A Brand New Ugly Look!

Less than five minutes after publishing the previous post, my blog was deleted by Blogger/Google again.

Again, I had to go through the whole "beg to be restored" nonsense, until I got it back again today. Blogger officials still flat-out refuse to tell me what is triggering the auto-deletion "robots" they ridiculously employ, but several volunteers on their message boards agreed with what I'd diagnosed all along: it was something in my whiz-bang custom template that caused the "protecting" (LOL!) robots that look for malicious spam scripts to remove me. Thus, regretfully, I have been forced to remove ALL custom template work from my blog for now. I may reinstate some of it (some things are now "broken" here - due to removing so much of the "guts" of the site) since I can't fathom how countless other blogs use things like LinkWithin just fine, and I can't seem to.

Apologies for how crap my blog now looks... it's rather shameful compared to the work I put in to making it look nice and different before, but if the alternatives are "looking crap" or "getting deleted every month or more" I have to consider the former preferable.

Honestly, the one thing that's held me back from an alternative like WordPress is that I fell in love with how customizable Blogger's templates, look and interface was; simple to edit and could be highly customized to look awesome and be easier to use than the "defaults". Take that customization away... and alternative services seem much more viable.

*sigh* Blogging is supposed to be fun and not stressful, isn't it?

(Oh look, I'm now missing the old "dashboard" across the top of Blogger. That will add some extra frustration, eh?)

Update

A quick update:

A few weeks ago, various behind the scenes issues of running my blog were starting to get to me; even though mostly minor things, it was getting more stressful than enjoyable, more of a chore rather than "fun". At the same time, a very close friend's site disappeared overnight (wary of some very scary new laws in a country I'm happy not to live in!), and then when Google shut me down yet again just after my last post (though only for a day, it meant going through the appeal process for the fourth time) was the last straw. 'Real life' and work had been pretty stressful too of late, and I felt I needed to take a week or so's break totally away from it all. Thus, I took myself off for a week's holiday.

However, I fell pretty ill about a week later, and haven't felt up to blogging or even being online much during that period. Without going into details, it was actually rather scary, especially since one's mind tends to convince you that the worst is to fear, but I'm pretty much on the mend now, and my fears of what might have been the problem seem not to have been the case, thankfully.

It has given me time to think about the future of my blog; I'm hoping that my time away will be case of absence making the heart fonder: that is, it will be more enjoyable for me to return to posting and chatting with readers.

I hope everyone's been well and safe in my absence, and continue to enjoy what I post here. Hopefully, you're all still out there! :)

Short version: I'm still alive, and regular service will now be resuming.