Reports of our demise are slightly exaggerated

It's been a good two years, and I really enjoy doing this, but lately my heart is not in the blog. Note that this is NOT a goodbye or a hiatus or anything. It's actually something very concrete. "Something is causing this, Mike... now, think."

Well, I've thought. Two causes for my spate of French-level ennui:

1. I have no energy for much of anything recently. I've had to narrowly focus on a few things to do them well, and much of my contact with the larger world (blog included) has had to slide. I have posts and ideas but not a lot of leftover oomph to push them into view.
2. Blogger.

Yep, hosting troubles. The commenting system was always wack but Haloscan rode to the rescue there, and even threw in trackbackery. Good times. But I'm fast running into the outer limits of what I can do in this ol' Hive. For example, apparently I can't have a collaborator - even a collaborator who's been on Blogger longer than I have - without him running headlong into every kind of bug, gremlin, glitch, hazard, and vexation.

Well, you get what you pay for, right? In this case, zero, since we pay exactly zero for this. As a result, I don't suppose that I can complain too much; but sometimes I still do, as the song has it (I'm tossing y'all a bone since I skipped Musical Monday). I don't think it's too much to ask of any service (even free service) to actually work as designed, especially when it worked perfectly well for the Barking Spider for over two years and just now decided to put up a pointless argument.

Neither do I think it's too much to ask Google to spend a little money on a tech support staff. You have all that gmail stuff just lying around, doncha guys? Well, it's simple - "bloggerhelp -at- gmail" would do quite nicely. Or "support -at- blogger -dot- com". If you can spend billions to buy YouTube, you can sink a lousy million into some IT for the rest of us, instead of a peer support group of fellow users who are equally frustrated. Just let us drop you an email. "Click here for help." That's all. We'll even put up with the odd "planned outage" you guys seem so fond of.

It's not a good idea for me to hold my breath on this one, so I'll put it to you, friends. Many of you have already jumped to WordPress, Moveable Type, or what have you. I think it may be time to put a few dollars into this and make a similar jump. What say you?

(PS - you can also take a stab at the movie quote from the first graf, if you like.)