Irritating, Aggrevating but yet Strangly Funny

I know, by now, listening (er, reading) to my rants about this freaking blogger reader is probably getting really old to many of you but for me, it is not just irritating any more, but it is downright aggravating. On another level -to be explained shortly -it is also somewhat funny, in the strange sense of the word "Funny."

Two weeks ago this past Friday, my reader went wacky on me. Wasn't working properly at all. Only updating a very few of the blogs I have subscribed to on my reader and also, it was not updating my own posts on my reader either.

I worked on trying to straighten this messed up thing out for like 4-5 days. E-mails going back and forth with a friend of mine who uses Reader too but even she -and she can understand most of the weird instructions in the reader "help" section too. For me, all they seem to do is totally confuse me as they use beaucoup jargon - what I refer to as
computerese -and that's a language I do not know at all!

Well, I did get the reader to work -but it was a very short-lived affair. It lasted maybe through one post I wrote and then, zapped out on me again. So, back to the help desk files, reading more, getting more crosseyed than my normal and I got it to work again. That lasted a little longer but then, it too zapped out on me last week one day. The last time I got it working, it held up for almost a week before, once again, dying on me now.

I've written several posts in the past week and until this morning, my blog was showing that it had been updated after each of those posts. Granted it took a long time for my blog to show that it had been updated -like 6-7 hours before it would update but at least, it was updating.

Or so I thought until this morning when I saw it had not updated on me overnight and I had put up a post late last night that should have been showing up long before 7-8 a.m. today.

When I clicked into my blog on my reader, imagine my surprise then where it shows my last post as being done on Monday, August 11th! Hmmm. Now it was no longer updating -again -but also, it was picking some date out of the bloue to show as my last update to my blog too.

Go figure.

So today, after I got home from church, had another cup of coffee, read the paper and tried to do the crossword puzzle (not much today though as I think my brain is really totally fried now and I could barely answer any of the clues today.), I started to try to work on this stinking reader/feedburner issue again.

First I came across some instructions that said I should go to the Feedburner page and "ping" my blog. Ok, I did that and it told me to "hold my horses as this blog had just been pinged a half-hour earlier." Now how the hell could that be? I hadn't pinged it!

Then I found another piece of instruction that said if pinging it didn't work, to go to the Feedburner site and on their instruction page, to click on the "Resync" button. Well, apparently whoever in my house is ripping off a goodly number of the Monday pages from my Bushism desk calendar is also pulling things off the Feedburner site because I have yet to locate anything that looks remotely like a place to "resync" my blog!

The last instruction blurb I read said that possibly my blog has lost its validation and I needed to go to the Blog Validation page, key in my url and hit enter and it would validate my blog.

Imagine my surprise when I did that and the blog that it said it validated was one with this text in the url -- "Autistic Dad". Now, look at the url for my blog and tell me, do you see anything in my url that comes even close to resembling "Autistic Dad?"

That's what I meant about this being funny now, but in a strange sort of way.

So now, I am back to square one once again.

I've posted several questions on the Blogger forum sties over the course of the first week of these problems as well as posting questions on the site feeds forum and another forum referred to me by another blogger. So far, I have yet to receive any response to any of my queries about my problems.

Now, granted I may not post every single day -although I do try to do that -but I don't think in the almost two years now since I started my blog that I have gone a full week without posting except perhaps the week in October two years ago when I was in the hospital in Pittsburgh for a week!

Thankfully, some of my really loyal readers do realize that and also, since I've tried to make as many of my readers as possible aware of the updating problems I am having when they don't see new posts, they try to remember to click into my blog to make sure I don't have some new "stuff" there.

But let me just say this, when you read that installing Feedburner is as easy as pie, "one, two, three" and presto magic, you're off to the races, don't believe them, not for a NY minute!

Why? Because they lie!

That's my story and I'm sticking to it too - mainly because it is true -every last bit of it!