To all my Blogger/Blogspot friends

Holy cow, what’s been going on with Blogger this weekend???

It’s been a bit of a shock to realize how many sites I visit are hosted on Blogger. Practically three-quarters of my known universe! (Okay, three-quarters of my bookmarks.)

Also down yesterday: the Blogger status page. I tried to follow what was going on at the Blogger Forum, and it didn’t look good.

Imagine what would happen if everything was wiped clean? I reel at the thought. A bit of “Mount Vesuvius does Pompeii” comes to mind. Think of the multitude of information that might’ve been lost forever!

Now that you’re up again (cross your fingers that you stay up!) you should back up your templates and posts if you haven’t already done so.

Here are instructions for backing up your Blogger/Blogspot blog.

If you’re using Haloscan for comments, though, your comments won’t be backed up—you have to do that separately. Here are instructions for backing up Haloscan comments. I couldn’t find information about backing up Haloscan trackbacks.

Those of you who hate being tied to Blogger, please consider WordPress Free Blog Hosting or better yet, paying for web hosting at a reputable company. There are several decent hosts out there that don’t cost much. You can back up your blog, comments, and trackbacks all at once, no fuss, no muss.

I use HostGator. 24/7 support, baby, with total control over your content. You can’t beat it. (They’ve got a good article about choosing a web host over there, too.)


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7 Replies to “To all my Blogger/Blogspot friends”

  1. Man, I thought it was just me. I recently changed Internet providers and thought I’d made a mistake in doing so. Whew.

  2. Funny thing is, this the the first time Blogger really pooped out on me. I posted something on Friday, coincidently at the time the whole thing flipped out. That evening, my mother called to protest…”I can’t reach your blog.” When she can’t get to my blog IT MUST BE MY FAULT. Sure, Mom.

    Maybe I just jinxed everyone. I was thinking, re a WordPress discussion elsewhere, “Why would I switch, Blogger’s been good to me.” Hee.

    In my case, “you get what you pay for” (which would be nada, zilch, zip, nothing) applies. WordPress requires paying for a server, no?

  3. What a fun weekend with blooger. And to add insult to injury my ISP also went down. Couldn’t even connect to the remote computer to get on line. Butttttt…apparently they both went down at the same time, so I didn’t notice Blogger, cause ai couldn’t get there….Hmmmm…could they be related????

    I don’t know about that backing up the whole blog…on blogger I read it and it’s a little invloved. I’m not sure I want to attempt that yet. I’m just working at creating my own .com…that’s enough for now!

  4. Pat, WordPress is open source and free. You’re already paying for a website; you could easily host your blog “under” your regular site, in a subdomain or just another folder.

    I looked at your host… they offer Fantastico through your control panel. Fantastico provides beginners with an easy way to install/uninstall WordPress. You tell it where you want the WordPress blog to go and it does it for you.

    Then you find templates to download…that’s lots of fun, playing with theme templates. You can see a very few of them here. My current theme is a modified version of Dixie belle, shown on that page.

    If you want to “test” out WordPress, create an account at WordPress.com. It’s free (like Blogger) and it’ll give you an idea of how WordPress works in comparison to Blogger.

    April, Bonnie and Michelle, a lot of people thought it was their ISP. It looks as if Blogger’s going to have an update of a sort tomorrow, as announced on the Status page.

    UPDATED 2/7/06 TO ADD: Here’s a great theme viewer, too. Lots of fun! I’m itching to try out a new theme.

  5. I think the problem was with Blogspot, the free server many people choose to host their blogs. With free, what you pay is what you get. Well, sometimes you get more, like annoying popup ads! My host, LAMPhost.com, really rocks. They recently slipped another 50 Megs of space (if I remember correctly) into my account without even being asked and without charge.

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