Natalie Goes to Japan

40 year old very married blonde woman having a midlife crisis who heads to Japan alone to follow her dreams. Be careful what you wish for ... you just may get it.

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Google is Holding My Blog Hostage

Google took over Blogger awhile ago, and they have been slowly trying to get us all to switch over to the "New, Improved Blogger" which requires you to set up a Google account. Well, I'm not interested in getting the New Blogger. There are a few bugs, and old Blogger works for me just fine. Plus, as I leave Japan in a few months, the blog itself will come to an end. But Google is now getting more insistant, in a Mafia sort of way. Now, when I log in to Blogger a screen comes up that says something to the effect of "Hey, now would be a great time to upgrade. All you have to do is click here and sell your soul to Google". Which would be fine, but there is no way to get out of that screen other than "click here". If you have time, you can wait it out, and check back in half an hour or so and the screen might go away. But I don't always have time to do that. So although I have wanted to post a few times last week, Google was barring the door. I've gotten so pissed that I switched my search engine away from Google. I'm afraid Google is turning into Microsoft. What a shame.

7 Comments:

At 8:35 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Could be much worse....

My Blogger blogspot blog got picked up by the Google Blogger robots as being a spam-blog.

I had to submit a form so a "real person" can do a review before they let me post again.

Still waiting....

So for now, I can edit posts and comments...I can save "drafts" but I cannot post any new blog posts until Google/Blogger decides to let me again....

(sigh)

And what's ironic is that I was going to make a post about the up-tick in spam and phishing and give some pointers...

(big sigh)

I feel your pain and frustration, Natalie....

 
At 2:13 PM, Blogger Shari said...

I'm not sure what you mean when you say you have to "sell your soul" to Google. All you have to do is create an account. You don't have to give them your real name. You don't have to give them any other e-mail address and you don't have to pay anything. The entire process takes less than 2 minutes.

As for bugs, I've not encountered any since switching over. However, to each their own. If you don't want to switch, don't, but it really doesn't cost anything to upgrade.

 
At 4:24 PM, Blogger Natalie said...

Shari,

Selling your soul was a total exageration, and I know I am blowing it all out of proportion. And I am not one for conspiracy theories. But I signed up with Blogger and not Google. And I don't see why I have to re-sign up. I knew the change would be quick and actually painless. But I am being stubborn. And I don't mind the little ad saying sign up for new blogger...I just mind there isn't any other option. Then again I have said "NO" repeatedly and they keep insisting. If I was going to keep a blog in the future I would just move to some other place. I also see no benefit in the upgrade, so why should I? I can't say that I trust them not to send me email either. Ah, I told you I was stubborn!

 
At 1:19 PM, Blogger Shari said...

Fair enough though being able to use labels is worth the upgrade if you plan to continue (as are some other features).

I also signed up with Blogger initially and resisted upgrading for quite awhile though I mainly did it out of laziness with coping with what I expected would be a new interface. In the end, it turned out the upgraded Blogger was easier to use and makes editing less of a chore (especially with not having to re-publish the blog).

 
At 10:35 AM, Blogger Emsk said...

This has irked me as well, Natalie, especially as when I log in to my account noe of the instructions are in English anymore. Because my laptop can't read Kanjii all I have are a lot of little ?????, so there's a lot of guess work going on here.

Your site looks great - I want to figure out how to post the books I've been reading as well. How do you do that?

 
At 9:28 AM, Blogger Shari said...

Just a tip for emsk as I found some browsers tried to be overly clever and display in Japanese. You can get your English back even if you can't read the gibberish.

Log into our Blogger dashboard. Your profile box should be in the top right with three bullet points under your picture. The last bullet point is "change language" (which you can't read because it's gibberish). Click the third bullet point and a language selection page will load. This page will let you choose English. Click the orange button and you're back in business.

 
At 10:17 AM, Blogger Natalie said...

emsk

I know a tiny bit of html. Under your template you find the sidebar and enter

{br}
{img src="http://??????.gif"}
{b}The Title of choice {/b}{br}
Author of choice{br}
Your review{br}
Score: ? {br}

You have to change { to < and } to >. If typed it like that the browser would try and read it and you couldn't see the actual code. Hope this helps. And of course you have to find a pic of the book, right click it and choose Copy Image Location and insert that in the ????? spot. That is the end of my html knowledge.

9:15 AM

 

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