Yesterday, I tentatively started "The Daily School Bus." While snapping images of school buses I come upon is one of my many strange photographic passions and school buses will likely always keep popping up on this, or any other blog I might launch to replace it, for as long as I blog, I had none-the-less hoped bus stardom in a daily feature would be temporary. As I explained yesterday, after starting out with some mildly annoying, sporadic, quirks I could work my way around in relatively short order, the performance of the Squarespace iPhone app I have been using to post for two-and-half months steadily degenerated - often deleting my pictures and posting only the words. It got ever more frustrating until finally it became impossible to work with. I sometimes made between 20 and 40 retries to publish a post, only to have the Squarespace app delete the photo each time.
As I explained yesterday, I made a formal complaint to Squarespace. Squarespace acknowledged the problem promised to fix it - and a number of others I pointed out - and to notify me when they do. But then Squarespace has made such promises before with other annoying, time-wasting problems, sometimes taking years to make the fix, sometimes never making it.
I have invested so much in time, effort and even money into this blog - into Squarespace. I am completely fed up with this kind of thing. I got into computers in the mid-80's and into the net not long afterward and in that time I have had to deal with many frustrations, as has anybody who boots up and goes online.
Yet, nothing else I have experienced has even come close to the aggravation and amount of wasted time that my investment in Squarespace has cost me. I must be incredibly foolish to have stuck with them for so long - since 2008. Squarespace does, however, provide the tools to create a good blog structure and they have a support staff that always gets back to you and they usually do their best to address the problem, but the underneath the bright structure they have created is a foundation so flawed that sometimes the problems seem to be unaddressable.
Over the years, I have received received many reassurances from Squarespace that they were working to address this problem or that and to improve their complete product. So, despite my many bad experiences, having already invested myself so deeply into their platform, I have wanted to believe they would solve all their problems and make my blogging experience with them a good one. But now Squarespace has pushed me over the edge.
So, both to explain to readers why, due all this aggravation and wasted time, I must cut back on my blogging, I tentatively launched The Daily School Bus yesterday. The school bus pictures would serve as place holders to keep my blog on life-support while Squarespace maybe got their act together and fixed the problem, as they promised.
When I tapped "publish" on my iPhone ap to post yesterday's introductory explanation, I fully expected the app to strip the photo out of the post as it had done with single other attempt I had made to post over the previous three days. In one life's many ironic coincidences, the app successful put up the full post - picture included. When this happens, it is a simple, quick, and beautiful thing. Although I had received no notification the problem had been fixed, this gave me hope that perhaps it had.
Not long after, I made the Kalib-Dusty post. It, too, went up; full and complete. My hopes rose further.
Next, up was Two artists collaborate, 1 of 2. I began to feel optimistic.
Unfortunately, when I first tried to post Two artists collaborate, 2 of 2, the Squarespace app failed. I did a couple of retries and finally the app put the full post up, picture included. Now I was wary again, but willing to keep going. I don't like it all, but, as annoying as it is, I can tolerate two failed attempts to post if the third succeeds.
Next, Kalib and I went to Taco Bell, where I took the above image right after we got our food. I quickly added the text you see in the picture-less post just ahead of this one and tapped, "publish." The Squarespace app posted the text but stripped the picture. I then tried and tried again - sometimes getting as many as four, identical, picture-less posts, all saying the same thing, stack up on the page before I deleted any of them. After ten tries, I lost count but I really wanted to get the post up, so I kept trying. I must have tried about 20 times total. Finally, having had not only my blogging experience but my lunch experience ruined, I gave up. I kept my frustration hidden from Kalib and I happy to say he did enjoy his lunch experience at The Bell.
Afterward, I returned home, emailed these two images to myself and then attached them to the text in my computer the normal, slow, laborious, Squarespace 5 way, just as I had long done before I switched to the iPhone and the Squarespace app.
So now The Daily School Bus is officially launched. I will post one school bus image a day until Squarespace notifies me they have fixed the problem - or until I give up and go find another blog host altogether. Switching hosts would create an enormous headache for me, but maybe that's what it is coming to. After all these years, and after all this time and effort, not to mention money, I have invested into this blog and into Squarespace, I'm afraid my confidence in Squarespace is finally all but shot.
Monday, October 21, 2013 at 10:40AM 
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