Unmigrated Legacy Blogger - huh?

Google, what are you doing to me? To others? It was you, wasn't it? Sent the email warning that "legacy" blogs were endangered and required to be moved.

You are receiving this message because your email address is associated with an unmigrated legacy Blogger account. As we announced in April of last year, legacy accounts will no longer be accessible after May 30th, 2012 unless they are updated to the Google Account system. Any blog content associated with this account will also be unmodifiable after that date.

To transfer your blog to the Google Account system you need to visit the Legacy Migration page at http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/NQQ3dQolv1dns1 right now to make sure that your account and associated blogs are claimed. If you’ve forgotten the Blogger password that is associated with this email address, you can use our Account Recovery page at http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/PPo3H8hLB9iHIK to request password information to be sent via email.

For more information, please see our initial announcement we posted to our blog at http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/STvPY7lCij04Of . If you have questions, please visit our Help Forum at http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/jW60wlPTgtyRtX and create a message with [Legacy Account] in the subject line.

Regards,

The Blogger Team Google 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043 ---- This e-mail is being sent to notify you of important changes to your Blogger account.

So, I obeyed. My old Blogger password was not accepted. I had to make a new one. Have I have conned? Hacked? What is this all about? It is now harder to get to Blogger. The pages seem to want me to get Chrome. I already have it/

Really - things don't get easier. One wastes an immense amount of time, STILL, fiddling with technicalities and mysterious tech requests. Or, please, someone tell me, have I just be done like a dog's dinner?

Oh, and since when did Blogger stop formatting? Why is everything running together these days? Do I have to do a refresher course in HTML?

Now here's a sad thing

Would it not be great if one could take this as one of those correspondence-exchanged issues reminiscent of the late, great Henry Root? How funny was he!
How not funny is this.
This is the story of a sincere sucker being time-wasted because she was too busy to read too closely. And she was under the impression that she was working with something which seemed to identify itself as "The Society of Professional Journalists".
You can see the cause of this exchange on the right=hand nav bar of this blog.

Dear WebRing,

I have kept your email open on my desktop for a long time, periodically returning to the blogspot address I have inhabited these nigh 12 years and trying to work out why your promotion corrupts my columns.
The bad news is that I don't know.
I am not a web designer or a coder, albeit I was inaugural online editor of my metro daily newspaper and have mastered quite a few evolving print media programs, the latest being the paywall version of Fatwire.

I have managed to keep everything neat and tidy on my wee blog over the years - until now.

Suddenly the penny dropped.

I cannot make your ID conform to the blogspot column sizes because I need to "upgrade" to WebRing Premium.
And then I will get my own FREE blog?

Good grief.
Now, with the "luxury" of a (sick) day off my work on a busy metro daily, I have a moment to solve a problem. And the problem is not me and my blog, but Internet bottom-feeders looking for my dollar.

Fie.

The Internet was a better place before your sort came to parasite it.

Samela



On 17/07/2011, at 12:18 AM, feedback@webring.com wrote:

Hi saline,
You recently created a WebRing account. We noticed you haven't joined any of our thousands of WebRing Communities.

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Try our list of video tutorials http://help.webring.com/h/editor
Enquire at our Memerb Support forum http://g.webring.com/forum?forum=webringsupport
Upgrade to WebRing premium and we will add the NavBar for you! http://webring.com/h/benefits
Premium members also receive:
Better placement in rings for more traffic.
Free webring.com email account
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Don't Have a Web Site? We have a solution for you!
Webspace
WebRing members have a place to create a website, store private files, and more. Check out your Webspace area if you have not done so already. It's flexible and FREE.

Blogs
We have hundreds of WebRing blogs. As a WebRing member, you get your own FREE blog. Blogs are a great and easy way to communicate any message or sell any product. Plus, we have built a NavBar into the blog.

In addition, nearly everything you do on WebRing earns you Activity Points! What can you do with these points? Redeem them in our Rewards Room for products or services.

We love hearing from our members. Feel free to contact us with any comments or suggestions at feedback@webring.com.

Sincerely,

WebRing Member Services

To manage receipt of email, or cancel this account, please visit your My Account area - http://www.webring.com/mbr - This is an account you created, so there is no "unsubscribe". This is a transactional email under CAN-SPAM guidelines, not commercial or unsolicited email.

Feedback, the tragedy

What is it with feedback?
Why does it bring out the worst in so many people?
Not all, I hasten to add. Not all.

But a whole new breed as been unleashed.

It is as if the anonymity of the Internet gives permission for behaviour your parents would never sanction. It is an excuse for releasing all the bile one has never dared expel, for fear of the terrible consequences.

So many people seem to have this inner anger.
All it takes is a blog or even an online newspaper report to fire up the demons of feedback, the instinct to tell the writer where to get off.

I recall when the LA Times tried the grand Internet experiment of opening up its editorials for the people to have their say. True equality. Absolute respect for the views of the readership.

But what did the paper get?
It got a deluge of vitriol. Such tirades of unspeakable spite and hatred that it gave up on the grand idea of the people's editorials and went back to the old ways.

