Just wasting time

Not intentionally, mind you... I tried to read my weblog a couple of hours ago. After repeated attempts to load the page, it came up the same way each time - totally messed up. Normally, I wouldn't think twice about it. I'd assume that there was a problem with blogspot's server, and that somehow, partially completed pages were being served up.

But yesterday, I had experienced lots of problems with w.bloggar's interface to blogger. When I went to w.bloggar's site to see if there were any technical notes posted, I noticed that there was a new version of w.bloggar available for download - and I promptly upgraded. With no improvement in performance, I headed over to blogspot to see if anything was posted on that site. There was a post, but not about problems... it was about a new beta version of blogger.

Although I didn't opt to download the new version, I did visit their site that gives you a taste of what your blog would look like if you were using the new blogger interface. I didn't change anything, but I did poke around for quite a while.

Which brings me back to my current issue... seeing all the mumbo jumbo on the screen, I jumped to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe I had changed something. For a person who backs up data twice a day, I'm ashamed to say I don't have a single backup copy of the template stored on blogger's server. So, I spent the past two hours comparing the template code from an old googled archive of my site to the template on file with blogger.

You probably know that google's version of a page has all the template tokens expanded with actual content, so it wasn't a trivial matter to look at the source code of both forms and try to find the similarities and differences. But I persisted, and after two hours, I concluded that the templates were undamaged. Just to be sure, I tried loading them into Dreamweaver, and it couldn't find anything out of the ordinary either. And then I tried to go back into Blogger, and lo-and-behold, the page came up perfectly.

Sometimes, computers can be so juvenile!