They say ‘tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all*, but I think that’s bullshit – I want my blog back and Google stole it.
Regular readers on my blog will have realised that something is up – for a start, I’ve moved it to a different publishing platform – wordpress in case that wasn’t obvious from the URL in your browsers’s address window above this page – but also, I haven’t posted anything to my old blog for several weeks.
Why is this? Well, stick with this one, because it’s complex. Blogger was bought by Google, and a couple of weeks ago, it launched something called New Blogger, and blogger users were heavily bombarded with requests to ‘move over’ to the new system. Why not, I thought, and clicked the migrate button.
However, when I upgraded to the new system, it automatically changed over to using an existing old google mail account. The problem is I haven’t used that account in many many months and have no idea what the password for the account is.
However, I actually didn’t worry about this too much, as the password for this gmail account was stored in my PC’s cache – even though I didn’t know it, my PC did – but a couple of weeks ago that got deleted in a cache clearout and I was locked out of my blog account. I have no record of the password for this account – when I registered it I was using a different PC, so I couldn’t access the account to reset the password.
No problem, I thought, Google has a facility for just this sort of problem, you just click the button marked “Forgotten your password?” However, this just made me wait for five days before it would allow me to get access to the new password function. That works by asking you a series of security questions, the answers to which you give the system when you register the account in the first place.
Except when I finally got to this point, and tried to log in, I got asked a security question to which I didn’t know the answer. And it was in Finnish!! I suppose it’s possible I requested my security question to be in finish when I registered the account, but it seems extremely unlikely. So why is any of this Google’s fault?
Well, none of this is. However, the fact that its staff ignored five e-mails asking for help and that my appeal for help on its official help forums has also been left untroubled by any Googlish attention, is its fault.
Anyway, onward and upward. I have ‘migrated’ to wordpress, and so far, it seems like a nice system to work with. Hopefully, at some point Google will get around to helping me re-access my old blog but until then, I can’t post to it or even let regular readers there know that I’ve moved.
* I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
From Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam:27, 1850, and not as most people would guess, from Shakespeare. So there, you see . . . you just learned something and it didn’t hurt at all.
alexmeehan.com 