marketing.