11 May, 2008

Blanket Block Out

Has anybody in my readership experienced the blanket block out by Blogger?

For the third day in a row, I have fallen under the dark hand of blocked blogging. Blogger explains that my URL or IP Address looks like one that has "automated" something or other on it.

A search for help reveals that Blogger is just blocking out big swaths of users, from Newfoundland to Mexico. Various sites suggest using third party software for various patches. Hello. That sounds like the exact problem that Blogger is trying to stop - third party vacuuming of it's pages.

Anyway, if there are tech wizards in my world, what do you suggest? I wonder if any of my third party thingies are standing accused? I will wipe a few out, and see how that does.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wonder if you're not experienceing what happened to Marsha at the Extraordinary Pencil. She wrote about it here http://theextraordinarypencil.blogspot.com/2008/04/extraordinary-pencil-was-held-hostage.html.

Casey Klahn said...

First, thanks very much for reading from Alberta, Anima.

Yes, the situation Marsha was in looks the same. I was down for a little over an hour for three days consecutively. She indicates that spam sites steal content, which has happened to me. I didn't think much of it at the time, but what a headache.

Blogger is on thin ice with me now, too. except, have you seen the small images on Wordpress? Is there some way around that?

Marsha Robinett said...

Sorry for your experience...but if you were only blocked for an hour three days in a row consider yourself fortunate. Many, as with me are being shut down for days and some for over a week.

I think blogger is systematically going through their "bloggers" and shutting them down...knowing that only the ligament bloggers will complain. It's a way of weeding out the spam blogs. The thing is...the spam blogs will only open up again under a different URL and be back in business.

I too considered moving to a new provider. For now, I'm staying where I am. The idea of doing all this again is overwhelming.

Casey Klahn said...

I had a devil of a time finding a place to complain. The forum at blogger help was one, and the employee would occasionally check there to admit they were guilting the group by pogrom.

There is a fancy way to back up your blog (see blogger help, I think), but it looked like I had to save my template (not hard), then change templates and make a file and then burn that/back up that file.

It looked a little iffey, as if a guy not loaded up on his morning coffee might hit that big red DELETE THIS BLOG button by mistake.
I'll be looking in to it, though. I think a back up would be an important item to have, especially if you prize your articles and writing.

Anonymous said...

I'm not familiar with wordpress at all, but I'm going to start researching the different providers. The idea of switching, and all the work and headaches that would involve, makes me shudder.

I use FTP publishing with blogger so my pages are hosted on my portfolio website's server. They're also on my laptop hard drive and backed up on another FTP site hosted by a separate company. At least that reasures me if I am forced to move suddenly.

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