Now that the move has been completed and the Blogger fiasco might be coming to an end, I just wanted to say thanks to lots of people who’ve helped out. Not necessarily by name, but
- The Oracle aggregator owners who ended up with a page full of spam but responded helpfully and quickly.
- The various readers who’ve updated their links without a word of moaning that I forced it on them over a weekend without any warning.
- All of those who had a little word in my ear, pointing out that Orablogs was full of spam. It highlighted who most of the weekend blog readers are. Geeks! (Ooops, I’d better be careful where I point fingers here. Look home before you look abroad 😉
- Everyone who has helped with suggestions for the formatting and management of the new blog.
The community spirit certainly shone through.
What I can’t say thank you for is the [sarcasm]dynamite support[/sarcasm] from Blogger.com
I realise it’s a free service but when I compare the service that I had from WordPress.com in the brief time I was there (and the service Andy C. has got from them) to the email I got from Blogger, it’s like night and day. I finally received an email from them last night along the lines of – ‘Looks okay to us now’. Mysteriously, although there was still someone camping there (trust me, I really wouldn’t waste my time coming up with the nonsense that was there), I was able to go and republish my blog without it complaining about oracledoug being in use. So Blogger did nothing and the problem just fixed itself. (Oh, please don’t comment – ‘are you sure you …’. I worked with the problem all weekend and I know it wasn’t working. Then it was.)
Frankly, I’ve been through all of this with big Internet companies in the past (e.g. Hotmail). I know they must receive a deluge of support emails but if the response is to say there’s nothing wrong when I can prove there is, there isn’t much point persevering. Would it really have been too difficult for them to check what was on that page for almost the past year against what was going on there now? I suppose they’re too busy fixing their performance problems.
Whilst I could (and perhaps should) have left the old blog in place and stopped spammers camping out there any more, I deleted the entire blog and won’t be going near Blogger again.
Last night, it was returning ‘page not found’ and now someone new is camping out there. That’s the price I have to pay for moving and I’m sure it doesn’t help Blogger or the search engines, but I’m sick of it.
Ah, well … Onwards and Upwards as an old friend likes to say.