You may have noticed the small message in the upper right corner yesterday where I said that due to 'technical difficulties' I was not able to post. These 'technical difficulties' were not caused by me, but by the almighty robots of Google.
Yesterday morning, just as I was ready to post to the blog, I got an email from Google telling me The Presurfer was caught in a 'spam trap.' Next month, this site will be 8 years old and I have never, ever, spammed anyone or anything. You can imagine my confusion, and my anger.
Fortunately, I happen to know a wonderful guy. His name is Philipp Lenssen and he manages Google Blogoscoped, one of my favorite blogs. Philipp contacted Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team and now, 24 hours later, I am able to post again.
So, all's well that ends well? Not really! Yes, I am very grateful to Philipp and Mr. Cutts, but this is not the way it's supposed to work. If not for Philipp, who else would be able to help me? And reading several forums on the internet about this subject, I realize it's not just me. It happens to a lot of people. There's a lot of frustration going around. It usually takes longer before people are able to use their site again.
And most important of all is that I still don't know what caused this. Google doesn't tell me why the site was blocked and why the site was unblocked. And as long as I don't know, how am I going to prevent this of happening again? Why can't (or won't) Google do something about this?
In the meantime I'm looking elsewhere. I am already experimenting with Wordpress which is a good alternative. The problem is that I really like Google's Blogger service but they are not treating me nice and they are sometimes giving me a hard time. Now, all I can do is hope this doesn't happen again. But if it does, I'm moving!
UPDATE: I now know what happened. It was a bug in Google Blogger's data processing code.
12 comment(s):
Possible explanation - http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-07-07-n60.html
3 things...
1. Wordpress is always ready to have you. In fact, importing your whole blog will only take one click. What you should do is buy a URL (maybe "presurfer.com" if you can get it) and set the URL to this blog you've got now. Tell everyone to bookmark and use your new URL. Drive it home for a month. Once the time is right, instead of having that URL redirect here, just put your new (but same, since it'll have all of these posts) Wordpress blog there. Google problem no more.
2. Glad those guys could help you. Now I know who to turn to if I ever get in trouble.
3. Glad to have you back friend!
j
The Mental Floss blog just had a similar issue.
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/16543
From time to time I face the same problem and the most simple solution is to clean his cookies. Most times it work.
You might really really think about spending some money and getting out from under Blogger.
After all, "free" is usually worth what you pay for it.
This "glitch" has affected many, many hundreds of blogs.
Glad to have you back.
I would guess a lot more than "hundreds" by my count yesterday morning at 10.00 am Pacific time there were over 300,000 complaints on the boards. I did export my blog to Wordpress, but is has more restrictions than Blogger and is less flexible in my opinion. But I am nit an ace HTML programmer. http://bearlyrambling.blogspot.com/2008/08/blogger-problems.html
Don't know if this has anything to do with it, but yesterday I clicked on the "Estimate Your Gender with Your Browser History" thing. Even though it said "don't really do it" on the site, I clicked anyway (too slow to catch it) and my laptop just went a bit funny. I had to clear and clean everything and now it's running fine... but it scared me for a while.
Hey, Gerard!
1) I love your blog!
2) I second (or third) the Wordpress suggestion. I run three different blogs on it, and it's wonderful and free. The 2.5 update made the administration a lot more intuitive than it used to be, IMHO.
I pay for hosting from a separate company (because I'm a control freak), but that's only a few dollars a month.
Almost two years ago I left Blogger for Wordpress (hosted on my own site). The conversion was a pain, but I haven't regretted it otherwise.
Blogger was too unreliable, and I didn't have the control I wanted.
Troubles you can find anywhere and Blogger/Blogspot is the best Platform to work with blogs. Simple, Easy and it's Free!
Gerard, there are a lot of new templates for the new Blogspot with many functionality like a Wordpress themes. Chek out:
http://btemplates.com/
WordPress... You. Will. Luvvit!
The widgets are what make it great.
Good luck.
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