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I hate when that happens, dept.: This is what you get at www.blogger.com: an ODBC error.  This is the leading blogging tool, they were bought by Google [in part] to give themselves better infrastructure, and this is what happens!  Man.

Two things about this.  First, a site this critical should be monitored, and someone's beeper somewhere should go off whenever there's a problem.  Basic.  Second, if the database goes down something a little more user-friendly should be displayed, besides the raw error from the database.  Something along the lines of "we are temporarily unavailable, we'll be right back".  Also basic.

[ Update: They were down like this for two hours.  I know getting a database back up can be ugly - I've been there - but surely they could have posted something smoother on their home page while they were getting it back up? ]