01 August 2008

[bloggage] Fifteen Hours Behind The Moon

1685.


Starting sometime last evening, me and quite a few Blogspot bloggers were confronted with an extremely unsettling message in email.


A bot Blogger used to detect so-called spam-blogs ("splogs"), which are blogs whose only purpose in life is to connect with sketchy e-commerce sites, identified a whole bushel basket full of us legitimate (though, in my case, underrated) blogs as splogs. And we were locked down.


This was unsettling, to say the least. I checked in in the Google Blogger Help Group and found the range of reactions from soup to nuts: from people who were distraught (and didn't mind saying so) to people who were sure it was because of their politics (both righty and lefty blogs were certain of it in about an equal measure).


Google says the spam-blog bot is "fuzzy". Today seems to be false-positive day. And that I'm posting this shows that my humble, underrated, really-quite-excellent blog passed muster as "most likely authored by a human who isn't interested in spamming", and knowing the crapstorm they had to deal with, that my blog was only locked down for me for about 15 hours is actually quite admirable.


However. As a result, this blog does have a bolt-hole. Some time ago I investigated WordPress when I realized that they have hosted free blog services as well. Some angel over at Blogger Help Group pointed out that WordPress will import all the posts from your Blogspot blog, comments and all. The only thing that doesn't come over is blogrolls. Video embed code doesn't work out the same, but that can always be fixed.


So now I have an archive and mirror. It's here. And the current feature set of WP is sexy indeed; it makes one think of migrating.


But for now, Blogger it remains. Credit to Blogger personnel for fixing it.


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Self-hosted Wordpress is the way to go. You'll love the widget functionality. I felt a little sad leaving blogger behind -- because it's where I started -- but it just hasn't kept up. Wordpress is incredibly flexible and customizable.

Samuel John Klein said...

I'm sure getting a lot of encouragement to go WP, there, Alan. I am seriously considering it.

What's really holding me back right now is the thought of building back what readership I have and links fairly quail at the thought of having to do it all again (I'm not afraid of it, mind ... maybe a better word would be "despair").

What small niche I have in the "blogosphere" (ghod, I hate that word, but what're you gonna do?) I've worked hard to carve. Doing that all over again?

But I likey that Wordpress. I'm not savvy or have enough dependable income to do self-hosting, yet, but the WP-hosted blog is amazingly wonderful and fun to use.