Monday, January 05, 2015

Moved a number of postcode blogs from Bloger to WordPress due to Blogger's automated scanner incorrectly nuking blogs.

Google's Blogger service has been a right pain lately. Their automatic scanner has a delete first, ask question later approach. That is if the Blogger's automated scanner thinks you're in violation of their terms they simply delete the blog. The problem is the scanner isn't perfect and there are many false positives. I've had a number of blogs restored with a number still to be restored. It has been a real pain since you can't contact Google Blogger support directly and it is very unproductive.

I've largely lost confidence in Google's Blogger service as a result. To avoid this situation I've now moved a number of blogs to WordPress.com. The following blogs for the respective postcode pages have now been set up.

www.justlocal3105.wordpress.com - Bulleen
www.justlocal3106.wordpress.com - Templestowe
www.justlocal3107.wordpress.com - Templestowe Lower
www.justlocal3108.wordpress.com - Doncaster
www.justlocal3109.wordpress.com - Doncaster East
www.justlocal3093.wordpress.com - Lower Plenty
www.justlocal3094.wordpress.com - Montmorency
www.justlocal3095.wordpress.com - Eltham

Whilst this has been a considerable annoyance, the reality is JustLocal was set up so each postcode page could have its own blog about local happenings and it didn't matter where the blog was located, or the service being used.

This is a good opportunity to warn others to back up their blogs and any other information they only store online. Large companies such as Google now don't make it easy to directly contact them for support. The companies have largely offloaded support to volunteers to minimise cost and as a result you're dealing with people who can have almost no experience through to quite experienced. Ultimately these people don't work for Google so the can become obnoxious to deal with. They have after all nothing to lose. An employee on the other hand can lose their job so will treat customers with the appropriate level of respect.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au
Helping local business prosper.

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