Mumbles & Grumbles #001

Welcome to the first NWSFS on MySpace Editors blog. Contrary to the title, not all of this blog will be mumbling and grumbling, though this first blog will have a lot of both.

I had originally had thought out what I wanted to post in this first blog, but once again MySpace pulled a boner. I just found out that Robert Marston Fanney's Eragon group has been deleted for no apparent reason. This was a large group and it was the second group of Robert's that has been deleted for no reason. Several other large groups have been deleted and one has to wonder why this is happening. If it's for technical reason, such as a database crash, then that is a major technical flaw. MySpace seems to have more than it's share of technical SNAFUs such as database crashes, outages, so called "routine maintenance" periods that take profiles and blogs down for hours.

To be honest, MySpace is a victim of it's success. Not just in the number of people who have joined (are there really 200 million accounts?) but also of the new management that has taken over MySpace. All these problems along with a few other things (can we say aliased links?) are the major reasons I have created this backup blog to the NWSFS News Blog on MySpace.

The situation with MySpace aliasing all links on Profiles and in Bulletins is of major concern to me. MySpace claims that this is for anti-spam measures, but I am beginning to have my doubts. I have discovered that any MySpace aliased link is not viewable if posted outside of MySpace and I wonder why this is so. Is it for content protection, tracking, or for advertising purposes. One has to wonder.

Well enough of the "conspiracy" stuff, now the two main reasons why I have moved some content off MySpace. First, to put it simply, the MySpace blog unity is close to impossible to work with and is making production of the news blog a very time consuming task. The second major reason for the move is that by posting most of the bulletin content here on blogspot.com, I am able to keep the size of the blog to a manageable level and I can make any necessary edits to a post without having to worry about the MySpace blog unity corrupting the original entry. I am finding that while a posting looks fine here on blogspot or in my HTML editor, once I post it on MySpace, it is full of errors.

Both blogspot and LiveJournal are easy to work with and are excellent tools, but since there is a NWSFS group on LiveJournal I set up this "alternate" site for the NWSFS on MySpace group which will also serve as an backup when MySpace crashes.

Hopefully using this blogspot.com account and other changes I plan to make to the blog will help get the news our for not just NWSFS, but for everyone else. If you have any thoughts or comments about the changes, please let me know.

Thanks!

Jim Cox
NWSFS on MySpace
http://www.myspace.com/nwsfs
http://blog.myspace.com/nwsfs