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?)