I have been a writer since pre-school.
Our family has been on the internet for almost a decade, going clear back to the early days off USENET bulletin boards. I watched Husband and Son foraging excitedly through this new cyber-jungle, and followed along on their safari.
I learned that I could find people who had similar interests. I learned that I could post messages that other people responded to. I found a place to share my crazy ideas and express myself through my humorous writing.
It made me happy.
Eldest Son started blogging and sent me his link. I was fascinated, and played around with several private blogs, learning the ropes.
Then I officially started Digital Doorway: Enter the Laughter in January 2005.
No one came.
It made me sad.
But I am one determined gal, and I learned about traffic exchanges, started commenting at other blogs, and got myself listed in directories.
Readers came, and life was good.
Then disaster struck.
On Tuesday, January 24, 2006, I put up an early morning post with the subject that it was three weeks until Valentine’s Day. My template had small pictures of items I had listed at E-Bay down the sidebar, to direct people to those online auctions, in hopes of having more bidders.
That afternoon, one of the items sold, so I went to the template to remove its picture. There was a notice from Blogger that they would be shutting down for maintenance.
Little did I know my blog was doomed.
I was right on the borderline, one minute before the scheduled shutdown.
I thought I could get an update in just before the shutdown. I made the changes and hit publish. One of the pictures wasn’t showing up, (just got that dumb little box with a red x in it) so I double-checked the code and I had left the trailing quote mark off of the reference to the picture.
Duh on me - LOL
I went in and made the change to add the quote mark, and hit publish again.
I think that is when I sent the whole shebang down the drain LOL
It was exactly at 4 PM. I went to “View blog” and none of the changes showed up. I went back to the template and they had the notice up that they were doing maintenance and nobody could get in. But after the control dashboard became available again, I still wasn’t able to publish. I could attempt to change things, but when I hit publish it would just show 0% over and over LOL
The next day, when it still wouldn’t work, I thought I would switch to FTP and upload it to web hosted space I already have, so I set up a folder at my webhost (Yahoo) to receive it, and changed the parameters at Blogger. But I still got the 0% publish thing, and that’s when I knew I was doomed.
I’ve written dozens of letters to Blogger Help and Support, all for naught.
I’m considering Wordpress, but I hate having to start yet again, and having to learn a whole new system. So I’ll probably just stick with the new blogspot address and hope all my old pals can find me - LOL
So if you see a frazzled blonde out of the corner of your eye, waving her arms, whistling, shouting, and waving a sign that says, “Over here!” that’s me.
Come on over, door’s always open.
Posted by Marti @ 
