This blog does not, unfortunately, appear on my website by magic. I use a piece of software called iBlog to create and publish it. I got iBlog for free as part of my .mac subscription from Apple, and thought I’d see what the blog revolution was all about. I think I’m starting to understand.

iBlog greatly lowers the threshold for making ideas and other content available to the web. I write a title, an abstract, and the article, then just press Save and later, Publish, and there it is, organized both by category and chronologically, and looking good to boot. Sure, as a programmer I could write all this code myself, but I won’t. iBlog already has it done.

Unfortunately, as with all other relationships of dependence, this means that when things go wrong I can’t fix them. If I had done it myself and made some mistake or omission, I would be facing tedium and wastage of time, but would eventually get what I wanted. When I use iBlog and it messes up, I face wastage of time and total show-stopping futility. Which is what’s happening lately. It won’t publish my new entries and has started to forget my old categories. Basically I have no more trust or confidence that there is any relationship between what I type in here and what ends up on my website. And that’s a bad thing.

Of course I’ve already fired off requests for help to the vendor, and perhaps they will be able to help me, but this loss of trust in the faithful transmission of data is pretty significant. Think about it: if your hard drive randomly forgot data that you placed on it, how long would you tolerate that situation? Of all the bugs that plague software, data loss is pretty much the ultimate capital crime.

iBlog has not quite committed this crime, because I can see all my blog entries still somehow in its internal database, but the slippery connection between that database and the web is pretty bad. Like your email client faithfully saving drafts of everything you send but sometimes not sending your email. Can that be overlooked? Not really.

I am willing to stay the executioner’s axe until I hear back from the vendor. Maybe there’s some easy way to ”jiggle” it into functioning. If so, then that will end up becoming part of my publishing process. Why do anything else except that which is guaranteed to transmit the data? If there is no such workaround, then it’s time to abandon iBlog. Which might, unfortunately, mean abandoning this blog entirely, since iBlog is the software that lowered the publishing threshold enough to create it in the first place.