Blogger Makes Friday the 13th Memorable

And not in a good way. Thursday May 12, 2011 started off as any other day and seemed to be going fairly well. I had gotten an important post to me up about Community Supported Agriculture, which I had been working on for a little bit. However, unknown to me at some point that day my beloved blogging platform Blogger had some major issues going on.

Once the kids are all in bed at night is when I do most of my social networking, blogging, etc. So I logged into the MomDot forums to see several other Blogger users complaining about how they were unable to access their dashboards to publish new posts. In addition to Blogger being in this "read-only" mode, several bloggers had also lost posts and comments from that day. I quickly checked my blog and thankfully, my CSA post was still there. I was not happy about not being able to work on my post for Friday, but not the end of the world.

When I woke up Friday morning and signed on to check things is when I discovered that the post had vanished. Insert panic attack. I put a lot of work and heart into it and now it was all gone. Plus I had sent it out to a lot of people who were interested in it and now they were getting a page does not exist message. That bothered me more than anything. In addition, because of all of the Blogger issues, my traffic had come to a stand still. Hopefully I am not the only blogger who checks their traffic stats multiple times a day. Between Statcounter, Google Analytics and Sitemeter I noticed that drop right away. Heck, I'd install and run Omniture analytics if I could. Needless to say, I was not happy.

So for much of the rest of Friday the 13th, I obsessively refreshed my blog to see if my post had returned. During all of this I kept thinking to myself "what the heck were the Blogger folks thinking?" Apparently there was some maintenance that happened Wednesday night which obviously did not go over so well. So now they were reverting back, hence the lost posts. But didn't someone over at Blogger HQ test this out first? Surely when you are a huge blogging platform with goodness knows how many users, you run some website testing first. ?? Or not.

Well Friday came and went without my post being restored. Then Saturday came and went with the same result. I did not want to wait any longer so I decided to republish it. Lucky for me I was able to still pull up the post in my feed and I was able to copy and paste it into a new post and publish it. I am so thankful for that because writing it from scratch again would have sucked. Hopefully it is there for good now.

Here is to a week ahead of no Blogger issues and business as usual. That was not fun at all and I don't want to do it again. Ever.

And no, I am not switching to Wordpress.

How did the Blogger foul up affect you last week?