After many frustrations in recent months on Blogger, I reached a point where Google’s ‘free’ product simply wasn’t serving me, or my readers, well at all, with particular regard to the commenting function.
In recent months, the notification of new comments on posts ceased, due to an unknown cause, and I had to visit blogger’s admin section and look for posts in a moderation queue. That got old fast.
Then there was an option to ‘upgrade’/switch my blogging identity from ‘blogger’ to ‘Google-plus’. I tried this change and discovered it had some curious outcomes:
– it allowed some folks who had been unable to successfully add comments in recent months to post now able to do so – yay!
– I now found comments on posts from months back, submitted by readers via Google Plus, which I had never seen nor received notification about. My apologies to those readers, like Ward in Seattle. I wasn’t ignoring you – I never received any notification, and the comments you made only seemed to exist in the Google Plus universe.
– when a reader comments via Google Plus the post author (me) is NOT given any notification as to whether a comment was left. And this applies to any post on this blog, going back, in this case, some 1020 posts back to 2009. The only way I would discover that someone had left a comment on an old post was by manually scrolling through the summary page for all 1020+ posts, and I’d have to do that on a regular basis. It would be almost a full-time job, and a very boring one at that.
-worst of all, on Google plus, there is no comment moderation, leaving my blog wide open to abusive comment content, x-rated comment content, or just the run-of the mill spam which comes in daily. No way that would work for me, and readers here I’m sure are not looking for that sort of thing either.
– if comments were made by readers with Google Plus, then reader without Google plus would be unable to see them. If i reverted back to ‘blogger’ identity instead of Google Plus, all comments left by google plus readers would be lost.
So, digging in deeper and finding these issues in blogger seem to be more of a feature than a bug, and Google isn’t in any particular hurry to do anything about it, I decided enough was enough, and though it costs me money to have the blog hosted here, at least I have ownership of the content, which is not the case with the Blogger platform, in which Google owns all your content. Whenever the product is free, then you are the product, as they say.
I’m so annoyed at google that I am thinking of canning all my Google accounts, including Youtube, gmail, and stopping using Google as a search engine. We’ll see how far I feel like taking it – for now, I’m happy to be here, and look forward to posting new content. I’ve placed a redirect on my old blogger site, so hopefully you will automatically land here when you visit the old site. Please update your bookmarks accordingly. And thanks for your steady readership! My apologies to all who were inconvenienced/annoyed/puzzled, or simply struggled trying to leave comments previously on blogger. Those problems are now in the past. Onward and upward.
Congratulations on the move! I contemplate making the same move for similar reasons.
Having said that, when I go to your former URL at blogspot, I’m redirected not to this page but to a general “Welcome to WordPress” landing page. I had to use that page’s “Search” window to find this page. So some people may have a hard time finding you.
Of course, my particular configuration of machine, OS, browser, AND the fact that my machine is on a school system network may have influenced where I landed in WordPress land . . .
Jim,
I breathe a slight sigh of relief after the stress of migrating the blog over. I’m glad you were able to find me, and I’ll get to work on figuring out why the redirect is taking you to the welcome to wordpress page instead of my blog page. This web site stuff is a struggle for me, i’ll admit….
Weird . . . just now the redirect worked perfectly. Nice!
Yeah, that’s likely because I fixed the redirect link after your previous comment. It turned out that there were a couple of missing forward slashes in the html script. Glad to hear it is working properly for you now.
Hi Chris,
Yay! Hopefully I can now leave comments that you will see. I tried leaving comments as “Anonymous” (I don’t have accounts with any of the “Log In as,…” options) many times in the past, but they all just seemed to disappear and I had no idea if they went through (obviously not).
I would certainly encourage you to distance yourself from Google. Once I found out their true mission in the world, I now avoid anything they are a part of (as much as I can – they are very pervasive). No Google search, no maps, no Android, etc.
Anyway, to catch up for the past, this is a great Blog and I enjoy all the posts on all the topics – please keep up the excellent work.
Steve
Steve,
comment coming through loud and clear now – welcome back!
I’m feeling similarly towards Google, and I am buried in it – Chrome browser, gmail, youtube channel, etc.. There are options though. I left Facebook a while back because I didn’t like what it is, and Google is becoming much the same sort of thing in my eyes.
Nice new home! I’ve been a ‘Wordie’ for a few years, and nothing strange has happened to me other than three new arms, a set of eyes on my big toes. Regarding Google horror stories, I tried a new version of Calendar and lost everything in the process. But lest we forget, nothing is free, and so far, Google is better than the competition in most areas.
Yes, if Google did not offer something good and useful to folks, it wouldn’t be nearly so successful. However, a monopoly tends to go in non-consumer friendly directions ultimately. I grow uncomfortable with it.
I didn’t know of the struggle but glad to hear you are free, and I’m very glad the new blog has an RSS feed I can follow via Feedly.
I’m not as averse to Google products as I am to FB, but a couple recent switches have been painless – Chrome to Firefox, and google search to DuckDuckGo.
I used to use firefox, but then it became slow and buggy, but it remains on my computer so i could switch back i suppose. i’ll try duck duck go
I hope this move is an improvement. I started on blogspot after a wordpress server lost all my data, Is this a paradox?
I guess we’ll see how it pans out, but at least with WordPress, on a business plan, you get immediate chat support so it seems like problems can be worked out. On Google, you just get a forum to post up on, and reading through those forums I could see that the issue with commenting has been around since 2013 and Google has done zip to address it. I also like that i own my content here, and so long as it is backed up, there should be no problem.
Welcome Chris! Glad to see the move went well!
Thanks Brian! I spend my mornings on chat with them, tidying up loose ends, so it remains a work in progress.
Great to see you still posting, and this platform will really help me. Now i can highlight/right click words i don’t know and search to learn more about what you’re doing!
It’s nice to have commenting working again, and so glad that this site is providing increased functionality for readers such as yourself. LMK if there are any features you would like to see associated to this page and I’ll see what I can do.
The new site looks cool. 🙂
The old commenting system could be a real PITA. It was always be a surprise if a comment would be submitted, not submitted or vanish without a trace. I tended wo write my comments in an editor and then copy/paste them into the comment box so I wouldn’t loose them in the latter case. Sometimes commenting wouldn’t work for me for months on end.
Let me say that I very much appreciate you don’t require people to log in via social media.
Roland,
sorry to hear you were having such a problem over on blogger leaving comments- I wish I had known about it sooner. Seems like the blogger problems with commenting, Google Plus, etc., go back as far as 2013, but I only became aware of the issues in the past 6 months or so. Hoping for clear sailing from here on out.
I need to switch mine, too. Half of my photos (on my blogger blog) which were hosted on photobucket are now held hostage for payment. Is there a painless trick to switching? I’m worried all my old blog posts will be lost.
Julie,
I followed this advice and it worked as far as getting all my blog entries transferred over here:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-switch-from-blogger-to-wordpress-without-losing-google-rankings/
I didn’t lose any posts at all, but I did lose anything associated to widgets from the Blogger platform, and am still working on having individual posts from the old site redirect here to the correct pages. So far, very glad I made the switch and there are so many things you can do with a blog here that weren’t possible on Blogger, plus the WP chat support has been great too.
Thanks Chris!