Friday, November 8, 2002 - Fri, 8 Nov 2002

Now that I’ve decided on putting up a blog, the next step is a bit of research. The Genealogical Computing article refers to the online tool Blogger for helping set up blogs. I went there and found that I really like their interface. I signed up and started trying to set up my Behold blog. I already started encountering some problems. The setup of a new blog initially didn’t seem to work for me, so I hit went through the process again. By the time I was through, I had 6 identically named blogs. I tried to delete the others, and found you had to do that from its settings page. But on all but my first blog, hitting the settings button gave an error:

ADODB.Field error ‘800a0bcd’

Either BOF or EOF is True, or the current record has been deleted. Requested operation requires a current record.

/blog_edit.pyra, line 25

I checked their FAQ (nothing there about it) and tried to get on to their Discussion Forum, but this gave an error of its own:

Error!!!

XML Error loading ”

A string literal was expected, but no opening quote character was found.

at line 26, character 26

Hmmm. Two strikes against them already. We’ll lets just ftp the stuff over to my website. Alas - the third strike: For some strange reason, it makes me log in twice to my webserver, and then if finally says: “Oops, your blog was not quite ready to be published. Please try again.[more info]“. When I click on “more info”, it leads to the answer:

Blogger is currently (09.03.02) experiencing problems publishing some sites. We’re looking into the problem. A fix or work around will be posted here, as soon as we can figure it out. Sorry for any inconveniences.

I clicked on the button “No, this doesn’t answer my question” and went to search for a reason on Google. What I found was that a lot of people have been having many problems with Blogger over the last few months. I had to conclude that Blogger wasn’t the way to go.

So I searched around for what other Blogging tools there were. So I checked out BigBlogTool and Upsaid, but I liked the features and interface of Blogger better (even if it didn’t work). I then checked out systems that I might run myself, such as Greymatter and Movable Type, but these type of tools generally require Perl, and Perl doesn’t run on my webhost (unless I compile it). I looked for asp-based bloggers, and there are some, but I didn’t like their interface, nor the need to mix asp pages on my website.

But blogging is not complicated. The tricky part really is setting up a template that you like and then doing what is necessary to make the process of adding to your blog simple and quick. I knew if it was anything less than convenient, I would abandon it.

Fortunately, when trying to set up my blog at blogger.com, I found a template that I really liked. Spent about 3 hours today doing this blog research. That’s enough. Tomorrow, I’ll try to customize the blog template and get it going.