Web 2.0 Has Issues

So, I get an email the other day from a local CS guy, wants to hook up and is interested in one of my sites.  Ever the promoter of all things Hank, I also point out to him that I have this cool Geo-Blogging portal over at Excio.com, and that he should go check it out, and in doing so, I cruise out there too to see how things are going.

I get to the site, see we have a new blogger onboard, do the snoopy dance in my head, and click on a post to see where the guy is from....He's from the Sahara, or at least he must be, because over his post, in the space I should see the google map of his location, I see a tan box.  No streets, no forests, lakes, streams, tributaries, or golf courses....just tan.   Hmmm me says to meself, odd.

So now I look at one of my own posts, and am aghast to see that I too have been moved to the Sahara.  Something is amiss.  A little digging, and I notice a JavaScript error icon down in the corner of my browser window that informs me that not only is "null = null", but "lat is null or not an object".  I know for a fact, learned in the third grade I did, that the world is not flat, no sir, it has 3 dimensions, so my post isn't linear, if it has a longitude, then logic also dictates that it has a latitude, but my browser tells me different.  I guess in a world without lat, we all live in the Sahara.

So being a good developer, I blame the developer from whom I downloaded the code for my map control.  Surely this was his lousy fault, because it sure as Hell wasn't mine. [Keep reading....it wasn't his fault either, his stuff still rocks, but don't tell anyone until later in the story...shhh]  I go to google, google knows everything....and I asks google "Google, why is this stupid control broken and giving me an error?", and google tells me "It ain't your control man....it's me, I broke your site."

Whoa, hold on.  A goZillion dollar, all knowing, all employing, all stock rising, not evil company like google made a breaking change on a Web 2.0 staple of the Internet, and just sort of never fixed it?  YUP!  Sure as Hell did, and when they, of all people, the web 2.0 monolithic beast that drove the train did that, they broke my little site too.  And when they did that, they made me look stupid.  And when they did that, they made me rethink the system of global interdependencies that are supposed to the dependable, and are supposed to be there even if a new version comes out, and are supposed to be built by professionals that are supposed to know better than to pull that shit.  Maybe I need to rethink some stuff here.

[Edit] Went out and fixed the scripts on my end that made things work again.  What a pain.