Blogger just emailed me a nice apology.
They wanted to make sure we all knew that it was an algorithm that deleted me, not a renegade Creationist janitor. They are taking the deletion seriously, and are trying to learn what happened and how to prevent it in the future.
I had a few suggestions for them too:
Hi Blogger!I am sympathetic to the sheer level of spam-crap you all have to deal with, but you guys really need to make it easier for bloggers to know whats wrong with our sites and how we can fix it. Since I never did anything but post (didnt change anything in the original template) I kinda expected Blogger to run seamlessly with Google since they are run by the same corporation, but I suppose iPhones dont always sync perfectly with iMacs :)
I loved Blogger because it was so easy. You dont even have to really know html. But that also means I dont have any idea what 'robots' or 'spiders' or any of that stuff is when it goes wrong on Google Webmaster Tools or how to fix it (I only know about Google Webmaster because of the last time I was delisted). I dont think Im the only Blogger user thats not a l33t h4x0r and knows how to put your alls spam detectors at ease on my own.
And thank you for putting my mind at ease about Creationist moles. Im not a conspiracy theorist, but it was curious timing and it felt shady. And, I felt that if I didnt 'know someone' at Google, there was no way I could find contact information or answers. Your alls help section feels like a link farm, and when you have almost 2 years of blogging disappear, its scary.
I will pass the word on to other Blogger users that were shaken up by the sudden ERV disappearance. But Im also encouraging them to back up all of their posts, all the time.
Thank you to all the old ERV readers that were planning a mass exodus to Wordpress (I think that was one of the reasons I got a nice personal email). Blogger appears to be okay now, but there is a level of trust thats been broken. If you stay (if you are on another site even), BACK UP ALL OF YOUR POSTS!!!!!
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If anyone has a domain of their own it is really easy to set up blogger to FTP to your domain instead of a blogger domain. So in the even of blogger deleting your account all your posts should still remain (I think).
Of course if you are as lazy as me and haven't made a post since feb then it really doesn't matter what happens.
Well they would say that, wouldn't they. OK, OK conspiracy mode off :)
Just glad you finally got everything sorted and I shall look forward to re-reading some classic ERV TARD take downs as you repost them here. To be honest, personally I am glad you are now part of the Borg as it is easy to comment here.
That was rather nice of them, yes. "Don't be ebol" works ...
I'm growing fond of your idiom. It's obvious I'll never be a "y'all" speaker despite the cleverness of that pronoun. I'd never have guessed at using "your all's" for the genitive, but it's perfectly logical of course.
Im not a conspiracy theorist
I am.
;)
Although relieved that the loss of your former home was not intentional, I'm exuberant that you are now on ScienceBlogs and can also transfer the brilliant (IMHO) information you posted on Blogger to here.
That's because I'm apparently retarded and could never get a comment to work on the old blog unless I did the anonymous thing.
Awesomely cool is the concept of no apostrophes. Being an old fart, I use them for the very reason you choose to reject them and I do need to re-think the issue (I can see it now: Bill O [Thunk] Reilly inculcates the WAR ON THE APOSTROPHY.)
Rock on, Abbie!
Wordpress is AWESOME. I love the flexibility. Congrats on your new digs, but I wouldn't give up all the perks of self-hosting.
@Sili:
Actually, y'all {possessive: y'all's]is a nice phrase (yall, to use Abbie's apostrophe lack...I can't do it. I even text-message in full phrases almost always). For a true Southerner, and those who want to use it correctly, it always refers to more than 1 person...(End lecture) I'm always correcting my northern friends, too.
Abbie: I am so glad you got an apology.
All: I love the comments listed above, y'all! :^)
As a blogger and an avid commenter, another vote for Wordpress. Wordpress kicks fucking ass!! Blogger can suck my balls!!
The extremely poor integration of comments from the blog proper in Blogger is a total fucking design and usability disaster. Wordpress wins on this hands down. And the fucked-up-letter anti-spam thingamajig is a total fucking pain in the ass. Yeah, maybe people with 20-year-old eyes can read those fucking things, but real adults have to squint like a motherfucker.
Yes, commenting on Blogger sort of sucks. Even if I'm logged in to Google, I have to put in my email and password and read the illegible letters and such. This may have something to do with our firewall at work - it often makes websites forget who I am - but it's an annoyance that ScienceBlogs doesn't have.
The bad thing is, anyone could come here and post all kinds of crap under my name.
Wait, that's actually a good thing - it gives deniability. Anything stupid I've posted in the past - that wasn't me!
From the OP:
"it was an algorithm that deleted me, not a renegade Creationist janitor."
Actually, it was a renegade Creationist algorithm (bwahahahah)
Being a southerner (ie from southern ontario), we don't use "y'all" or even "all 'o y'all'. Some here use "yous" (pronounced use), or "yous guys". As in "When are yous guys gonna get here?"
Glad to see the numbers on the comments...if I commented fast enough, I get to be a perfect 10!!!
BAllanJ,
6 years in Houston taught me the correct plural of y'all is all y'all.
It's taken me quite some time to understand that in Texas, y'all isn't plural. It's friendly. All y'all is plural.
Yet another raving review of wordpress... SO easy to use, and if you have trouble on your own...you can usually find what you want in the help section- and when you can't- they are shockingly fast with personalized responses to (rare) problems.
But- no matter where you are, always good to back up posts ... and data... I'm making sure I have everything backed up right now!
I don't know jack about Blogger . . . well, I didn't before your site vanished . . . but I'm glad to see you on the air again. I find your site instructive first and entertaining second.
Now I've spent 62 years studying how people talk in the South, including South Texas, so let me just say this once and y'all make of it what you like.
In big swaths of the Southern U.S. y'all is the second person plural pronoun. In very formal speech you will sometimes hear you-all. The possessive form is y'all's OR your-all's (this depends on where you are). You may change to "you" if repeating the pronoun, as in "y'all make of it what you like."
Very aged people in East Tennessee and the Tarheel counties of North Carolina say you-uns, but y'all won the field a good long time ago and I don't think I have heard you-uns since my grandmother died.
Some young people who have been raised wrong say "you guys."
If you spell it ya'll, people will think you meant you'll.
All y'all is an intensifier. "I'd like to invite all y'all over to the house for a slice of cake" is just marginally more hospitable than "invite y'all." And since Texans are some of the most hospitable folks anywhere, you probably do hear all y'all more in those parts.
Please share with us what algorithm (never could spell that) of Blogger's would take a blog that had not substantially changed its link distribution in two years and delete it. Too many links to Expelled Exposed? One too many Damns?
I think it is the alogrithm Google is developing for the Chinese Government to delete offending sites at the command of Beijing. It deletes it from everywhere, even from the Google searches.
If Google can do stuff like this by mistake, just think what they can do if they are trying to do it.