Heads Up!

Uh oh. It appears Google is making some "exciting changes" to Blogger, which is never good news.

One of the tasks that used to justify my exorbitant salary was running periodic upgrades to our library management system, or to its underlying database and operating system. Even, every seven years or so, managing a complete migration of our data and procedures to a shiny new management system. Few things are more stressful. Where "success" is nobody noticing anything has happened, and "failure" is days of downtime and ad hominem recriminations, anything workable in between is an acceptable outcome. I suppose "exciting" is one word for it. However, the difference between our various library system suppliers and Google is that no money is involved; Blogger being free and, as far as I can see, having – as yet, anyway – no way of generating income for Google. Moreover, dialogue between Google and the end-users of its blogging product is non-existent, and consequently the guys at Google don't need to give much of a damn if things go wrong.

Inevitably, things are going to break. Already, I've stopped receiving email notifications of your comments, so it will take longer than usual for me to spot them, publish them and to respond. Not that, ahem, I'm getting that many at the moment... In case this affects you, note that OpenID sign-ins for comments will no longer be acceptable in future. Also, "third party gadgets" will no longer be supported, so that will break anything I've added that is non-standard. Right... Like I can remember which bits they might be, after ten years.

Isn't that exciting?

Leave it alone, Google,

or the kitten gets it!