People online are not content to disagree. They have to bellow personal insults.
As if they, themselves, are paragons of some sort, that they stand all-knowing in judgement, talented and wise. Well, the sort of paragons that can't frame a sentence let alone spell one.

Literacy and feedback do not go hand-in-hand.
And the worse the literacy, the more adamant the feedback sender is that they can tell the thinking writer that he or she is not worth the time of day.
Is it jealousy? Is it the tall poppy syndrome? The classic hostility of the under-achiever?

Whatever it is, it is bloody sad.
The feedback writers show a lot of cowardice. They think they can't be identified although, especially when it comes to newspaper feedback posts, guess what? They can.

The odd thing is that these people who have so much anger and such paucity of articulation also are out there actually reading.

The ugly world of website comment

How come, as one who adores reading diary blogs, I cannot bring myself to do anything quite so straightforward?
I suppose this is a "comment" blog. I only blog when something gets up my nose.
Six months later, I am still wishing that it was smoke getting up my nose.
How tragic.
Oh, why can't being a non-smoker be easier?

For the last few months, I've been sidetracked into blogging for my newspaper's website.
It is a pretty unrewarding business.
There is a very different demographic going to those commercial sites - and it contains some rather ugly individuals who take the invitation to "comment" on stories as an opportunity to leap, in ill-educated English, into vicious personal attacks.
They misread the copy, misinterpret or perhaps don't read at all, since a few of them simply seem to want to talk about my photograph.
Most common comments are in the vein of "get off your high horse lady - X is a lot better than you are - go back to writing cookery books".

I am sure these people would not speak to one in the flesh in this manner.
It seems that the anonymity of the Internet is an enabler for sour, angry, frustrated and, dare I say it, pretty stupid people to hit rock bottom and be their true selves.
Cowardly, crude and venomous.

So, it is generally an unpleasant experience to log in to moderate the comments on the newspaper blog.

But, my compensation lies in the fact that these uglies are not as anonymous as they may think. Their email addresses may be private from the website readership but they are not concealed from the website administrators. So, guess what? I know who they are!

Oh, my, and wouldn't their employers be appalled at the sort of grotesque things their staff members are sending out online during the course of their working hours?

Aren't they lucky that I am not as vindictive and cruel as they are?

Organ donation, a soft tissue issue.

Being an enthusiastic supporter of the power of the Blogsphere to make a difference as the brilliant, international pressure group, I embarrass myself by discovering that I am a day late in raising the flag for organ donors.
It is a cause which merits global attention. The Australian style is simply to sign up on one's driver's license. One would imagine, therefore that there are lots of donors registered. Yet, Australia has one of the lowest rates of donors in the developed world. This turns out to be because the words "Organ Donor" on your driver's license don't actually mean a damned thing. It is a "statement of intent" but it will not make you an organ donor. It remains an issue for next of kin to decide.
If Australians want to be organ donors, they have to go to a bit more trouble. They have to put themselves on a special register and carry a separate card. Another piece of bloody plastic in the wallet - because the driver's license, which is good enough for most ID requirements and is generally deemed the most pivotal personal document after the passport, is not good enough to be an organ donor card. Huh?
Is your head spinning? Mine is.
Well, Australia celebrated a lovely organ donors' week earlier in the year. Lots of nice people signed up. There are almost a million donors, 924,387, when last I checked. In a country of 21 million, I guess that makes one donor for every 21. I would not have thought it was a bad rate. But, of course, the donors have to be dead to be useful.

Or not. There are some nasty, scary stories out there because of which some people carry Organ Retainer cards.
Just to be fair to the other side of the story.
The tales of black market in human organs may not be myths. Certainly, there are some alarming stories from China, yes, China again, about harvesting organs from Falun Gong prisoners. There are tales of donor bodies left stripped, an abandoned gutted carcas on the slab, while the medics rush around saving lives with the harvested organs and tissues.
Those stories are a bit sad.
It is not perfect business and nor is it a perfect world.

But those of us who choose to do a bit of good, to give a second chance to the sick by dedicating our used bits to their rebirth, should make our intention crystal clear - especially to our next of kin.

Botox for blogs

I've finally done it. I have given angrypenguin a facelift, thanks to Blogger's upgrade-to-Google facility. I am pleased with the crisp, clean look.

Of course, I am having problems in this new, much-overdue template change. Blogger says one can access the original blog to get at template adds, but now I can't find it. Maybe this is because I made more than one change to the template as I moved over. Seeing my original choice in full-screen, I realised the column width was too wide for easy online reading and sought a narrower column - this template. That is a flaw in the preview facility - the small window gives a skewed perspective. The design looked dramatically different when I adopted it.
So, all my logos, my counter and illustrated links are gone - along with the link Blogger originally offered to my archived original blog. I've scoured the Help lists - to no avail.
One always dreads making any changes online - it is never problem-free and ends up being really time-consuming. I am a content expert, but never claimed to have much aptitude for the techie side of the WWW. So here I am, floundering.