Blogger Beware!

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!