Following up on this, I was right when I said someone would complain to my host. This time, they filed a DMCA on my content. Oooo-kay. So if filing “slander” complaints on me doesn’t work, you lie and say I took your content? Amazing! Only there’s one catch. It wasn’t Mr.Corny who did this. Nope. It’s a third party who likes to get involved in what they call “high strung” bloggers’ drama and cause more drama. Only for me it caused more LULz than it did drama. Seriously. I got a good laugh (and so did Josh!) at the person claiming that after nearly ten years of publishing my content on the web, I suddenly decided to rip them off. Too bad that I had a severe strep infection when I read the report. The laughing hurt my already sore throat, but it was worth it. Josh wasn’t born yesterday. He knows me. Knows. He knows I am a writer and I have been since 1991. As a writer, I follow the two sacred laws:
1. Treasure what you write.
2. Write your own content.
I’ve always written my own content, even when I was writing in an old NeatBook in the fourth grade with a flimsy felt-tipped pen. I don’t have to steal from other people to have great content.
The joke is on this person who is interfering, because I’m not a high-strung anything. I just think people are amusing and I’m not afraid to say that under my real name. The only thing I regret is the person didn’t exactly use Corny’s name. They made it seem as if it were him hiding under the cloak of anonymity and reporting me. Amusing. I won’t go into the ways they hid who they really were, or the repercussions they felt for lying, but they were amateurs.
Doesn’t excuse the whole “ghost droppings” things though. 
Some questions have been raised about the downside of having a hosted blog verses going with the free server blogs.
The best reason I can think of for not having a free hosted blog, was the great BlogSpot outage in 2001. No one could publish to their Blogspot hosted blogs. If you had FTP you could publish through that, but it left me in the dark as to when I could update my blog. This happened the first week I got really into blogging. Then came the fall of Diary-x and the Journal Script. Anyone remember that? It just sort of faded away, but I knew people who were still using Diary-x up until it crashed and burned four years ago. All entries were permanently lost. People who had been blogging since 2001 lost everything after five years. Diary-X was a pre-greymatter program that allowed its Journal Script to be installed on a domain. You had to make the templates from hand, but that was ok. Many times I had a different template each day. 
But when Diary-X went under, all that was left were the sites that had Journal Script installed on them. Source. As long as I have my domain, my entries are safe, unless I delete them.
As a writer, I treasure my entries, no matter where they are. Every year I back up my journal, just in case something happens to it. It’s the only outsourced journal that I have and I don’t trust the company who hosts it, so I back up. I back up my hosted blogs too. More closer to the time that my payment is due, because you never know when I won’t be able to pay for my site any longer.
Another reason I pay for a site rather than getting a wordpress-hosted blog or blog spot: The simplicity of making my own pages and hosting them here, where I know I won’t get the rug pulled out from under me, is quite comforting. Josh has never removed my content before, and I don’t think he’s going to start.
One of the better reasons is I can ban people. Yep, if you fuck with me enough, I can add your IP range to my .htaccess file and not have to worry about you, until you start dicking around with proxies, and then you’ve circumvented the ban and I can file an official report with your ISP.
Then there’s email. I can go 5 years without logging into my email address here, and I don’t have to worry about someone getting a hold of it an re-registering in and then breaking into my stuff. And should someone attempt to log into my stuff on this site, their IP is logged and I can file complaints with their ISP. This usually ensures a rush to complain to Josh that I’m abusing his server because I caught them trying to break the law, but whatever. I’ve never had any content removed from the web, ever, so I guess I know where the line is and I walk it very finely.
Next Entry: A Second Pile of Entrecard Ghost Droppings
If you publish your blog on a personal domain (away from blogspot.com), and you use the ever-popular Blogger.com to do so, that will all change come next month. March 26th, to be exact.
Before I continue, I feel the need to point out that I somewhat know what I’m talking about when it comes to Blogger.com. I was the 49,107th person to sign up for Blogger, and I have used the service on and off for nearly ten years.
