I realised today that I had never got around to explaining why I suddenly changed to short feeds for my posts. The reason for the change is addressed in London Makeup Girl's excellent advice post here. If you are a blogger using the Blogger platform, I would heartily recommend you have a read. It's also worth knowing about as a reader: I realise that it can be frustrating not to be able to read whole posts via email or in Google Reader but there is a good reason for protecting content this way.
I'm not sure how many of you know that my blog was disabled a little over a week ago. It was thankfully brief but I freely admit it was a very nerve wracking couple of hours. I actually feel very lucky that Google got back to me so quickly. I have all of my posts backed up but I did worry about how I would re-publish them without a blog to put them on! Although I don't know the exact reason that my Google account and blog was disabled, it's very likely that Google had flagged my blog as spam.
Grace explains all about spam blogs (splogs) in her post and the value of using a short feed. I changed my settings to short feed the minute I got my blog back. I'm sorry for the inconvenience this causes but I hate to run the risk of losing my blog permanently. Although I don't consider myself terribly precious about my blog, I was shocked by how awful it felt to lose it even for that short time. Luckily for me I had Grace on the other end of the phone to talk me down from the ceiling!
PS. For those of you that have trouble getting blogs to display as mobile format on their phones, try adding the suffix /?m=1 to the end of the blog address. This will only work on blogs that have their mobile template setting enabled but I find this a very useful trick!
It was a horrible couple of hours. I felt bad too, as I'd noticed blogger marking your comments as spam for a couple of days before they disabled your blog and I just thought it was a blip. That's another good point - if a blogger you know is being marked as spam in your comments, please tell them!
ReplyDeleteYes, that is a very good point. In a very odd move, my hotmail account often puts the email notifications for comments I've made on MY blog in my junk. Very strange!
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for this- I am just catching up so will go to Grace's blog. I didnt know yours had been down- glad its back xx
ReplyDeleteThanks for flagging this up, I had a read of Grace's post too and will be having a good look at my blog settings. Glad to hear that you got your blog back!
ReplyDeleteThankyou Jane, I read your post and Grace's but as I commented on her post, I am just too old to understand - I can thankyou but I don't understand what I am thanking you for, or how to rectify anything....although sudden light bulb moment here, I can save the 2 posts and get my children to read them and act on them. Result :)
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