I've griped a fair bit. I should explain why.

MSN Spaces and the other Microsoft properties I'm trying out have hit a territory I call "compelling enough to criticise", which tends to trigger heavy ranting in me. I find it really uncomfortable when I try a product significantly better in one or more respects than what I'm using, but which has serious flaws that'd prevent me migrating.

In the best spirit of the "ex girlfriend" analogy Danny Sullivan used to explain the emotional state of people switching search engine from AltaVista to Google on The Chris Pirillo Show recently: it's a little like moving in with your cute new girlfriend only to discover she insists on ordering your CDs and books by the colour of the spine. One could argue that the habit makes sense, and even that it could be lived with, but it nonetheless adds friction to the relationship you could really do without.

I'm one of an estimated two people globally using PyDS as a blogging tool. Both Georg and I have stopped developing it because we'd rather use Django ("The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines"). That does, however, mean developing a great deal of server code to get our web sites up and running. As Juice users have noticed, I don't seem to have much spare coding time going. And so, my main site gathers cobwebs.

Given that context, MSN Spaces has an awful lot going for it. Unfortunately, there are bugs. That wouldn't normally be a problem for me, but unlike either PyDS or something based on Django I don't have access to the source code for MSN Spaces to fix the problem myself. Even if I successfully network, rant, and rave, I still might never get the problem fixed.

So: on one hand, I'd really need to sink a good few solid full time days to upgrade and fix my web site and help my new host to get Django running acceptably under his versions of Python, Apache, and Fedora Core. On the other, I'm already up and running here with functionality I couldn't develop in weeks of coding but I'm having to work around odd gaps I'd never have missed in my own code and which I can't close because it's closed source.

Tantalus never had it this bad.