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Comment by michaelpinto | Hacker News Reader

Every time I see Blogger.com I'm always shocked that the site still looks exactly like it did years ago -- it's had even has less TLC than Yahoo! has given Flickr. It really speaks volumes about a lack of focus at Google -- in the time Blogger has atrophied we've seen the likes of Movable Type, Wordpress and Tumblr arrive on the scene -- so that's at least three generations of blog that blogger.com is behind at current count. Honestly someone squatting on a blogger namespace seems almost as silly as setting up a myspace page at this point...

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You imply Flickr's gotten no love from Yahoo!, but that's not true at all. Just last year they completely revemped one of the most important pages on their site: The photo page - http://blog.flickr.net/en/2010/06/23/a-new-photo-experience-...

And they've made lots of improvements all over the site over the years. Flickr is one of the remaining products at Yahoo! that's gotten any serious love lately.

I apologize if you read that as a diss of Yahoo! — although compare the investment of Yahoo! in Flickr to say the investment of Apple into the iPod (which grew into the iPhone then the iPad). Or thing about the rate that Facebook has evolved in terms of adding feature sets over the last few years.

Indeed. A lot of hard work went into the photo page redesign/rebuild. It's difficult majorly overhauling a site that serves so many different needs to so many different kinds of users.

Too bad for all that work, it just got worse.

The photo view experience on Flickr is slower than any of its competitors. Slow slow sloooooow.

Plus recently, some of my photos have started to break (as in broken images).

It just feels like it's dead.

Incremental improvements (that aren't always improvements) aren't what Flickr needs. They need some vision and balls.

Hi, sorry you've had some difficulties with the site. We've made performance a big focus on the photo page but there's other sections of the site we're still trying to make faster. Regarding the broken images, we should be all clear on that (we recently brought up a new image cluster), so if you're still seeing that, let me know. I'm caudill @ yahoo-inc.com.

From someone that has been using them the past five years on a regular basis they do keep adding features and polishing old ones and I keep returning because of that fact.

Blogger is constantly getting new features. They even have a complete new design rolling out. http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/03/whats-new-with-blogger.html

You're somewhat mistaken. Blogger hasn't stayed still. It's actually gotten worse.

They used to be the best game in town because they had a simple tool to spit out a HTML-only version of your blog and FTP it wherever you wanted. The result was a blog that you could host on a cheap VPS and have it actually stand up to five people hitting it at once (unlike everybody's self-hosted Wordpress setup).

It was a really cool feature, and a giant pain point when it went away because there still to this day is not a replacement for it. If you want to static-host your blog in 2011, you need to write code.

> If you want to static-host your blog in 2011, you need to write code.

Or use software like jekyll.

https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll

I appreciate that you're trying to help, but this is another example that underscores my point. This is software that you install on a server, run, then manually upload the results to a server.

Blogger was a website where you could type text into a box and hit "go", thus publishing a Slashdot-proof static website via FTP.

For you and me, I'll grant that there's not much of a difference there. Imagine a hosted version of Jekyll, with an option to enter a FTP host/user/pass to automatically upload posts, and you'd have a rough approximation of the service that I'm describing (and which would still be a good idea for somebody to build as a paid product).

  > If you want to static-host your blog in 2011, you need
  > to write code.

Or use Amazon S3... some config needed, but no need to write code: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-...

That's exactly my point. If you want to host a blog today on an FTP server or Amazon S3, you need to design yourself a template and build a bunch of HTML pages, either in a text editor or with some random desktop tool or something you rolled yourself. Then you need to transfer the files to the server, either by hand or via a script of some sort.

If you wanted to do that 5 years ago, you'd sign up for Blogger and use their awesome free software to do it for you.

You guys gotta know that even though Yahoo is kind of an old player here in Europe/US, Yahoo Japan is by far the most visited site in Japan and the most widely used search engine with a market of around 70%. Nonetheless Yahoo (the actual one) only owns around 35% of the shares so that Softbank with the rest of them actually runs it. The guys are doing it pretty nicely with yahoo mail, the site and flickr, it is a shame that their time has gone by.

Interestingly, Yahoo Japan's search is actually google search now. Google search is the most popular by far. I prefer DuckDuckGo however.

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