Sorry for the outages folks. For about the past 3 hours it appears my blog was unreachable along with at least thousands of other blogs thanks to the fact that they are hosted by Google via Blogger. I’m not sure if someone tripped over a power cord in one of the data centers, or if a random cat just decided to use a server as a kitty litter box, but we’re back now.

And let this be another lesson in the fine uses of Twitter. I wrote a tweet a couple of hours ago to let people know Blogger was down but I could not write about it for obvious reasons, and Duncan Riley of TechCrunch picked it up, wrote a post, and within 30 minutes everything was fixed. Nice teamwork.

And before I get flooded with ‘why don’t you switch to Wordpress?’ replies, yes I know the virtues of Wordpress well, but I really don’t fancy taking the time to port everything over. Despite their apparent affinity for splogs, I like Blogger, I think they’ve done a lot of work this past year to improve the service. If they can just get a ‘pages’ feature and comments that don’t require users to go to a second page I’ll be happy as can be.

[UPDATE]: Not sure if this is at all related to the problems earlier, but Blogger-in-Draft just launched a new feature that allows Blogger users to use their blogspot or custom domains as OpenID Identities. Nice.