So Is That What Happened To Blogger Last Night?

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It's as good an explanation as any I guess.

Whatever it was about, Blogger was messed up last night. I first noticed the problem when it stopped doing autosave about an hour into my work on my post. I protected myself by copying the whole HTML and pasting it in my note taking ap, WhizFolder. This often happens but usually it will still publish fine once I click the button. This time it didn't. It returned a 400 error. Then I tried going to 'Edit Posts', to the dashboard, to Blogger help, to my blog itself. All but that last one returned the 400 or the 413 error code. Joystory loaded but there were no edit links and the bar at the top was missing.

So I googled 'blogger down' to see if anyone was talking anywhere about the issue. and found

http://downrightnow.com/blogger

Here they keep track of reports of sites going down by monitoring twitter, help forums and the reports made by their own visitors. They don't tell you why but there are links to sites that might have that info. The feature I liked the best was this graph depicting the aggregate of the reports from around the globe:

That thick bar on the left shading from green through yellow to red was on the left when I first discovered it about midnight and I was able to see that the problem had begun to develop a couple hours before I began working on my post and was intermittent for a time and then just before I had first tried to publish it became solid and had stayed that way for the hour since.

I gave it another hour, using the time to visit the links that might have info--twitter and help forums--lots of users were registering questions and complaints but no one was answering them.

One odd thing caught my attention though. Some users had found switching browsers or devices to help. But always only briefly. Others had found temporary relief after deleting internet history, cache and cookies. I tried the latter first. No joy. Then I switched from Crome to Explorer and was able to sign in and open the draft. Which was from very early in the composing stages. I hastily grabbed the HTML from Whiz and pasted it in and saved and it took! But when I attempted to publish--no go.

I finally gave up at 1:30 AM almost four hours after I was ready to post. Within minutes after safely saving the draft, I could't keep my eyes open.

I woke just before 8 AM and refreshed downrightnow.com and saw the solid thick bar, over 12 hours long by then, had begun to break up in the last half hour. So I tried once more to publish. And failed. But a few minutes later it took.

Tonight it is nearly 3AM and I'm just now about to wrap up Thursday's post. I had planned making it on this theme and was writing it in my head off and on all day but hadn't gotten around to starting it before dinner then after dinner I crashed for three hours. I'd been doing cleaning, organizing and laundry most of the day and was wiped out.

Ed woke me up at 9pm and we still had to make the bed with the clean bedding and fold and put away our clothes and I had to start another load. It was 10 before I could settle down again and then I was faced with the choice of getting my post up by midnight or watching the movie Losing Isaiah which was going to stop streaming on Netflix at midnight. I chose to watch the movie first but before I started it I opened the editor for a new post.