Typead, the blogging software I use, was a disaster today. Total debacle. No other words for it.
First, when posting a new item, this appeared:
Quick tune up? WTF? We were down for hours. And, that post was lost — gone completely.
If you are going to give me a "tune up," then how about:
1) Emailing me about it in advance;
2) Scheduling it for the middle of the night;
3) Understand what the definition of the word "quick" is.
Then, when attempting to post a comment explaining the problem to readers, there was this notice:
Look, I’ve been very happy with Typepad for a few years now. Yes, they have had glitches, but they have been pretty straightforward and honorable about ‘fessing up and fixing it.
Not today, though. Nothing more frustrating then being spoonfed a steaming pile of enzyme-free donkey fazoo. Whoever was in charge of today’s clusterfuck better get their "fazoo" together — and fast — or they may see a mass migration.
Today was simply unacceptable. Look, I don’t expect 24/7/365 service, but please, don’t bullshit me about the outages.
~~~
Tune up? Puh-leeze . . .
Its always the middle of the night somewhere.
Try the middle of the night where the blog host is . . .
I would demand my money back.
Barry,
Are you OK? I am laughing because I too find myself, as an “A” type personality, spewing forth, on occasion, all the froth you have today.
But alas, I just ran 5 miles on the elliptical and I am full of endorphines and oh so balanced and happy.
LOL, sorry about this…I just had to laugh.
Love ya man!
PS I too understand what it is like to have a post nearly written and have it “poof” into nowhere. Sorry! I feel your pain.
Typepad is a mess today — I’ll repost the missing pieces once it lets me
Posted by: Barry Ritholtz | Jun 15, 2007 3:25:32 PM
I visit multiple times a day, easier to keep up. And above is the 1st notice there was trouble.
What time was your problem? Were you accessing wireless or landline? Maybe it was a New York hub thing going on. Was internet volume big today in the markets?
My guess is that growth at Typepad is straining resources. There are times when the pages are very slow to load even when reading. The add comments function also seems to choke fairly often. That strikes me as code that wasn’t written to scale efficiently, hardware that isn’t scaling well, or some combination of both.
Back in the day, I used to do what you’re suggesting. Fess up, explain the problem (though users often aren’t able to really understand it), and explain what is being done about it. My big competitors tended to pretend nothing was wrong. The sad fact is that the number people who noticed and appreciated knowing the facts were far exceeded by those who didn’t experience the problem and wouldn’t have known the difference. In both our cases, whatever it was got fixed (or we wouldn’t have survived), but the difference was in customer perceptions.
Long story short, my competitors ended up being perceived as better, grew faster, and I sold out to them. It is what it is.
Greg0658 – from my experience, I’m almost certain it wasn’t a general internet type of problem.
if there was any positive , it’s that MS —Michael Schumacher— only killed five people today in other threads as part of his one man jihad
TypePad is so ’90s. You need to get on the Open Source, WordPress bandwagon. And threaded comments would be a nice touch.
As someone with a blog on my own server I can honestly say there’s nothing like watching the lights start blinking when people are using it.
It was a “let’s drive the user mad” day.
Ameritrade chocked and rolled over around 3PM and OptionsXpress was quite slow near the closing. OX managed to log me out like 90′ before the closing so I had to scramble back on.
Well, it is a good thing to have two accounts and two price feeds running in two separate notebooks. And yes the cell phone is the last hope if all else fails…
“Tune-up” is another word for “Upgrade,” methinks. Microsoft, take note!
Sorry to hear of that, Barry.
TypePad should follow the JetBlue model and tell people up front what the problem is and what they’re doing to fix it while apologizing at the same time.
On a personal note, I use TypePad and I had no problem today but that was in the morning and my blog is not quite the size of TBP…
At least it’s Friday…
Kent (aka The Financial Philosopher)
That’s nothin. Try THREE WEEKS trying to get the most simple of merchant services problems sorted out with Paypal. Idiots and morons … an endless snipe hunt.
Barry, my sympathies. In my short amount of time using WordPress over at Alephblog.com, I have had one post gobbled by a system glitch. It happens. It has happened to me at RealMoney as well. The lesson: draft posts using Word (or another package) and paste them into the blog software. I now do that for all of my big posts.
PS — I like WordPress because it allows me to control my own domain, which to me is a real plus.
“The lesson: draft posts using Word (or another package) and paste them into the blog software. I now do that for all of my big posts.”
Perhaps the most pertinent variation on the theme “save often, save early”, applicable to anything computer related.
The tubes of the internet must have been clogged.
Cool it wit’cho migratin’ motor truckin’ self.
You think there wouldn’t be temporary hang-up problems with any other provider?
This is only anecdotal certainly, but almost every service provider for almost everything I use the Internet for has glitched over the last month, including my employer’s servers, my own family’s website, my local newspaper’s site and generalized sites for weather information, national and financial media news, email and other functions.
If you couldn’t later re-think it, re-member it or re-type it, in 30 seconds or less, then compose it on your local word processor and post it later.
Of course being the blogger gives you particular issues that don’t necessarily involve your erudite following.
I’ve sworn to write in Word and then post.
Then I start to format, and the next thing you know its an entirely different piece (apologies to McLuhan, but the medium apparently changes the message).
Another lesson learned
http://tinyurl.com/5o9ny
Ten sentences… under 300 words. I wonder how it might’ve been different if he’d had a word processor or a typepad account.
One word…. WORDPRESS.
you know if mainstream banking trading accounts are spotty then there is something bigger happening. I’m beginning to think the Chinese or Russians are testing their cyber war tactics to see how the system stands up. But if a bank, who makes a mint off us cybertraders, is glitching then something is happening IMO.
Of course, ‘the authorities’ won’t tell us until they feel they have things under control or until some insider programming geek spills the news and thus forces them to admit it
….stand by
they’re coming for you Barry
http://blog.mises.org/archives/006745.asp
You would have known something like this was more apt to happen now if you had visited my blog, wallstreetweather.net and read my weekly forecast entry for June 15 as well as my Commentary section posts on Mercury Retrograde, parts I&II! :-)