At least, it sure is if, like me, you’re trying to move something written using your own custom software to one of the big hosting services. The two biggest problems are piss-poor documentation and improperly implemented API’s.
The documentation is completely geared to the majority who are already using one of the existing big hosting services. You’re told to just use this or that turnkey solution, which probably does work quite well… if you’re already using one of those services. What basic API documentation there is, is simply awful. For example, WordPress’s interface documentation is limited to a single statement: “[w]e support the major posting standards, such as the MetaWeblog API.” Charming. No mention what most of those standards are (do they assume I can read minds and know what their subjective standard of “major” is?), or how one chooses one over the other.
As for the one standard they do mention, that brings up the second point. They're lying: they don’t really support the MetaWebLog API. They support a bastardized version of it, in which some parameter names are changed and undocumented gratuitous post-processing of your content is done.
The latter is bad enough that I’m on the verge of concluding it will probably be easier for me to modify my own DIY blog software to add the features I desire than it will to bend such broken interfaces to my will.
It’s a common misconception that this is always the case. It’s not, and there can be a variety of reasons why. In Google’s case, they do a crummy job, but most of their competitors do an awful one, and crummy beats awful hands down.
I’m reminded of this each time I deal with a Google API. Such things tend to have documentation that ranges from cryptic to incomplete to obsolete. At first, one wonders how Google can be so successful given such shoddy quality. Then you try using a competitor’s API to do the same thing, and it all comes into focus: at least you can (eventually… after a fair measure of trial-and-error) make Google’s API do what you want. Most of Google’s competitors (in whatever business sector Google is in) offer an API that is so fundamentally broken by design that the odds are against you ever managing to do what you want with it at all.
Yes, what prompts this is my ongoing battle with trying to find a new home for this blog. Blogger may be part of a company that is giving Microsoft some serious competition in the Evil Empire business, and its API may be a pain in the keister to figure out how to use, but when I feed it an HTML blog entry, I can actually bend Blogger to my will and not have it make all sorts of undocumented gratuitous changes to my content.
And that’s more than can be said for Wordpress, which probably means that this blog is probably not going to end up on there. It may or may not end up on Blogger, either: even though all the evidence points to it being yet another instance of a Google-designed API being merely crummy instead of awful, I need to do a fair bit more testing before I can be certain that crummy is good enough in this case.
It’s not a new experience for me. When at a past employer, I had to try and use various internet advertising vendors’ API’s to try and integrate them into the employer’s business of reselling advertising. Often, after a month or more of fighting with a crap API, I’d be forced to give up in my effort, typically after running into one or another feature that was so spectacularly poorly-implemented that it would make one wonder what on earth the clowns who designed it were thinking.
The problem with Blogger is that it provides no way to host images, except for using associated Google service Picasa. And Picasa’s Terms of Service contains this deal-killer:
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services. [emphasis added]
And if you look earlier in those same Terms of Service, it becomes clear that “Services” means “Google’s products, software, services and web sites.”
So, really now, “a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free” license to use whatever I upload to “promote” “Google’s products, software, services and web sites?” I. Don’t. Think. So.
In contrast, here’s what Wordpress asks for:
By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog. If you delete Content, Automattic will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Website, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.
That’s much more reasonable, but remember that Wordpress is broken in certain key ways that limit its usefulness to me.
In brief, I’m beginning to suspect that free blog hosting sites are either (a) a case of getting what you pay for, or (b) potentially very expensive compared to paying a fee for hosting your own blog.
I just ran across the most annoying and poorly-designed job application site ever.
The first thing it did was to hijack my entire screen by maximizing my browser window. It didn’t ever use much of that space, mind you, it just grabbed it, as if to say “I’m so important, I can do whatever I want. Neener, neener!”
It then demands I register by creating an account and password. Not just any password, mind you, but one that goes above and beyond what my randomizer generates. Given the kind of sensitive info they demand (which they just shouldn’t; see below), maybe that’s makes sense in a perverse way.
Then it asks me to create a bogus “security code” based on my birth date and Social Security number. WTF? Can’t the Bozo who wrote the code for that site just call a random number generator? I’m supposed to toss sensitive personal information up there? Naturally, I concoct something that has nothing whatsoever to do with my Social Security number.
Then it asks for a name and a nickname. I don’t go by a nickname in corporate settings, so I just leave that spot blank. Uh, uh, uh — can’t do that. They made this a mandatory field. So I dig up the unpronounceable word L. Frank Baum coined in one of his Oz books, and enter that as a nickname: Pyrzqxgl.
Not only did they deserve it for having such an annoying site, but it felt good.
And no, this isn’t for some mom-and-pop outfit you’ve never heard of, it’s for a Fortune 500 company that everybody knows about. And no, it’s not a Taleo site, either. I didn’t think it possible, but I’ve finally found a job application site that’s worse than one hosted by Taleo.
Its producers spent $20 million making it, but the movie adaptation of the first part of Atlas Shrugged only earned $4.6 million at the box office.
And that makes the movie itself a telling metaphor about the ideology it (and the novel it is based on) advocates: it does not sell well. Even the capitalist ruling elite it glorifies, with a the occasional exception that proves the general rule, do not want it.
Of course, the odds of a movie turning out to be a flop are greatly increased if:
And what is the response from the “capitalism is always right” producer of that movie to the capitalist market’s verdict of his product? Why, that it’s unfair and evidence of how he’s being persecuted, of course!
Amusing, and not the least bit a surprise. I’ve run into many “Libertarian” types on the Internet (Usenet news in back its heyday was positively crawling with them), and know all too well that, despite their professing to adhere to an ideology which preaches the virtues of the marketplace and of being allowed to fail economically, it would be completely in character for that movie’s producer to blame others for his own failure. So I did a little Googling and found that, as expected, indeed he is.
At least, don’t look here if you’re one of the half-dozen people who regularly reads my musings, because there won’t be any more of them posted here. I’ve finally succeeded in moving this blog to a new home.
Old entries will stay around here at least until the next renewal period for Mobile Me comes around, but they can also be found on the new site (see link above).
Monthly Index for 2011 |
Index of Years