Sunday, August 2, 2009

Hi, blog! Nice to have you back again! GRRRR.....

What should I learn from my blogging experience this weekend? It went something like this:

1. Coming home on Friday night and logging into Blogger to fix a (gasp!) typo on the top post at Freckled Citizen.

2. "Your Blogger account has been disabled." EEK.

3. Finding out that my various partners in crime for all three of my blogs - Trevor (The F-Word from Eat, Drink, Marry) and the lovely Marjorie and Mikaela from m-pyre - had been disabled, too.

4. While Freckled Citizen and m-pyre's URLs were still working (even though I couldn't access Blogger to create new posts or edit existing posts), Eat, Drink, Marry gave me the notice "This blog has been removed."

4. Seeing that an extremely large number of people were screaming their heads off over on the Blogger Help Forum about the exact same thing happening to them on Friday night. We're talking large-scale and massive frustration.

5. Leaving countless forum posts, filling out countless forms, sending endless tweets, and sending endless e-mails to Blogger/Google but receiving absolute, resounding silence from them... and seeing even more people plea for help all day Saturday on the forum or on Twitter.

6. Frustratingly waiting for resolve all weekend (when I normally don't blog anyway) wondering if I'd get my blogs back, what I'd do if they were permanently deleted, and basically bitching about unfair the whole thing was.

7. Sunday night... ta-da! My blogs and blog access reappeared.

Now am I supposed to be jumping up and down and thanking Blogger for returning my blogs to me? Well, no. Because it never should've happened in the first place. Is the answer here "you get what you pay for," which in Blogger's case, is nothing? Is migrating to Wordpress (which I'm not a fan of) the only solution?Anyone have any gems of wisdom ? Because to me this weekend is a big warning to run far away from Blogger, or risk it all happening again. Only, I'm not sure what action that implies. Sigh... any ideas?

4 comments:

Bethany Anderson said...

You and me both. I'm extremely reticent to continue to blog there - I think I'll be working this week to export my blog to another host, and then redirect.

I can't have the blog disappear again.

nole said...

Come to Typepad! Yes, you pay - but you don't have to worry about server fees and the Typepad team is really supportive. Plus it's less vulnerable to hacking and other attacks than Wordpress. I love it.

Maggie said...

Thanks Nole -- I just checked out Typepad and it looks great. Tara also recommended SquareSpace on the Freckled Citizen post.

Bethany - check out both of those. Agreed, this CANNOT happen again.

ABC Dragoo said...

I switched to wp because last summer Blogger decided ABCD Design was a spam blog and blocked me. They wrote me a letter saying that if I contacted them within two weeks for a review they MIGHT not DELETE me.

There was no way to contact them on the noreply@blogger address that they wrote me from. As a matter of fact, at the time they were not on Twitter (as far as I knew) and the help section of the site did not help at all.

I feel your pain - I do not love wordpress, but to know that I am not going to run into that stress again... it's worth it!