How not to do an upgrade

After spending much time and effort trying to get my wife’s blog to work I could easily write a book about what not to do when you do an upgrade. For example:

Don’t update any of your support documentation before you release.

Be sure that said documentation lists as a troubleshooting step to check a box that doesn’t exist in your new interface. (Where did the “No File Rename” option go? I have a sneaky suspicion this is one of the problems with people unable to publish suddenly.)

Leave the part of the documentation that says “Support is only available to BloggerPro and BlogSpot Plus subscribers”, but stop letting people sign up at the same time. That way when they have issues with your upgrade, you make them believe there’s no way for them to get help. (Despite what the intro to BloggerControl states, you can use it as a free user)

Don’t review the issues posted to the BloggerControl for at least 3 days. (And counting!)

Change a major part of your service so that many third party tools break with the upgrade. (Post ID’s longer than 17 digits broke every comment system that treated the post ID’s as a number)

Don’t offer a commenting system to people affected by the broken comments they now have. Make them work for a solution!

Don’t make FTP logs available any longer. They weren’t REALLY useful for troubleshooting FTP problems, were they?

Am I missing any others? (I know there’s a bunch of developers pissed about the API, but I’m not a developer, so I don’t even know where to start with that BS!)

Update: Not Blogger related, but the local newspaper’s website upgraded their job search section, and as part of the upgrade they were nice enough to delete all the resumes and cover letters I had stored there. Actually they simply switched vendors for the site with no notice so everything just disappeared. Nice. I’ve really about fucking had it today…

Similar Posts

  • Is it Friday yet?

    Looks like we got a few copies of the W32.Gibe virus floating in last night. All of the attachments were stripped at the email gateway (Our ISP finally did something right!), but I was impressed with this one. It seems like most of the attachments disguised as something else have stuff in the email that…

  • Geek hazard

    So here’s a quick hazard of having too many geek toys. In process of making sitewide changes this weekend, I managed to screw up the HTML in two of the static pages. Turns out that while I used the laptop to check the validation of all of those pages, and corrected as necessary, I managed…

  • Integrity

    It’s my considered opinion that whether we’re talking about real life or blog-life, the people who have integrity don’t really have to spend any time talking about their integrity. Much has been made of the fact that people like Chris and Doc were given paid trips to Redmond for a Microsoft event and whether or…

  • Weekend

    While most of Friday night and Saturday revolved around the grand search for new dining room chairs, yesterday was pretty much an all-hockey day! We went to see “Miracle” early in the day, and got back home in time to catch the NHL All-Star Game on TV. The movie was pretty good, although I will…

  • Break time

    Just taking a break from A+ studying this afternoon to install PC Inspector File Recovery. I picked it up from an issue of Lockergnome a few days ago. It looks like it might be pretty useful bit of freeware, I’ll let you know. 🙂 Follow these topics: Uncategorized

  • Just because I can

    Last night, and then over lunch today, I installed the Skype Answering Machine on my laptop. Not because I have any real interest in starting to do any sort of audio, or podcasting, but just because I could. So if you have always wanted to tell me what you think of my blog, but never…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)