Google pissed me off, so I am off to WordPress.

This is a short post, to both explain why this blog terminated as abruptly as it did and to also announce a new one. There were two reasons why I stopped posting here, the first was some unforeseen but interesting work commitments but the second was Google changing the way Blogger served up pages and posts. It was the latter that really angered me off hence the title of this post.

I like programming and spent quite a few very enjoyable hours hacking the script interface of this blog to make it work the way I wanted to. One thing I disliked was when searching from either a keyword, tag or time slice it returned not just the blog headline and tags but also the body. I modified the calls so that it just presented the headlines and tags, so that upon any type of canned or free form search you would get all the relevant posts. You can still see this if you click on any tag or perform a search. However now you do not get all the relevant posts.

Google without consultation and without announcement changed the Blogger platform to limit the amount of posts that were being returned from its database. Their argument was quite legitimate, they needed to limit the bandwidth loads on their servers, given how some of their users were abusing the Blogger platform. What was outrageous was the way they did it and they way the responded to complaints. I specifically had found a client-driven solution to handle exactly the same issue, albeit for a different purpose, but after a few attempts going on their support channels, including suggesting how they could do the same on the server side,I dealt with extremely ignorant and stupid google support personnel, who failed to understand what for them should been a very simple point.

Clearly there is no point in playing with the client-side Blogger interface if google is going to that and behave so badly when it does. WordPress is open sourced so even if the parent hosting free site does make annoying changes (not that I have heard of that) I could have easily dealt with such an equivalent issue there.

I have launched a new blog Debugging Economics, the focus is different to this one. Even though Google broke this blog, I will keep this up and some articles maybe re posted and/or refreshed on the new site as needed.

So for the very few of you still left listening to this rss feed, please update your feeds to the new blog, if you are interested in the new theme.