Moving on, I see a few things wrong with this. For one, if I were still dependent on Blogger to publish my site, and my hosts are set up to use Blogger.com specifically, I would be in a pickle right now. For you see, my hosting expires on February 2end. To keep my site, I would naturally, pay for a year’s worth of hosting. Blogger sent out the notice to FTP users, that they were discontinuing the service on March 26th, on February 3erd. Unless they transfer their domain and hosting over to Google’s webhosting. Well, I’ve already paid for my hosting, as have 99.9% of the .5% of the “affected” FTP Blogger users, for the year, and I can’t get that money back. No refunds. $120 gone. I don’t know how much Google webhosting is, but I’m assuming they’re expecting their users to jump over to blogspot.com for free. Huh? I’ve just renewed my hosting for a year, with no refunds, and I’m either going to have to be forced to go to a free, non-professional site, or uproot everything and go to a new CMS. Which isn’t a bad idea to install something on your server so you have 100% control.
Then comes this part of Google’s excuse: “FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger.”
Ok. Well. When I was using Blogger back in 2000/2001, there was no bells or whistles for Blogger. Not even a title box. You had to do every little piece of HTML by hand. And I did, starting with the title tag at the top of my post, then typing everything out. I still do that in my WordPress entries. I’m not that lazy. Posts were numbered references on a page published once per month or week and updated periodically throughout that month or week. Blogger also featured a list of updated blogs on the front page. A Blog of the Month. A blog directory. The front page of Blogger was updated by people with souls, not Google drones.
Blogger was great.
Then in early 2003, Google acquired Blogger, and it became the abomination that it is today. Limited everything. One thing that really made me turn away from Blogger was the fact that in 2003, Google disliked something I published with their software to my personal, privately owned domain, hosted on a server other than their own, so they took the liberty to log into my account, delete the post from my domain and then delete my blog from my account. I never got it backed up. I had to just link to my old archive page. After that violation, which was not even against my hosts TOS and they should have had the final word on whether my content was removed or not, I went into self-hosted publishing platforms.
The moral of the story? Get your blog and go with WordPress. Or something that you’re comfortable with. Blogger is on it’s way out. You can thank Google for that.
So… FireFox 3.6 is out. But before you rush to download it, there’s something you should take into consideration if you use the EntreCard Tool bar to browse blogs to drop on (oh that sounds bad!).
It’s not compatible with FireFox 3.6:
Thunderbird 3 is a great upgrade. Everyone should go get that.
Upon frequenting the EntreCard world, I’ve noticed a little trend in those who tend to have a bit more money than the rest of us. Since my friend Matt installed and customized this site for me in what he interpreted as an “artistic digital reflection” of me, I’ve noticed a boom in the use of Colour Lab’s Arthemia Theme among WordPress bloggers. Different colours, different schemes, same theme. Did I start a trend here? Last year, I noticed several sites start using Citrus Theme after I did. I didn’t think I was that influential. You’d think someone with that much influence on the blogging world would get much more comments and have a much bigger following than I do. Or some link backs. Get that page rank up again!! But that’s just me and my crazy, late night brain. 
As you were…
They're Only Human
My sites were down for about an hour tonight. I apologise for this. I can’t control it anymore than I can control the rising sun or the rising moon. It just happens. I’m not going to sugar coat it, and I’m not too proud to say it, but my sites are only up 99% of the time. You get what you pay for with hosting, and I’m happy where I am. I’m not in the mood to move my site or anything dramatic like that. Everything is working and I’m comfortable with it. For now. That may change over time. Who knows?
It’s 2am and I have to get my butt in bed. My man went to bed over three hours ago, and fell asleep waiting on me to get my butt in there. So…until the next time something grinds my gears, I’m off.
Tomorrow is something big here on crimsonsparkle.net.
Don’t ask me what–If you were paying attention all these years, you’d know what it was.
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