It seems that I prematurely blamed Blogger for display problems - a holdover of being a software consultant maybe! It seems that my recent addition of a Technorati tag cloud consumed all of my hosting bandwidth in the background, preventing access to stylesheets, images and all of the other fancy stuff that makes my blog so slow to load! The tag cloud has been disabled from updating automatically for now, while I try and work out how to get some more bandwidth from my hosting account and fix an underlying problem with the code.
This has been a demonstration of abuse of the Web 2.0 approach - despite the simplicity of being able to add new features and components to a web app, it is essential that the underlying components are well tested, trusted and generally likely to play well with others. I made the inexcusable mistake of taking a piece of code that appeared to work and trusting that it would be fine in my environment. Web 2.0 still depends on a strong software discipline for components, even if they can be mashed-up into web pages with relative simplicity and little effort.
Hopefully this blog will return to regular service soon. Blogger is down for schedule maintenance at 4pm this afternoon (presumably PST, but they don't make that very clear), presumably to fix some problems they had a couple of days ago with their templates. So expect that there will be some problems that I can actually blaim them for later today, so they can hold my premature doubting of their quality of service in credit.
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