You know what really grinds my gears? Nobody’s come up with a new priest and a rabbi joke in like thirty years. Ya know? That, and when I can’t get something done because I’m waiting on someone else to do what they need to do first. I get antsy. Such was the case in trying to get everything I put into my BlogWare account out of it.

To their support staff, I wrote: “As I posted on one of your lists, I’m leaving BlogWare. However, there’s virtually no way to access my files easily / en masse (photos, attachments, etc.). Your export utility is feeble and doesn’t export all of my stored data (like keywords, for example). I’m trying to work around your export limitations, but still need a way to get those other files (photos, attachments, etc.).” Siobhan McLaughlin flipped a few swtiches, promising better export features for other BlogWare users in the future:

One of our operations team members has moved your files to be accessible via FTP. The files in _attachments is now in a folder called attachments, _photos is in a folder called Photos. I can complete it for other BW members on an as needed basis, just as we did for you. After your experience, we have started discussing internally that we should re-design the export function. We will also have to add in an ability to dump the files in a virtual directory to a real directory.

The BlogWare platform isn’t horrible – it’s just incredibly inflexible, and painfully not-open-source. When I switched to it (from MovableType) a few years ago, I was expecting constant updates, further feature refinement, continual development, etc. That’s not what happened, though. For a while, it was “security through obscurity.” Then, the spammers started to hit BlogWare with everything they had – and BlogWare is still struggling to keep up. TrackBack management was laughable to begin with in BlogWare, and that problem only got worse with the onslaught of nefarious digital data warlords. That’s ultimately what drove me away from BlogWare, truly. It’s an increasingly-antequated platform when compared to WordPress – for novices and experts alike. Sorry, TuCows.

Bye-Bye BlogWare