Note to readers of this blog: Posterous is where I've had a mirror to this blog hosted, for a while. I have no intention of closing the blog you're reading, at the moment. I am thinking of closing the mirror over at Posterous, for reasons you'll see explained, below.
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I'm also considering the possibility of shutting down this blog. As I wrote in a comment on the company blog, which Rich has decided to not let you see
"As a user, I have to ask - am I going to have to relocate, again, just for the sake of somebody else's marketing ploy? Do you see why somebody might say "this is more trouble than I'm willing to put up with, just to give away content"? As a blogger, I find that I'm spending more time cleaning up other people's messes than I'm getting to spend doing any actual blogging, just because people in the industry really seem to enjoy acting like absolute, total ... richards. Think about it. What's the nickname for Richard? Yes, they've been acting like richardheads, and it would be so nice to be able to blog in a place where the staff did otherwise. A breath of fresh air, really.
Please, be bold. Break new ground by acting like your users' time is worth something. Techcrunch might not sing your praises if you do so, but we will. Honest."
You know, I'm not being paid to write this thing. You might notice that the link to the copy of the blog homepage at 001webs.com is dead. As you can see by following the link to the other copy of said homepage at scriptmania, this is not because of any offensive content on that homepage. Said page is gone because 001webs is run incompetently, and the company has lost my homepage over and over and over, forcing me to write to them about this problem and re-upload the same pages, over and over and over. Eventually, I decided that I'd had enough, went looking for a new provider, and found one. I created a new page at this location, hoping that the url would not prove to be ironic.
I then wrote to my former provider, and got this response from the owner
"Hi Joseph,
don't really understand why you took this personally, you did so from the start.
It's a struggle for us to fight all the spammers that sign up. We have people trained to delete them and only them, it seems that somewhere something is not yet clicking as it should.
001Webs Admin"
Uh, huh. How about because you gave me your word that you were going to put an end to these deletions, and we are now on letter 18 in this conversation, Cristian? Meaning that I had to resurrect my site or ask you to resurrect it, how many times? How much patience is enough, and have you ever heard of a saying that ran something like "a man is as good as his word"? Note the unapologetic attitude. I could rebuild my site at the old location, again, and it would just vanish, again, so why bother?
Having created the new homepage, I then set out to update the appropriate links, replacing the url for the old (and now non-existent) blog homepage on 001webs with the url for its replacement, and found myself thwarted by the system on Posterous as I tried to do so. Please remember that name, if you're reading this, because I wouldn't want to foster any misunderstandings - the system at Typepad, where the twin to this blog is to be found, worked wonderfully, as it almost always seems to. The only place where I had the problem I'm about to discuss was at Posterous, and Posterous wasn't about to let me talk about the problem on the company blog.
"I found a replacement service, created a replacement homepage, and then tried to realign my links. I succeeded in this in every location except for one: Posterous. I found that your system won't let me edit the links in my blog sidebar, either in Internet Explorer or in Firefox, forcing me to leave a link in place that goes nowhere. Better still, when I go directly to the posterous homepage in Firefox, while logged in, I find no sign of a path to the blog management page. Navigation has gone from being difficult, to being a nightmare, with nothing but frustration waiting for the user who manages to find his way through the maze you've made of our control panels. Just finding the button needed to make a new post took a lot of looking through a not at all intuitive interface."
Just one of a number of comments I've posted about the problem, which the company has opted to keep the public from being able to see, including this one
"As a user, I have to ask - am I going to have to relocate, again, just for the sake of somebody else's marketing ploy? Do you see why somebody might say "this is more trouble than I'm willing to put up with, just to give away content"? As a blogger, I find that I'm spending more time cleaning up other people's messes than I'm getting to spend doing any actual blogging, just because people in the industry really seem to enjoy acting like absolute, total ... richards. Think about it. What's the nickname for Richard? Yes, they've been acting like richardheads, and it would be so nice to be able to blog in a place where the staff did otherwise. A breath of fresh air, really.
Please, be bold. Break new ground by acting like your users' time is worth something. Techcrunch might not sing your praises if you do so, but we will. Honest."
These are excerpts. I held onto the entirety of my comments, which I'll repost in another location, later (but not much later), but yes, this sums up the problem. I'm spending so much time dealing with the drama and insanity of the companies that I'm dealing with, that I find that I have little time left to do any blogging, which is what I'm putting up with the drama to do, in the first place. As I wrote in response to somebody we all know and love, over on the company blog
"Oh, and Rich ...
I notice that you commented an hour ago, meaning that there has been time for my earlier remarks to be seen and processed. You seem to be under the impression that you'll be able to keep them from being seen.
In this, you are quite sadly mistaken. I'll just post them elsewhere, as an illustration of the way in which Posterous has engaged in censorship on its company blog in order to stifle criticism of what is obviously a marketing driven move that has served its user base poorly. Hype is no substitute for functionality."
(No, this blog is not the location I was referring to) How crazy is it, to destroy basic functionality, just in order to be able to do a press release? As things are, on these terms, at the very least, I have to cut all links to this blog, and let it drift, because otherwise, I'm left with webring navigability issues.
So, while I'm thinking of finding a replacement for this blog, I'm also thinking of just giving up. Between having to start again from scratch, because a company will just delete its entire service without telling its users, first ("tee hee hee!"), or having to do damage control on my reputation because some admin - the people who are supposed to maintain some level of sanity - is off spreading rumors in retaliation for my evil decision to wear a blue shirt on a wednesday, or whatever one of these guys has decided to get worked up over - I don't have time to do what I'm here to do. That's why there are as few posts on this blog as there are, and that's ridiculous. There should be some reasonable expectation of professionalism when dealing with supposed professionals, and online, no such level ever seems to be met.
There are a few places where, to some extent, those expectations are being met. Maybe, what I need to do is retreat to those locations, and let sites that I've found to be poorly served by the staff die, instead of trying to replace them, because sanity, in this industry, seems to be very much more the exception than the rule, responsibility and integrity being concepts that scarcely seem to be remembered, at all.
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