Blogger Outage

Blogger was out yesterday for most of the day. Blogs were still visible during the outage, but nobody was able to post. Blogger was back today but my post from May 11 was missing. As this post explains, the recovery involved a rollback to May 10, then restoring the missing posts. My May 11 post appeared a few hours ago but the tags were mangled, so the restore was not completely clean.

The curious thing is: most of the Internet apparently never noticed that Blogger was out! I follow numerous technical blogs (that are not on Blogger) and the outage was not mentioned once. It shows how irrelevant Blogger is these days.

And, of course, I must make the obligatory snarky comment about cloud computing... but can't think of one! Damn! Never a snark around when you need one.

Blogger Chromium Weirdness

I use the following HTML/CSS snippet when I want pre-formatted text with an automatic scroll bar if the text is too wide:

<pre style="border-left: medium solid rgb(127, 127, 127); padding-left:0.5em; width:95%; overflow:auto;"></pre>

It does not work with Blogger and Chromium 10.0.648.204 where it always wraps the text instead of adding the scroll bar. It works with w3schools and Chromium. It works with Blogger and Iceweasel 4.0 (and Firefox, presumably). It even works with Blogger's preview and Chromium.

And that is a really trivial piece of HTML and CSS, too. It's a good thing I'm not trying anything complicated. Hey, maybe that's it! Yeah, maybe some JavaScript will fix it! ^__^

Blogger Spell Checker

For the past few days, the Blogger spell checker has been wonky. Some words that are spelled correctly are shown as being misspelled. The list of possible replacements always includes the word that is supposedly incorrect. If you replace the word with same one, exit and re-check spelling, the word is still shown as invalid! If you replace the word with a with different one, it works.

All this nonsense finally forced me to figure out why Iceweasel (unbranded Firefox on Debian) doesn't spell check in text entry fields. Turns out all I needed to do was install a dictionary package! The Iceweasel package only recommends the dictionary packages and since I don't automatically install recommended packages, I was supposed to select a dictionary manually. Oops.