Blogger: Go and sin no more

Caring for my baby

It would appear one would have to take extra breathing classes to contain the stress levels that might arise from the dangers of losing one’s blog.

In 2003, when I chose the platform offered by http://www.blog-city.com it appears I had a vision that extended beyond that of the owners – I cannot say I had planned to blog for as long as I have been blogging but now into my eighth year, I am still at it and hopefully consistently too.

I first opened an account and blog on Blogger in January 2007 only for the purposes of being able to post comments to Blogger-hosted blogs that had restrictions in place that favoured only Blogger members.

Defaulting to Blogger

However, as 2009 came to a close, I noticed that there was very little innovation on Blog-City and on the day of the 6^th anniversary of blogging I began simultaneously posting my blogs to both Blog-City and Blogger.

Maybe I am prescient, I do not know, but in August 2010 Blog-City announced they were bored with the project and planned to close down the service in January 2012.

I panicked as I found there was no easy way of moving 1,500 blogs from Blog-City to any other platform, basically, they had lagged behind the curve so much, I was at risk of having a dud blog becoming a dead blog.

Why backup a blog?

A blog in my view was a repository, a data bank, if you like an online journal and by inference backed up by its presence online – in essence, there is no point having a backup of a blog if you cannot read back the data with a simple restore process.

In the end, I decided to cast my lot with Blogger and began moving my blogs manually, brick by heavy brick; stone by rugged stone until it all was done by February 2011.

I have maintained Blog-City as I have tried to divert traffic to my Blogger blog which I acquired a domain name for and is addressable as http://akinblog-nl

Over time, I have added features to help ease the navigation of the site and I have generally been happy with it.

It wasn’t broke, so they broke it

This morning Blogger was down, apparently, it was supposed to be down for just an hour of maintenance, it lasted 20 hours because some gremlin had entered the works.

It got me thinking and wondering about the major decision I made in August 2010, with a behemoth like Google behind Blogger it is a surprise that this ever happened, it was like cowboys were let loose on the corral shooting their guns and scaring the buffalo into a right roaring stampede.

Before that maintenance window, I do not think anything was broken on Blogger, it is fine that they need to keep adding features to keep up with the competition like WordPress or Tumblr, but this is a case of them ignoring an old mechanic’s advice, “If it ain’t broke, don’t break it.”

The blogs I wrote on Wednesday and Thursday have disappeared though we have been assured they will be restored, I have seen sorry but a humiliating grovel by those who did this might only start to comfort me, I will reserve the greater sense of displeasure for another time.

Blogger, go and sin no more.

The Blogger is Back note.