I'm back!
And for the first time in my seven years of blogging, after pulling its first and hopefully only disappearing act, my blog is back too! It's a happy day!
And for the first time in my seven years of blogging, after pulling its first and hopefully only disappearing act, my blog is back too! It's a happy day!
I don't know if anyone has even noticed, but for the past several weeks if you tried to come to my blog, it wasn't here. You'd get a generic gray screen with business advertisements on it. It stoked the fire of my anger every time I saw it. My dear sweet Doll Sweet Journal was apparently gone forever due to the infuriating unhelpfulness and confusion that is Google, a company that became my enemy in September and after the fortunate events of this morning has now been upgraded to frenemy.
I can't even explain fully what happened because it's pretty confusing, but basically, I had to pay to renew my domain name (thedollsweetjournal.com), which I pay $10 a year for through Google. No problem. But it was a problem, because no matter what I did, Google wouldn't let me log into a "Google Admin Account" to renew it. I'd never set one up years ago when I bought the domain name and for some extremely frustrating and unknown reason it wouldn't let me start one. I tried so many things and so many times, but nothing worked. So I had no way to pay the ten bucks. It was so dumb, especially coming from this huge company that's supposed to be so smart and high-tech.
Adding to the confusion was the fact that my sister's Gmail address was mixed up with my account somehow (which I'm not sure we'll ever figure out how to fix because Google's not making that one easy either). I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to get this freaking ten bucks paid so that my blog would get renewed. I tried contacting Google for help to no avail. I googled my problem (how I hated having to use it given that Google was the source of my problem) and saw that others have experienced the same thing and weren't able to get it fixed. And then my blog disappeared when payment didn't happen, and I was TICKED. Seven years of writing and pictures, gone. I was so mad. I swore (literally) never to use Google for a blog again and to never use a Gmail account. I even started a new blog on Wordpress to make myself feel better and to spite Google, but I've done hardly anything with it because I was disheartened at losing my seven-year-old blog and having to start all over again.
Maybe this was a message from the universe that it was time to take blogging out of my life for good.
But I guess it wasn't, because I tried one last thing just this morning that Peter found through a more successful google search than mine was (grrrrrr), and miraculously, it worked! I've been procrastinating trying it for the last few weeks because in the likely event that it didn't work, it would have been the final nail in the coffin for The Doll Sweet Journal and I was going to move on to the Wordpress blog or just eliminate blogging from my life altogether. But miracle of miracles, it worked! So I paid the stupid ten dollars (actually I paid $30 just to be safe and as insurance for next fall so that I don't have to go through this again). And my blog got restored! It's back! Wipe away your tears of relief. I am! (Not really.)
But I guess it wasn't, because I tried one last thing just this morning that Peter found through a more successful google search than mine was (grrrrrr), and miraculously, it worked! I've been procrastinating trying it for the last few weeks because in the likely event that it didn't work, it would have been the final nail in the coffin for The Doll Sweet Journal and I was going to move on to the Wordpress blog or just eliminate blogging from my life altogether. But miracle of miracles, it worked! So I paid the stupid ten dollars (actually I paid $30 just to be safe and as insurance for next fall so that I don't have to go through this again). And my blog got restored! It's back! Wipe away your tears of relief. I am! (Not really.)
So it's back to business again! Although with the holidays coming up and a rather busy two months ahead, I'm not sure how much I'll actually blog for the rest of 2016. I might just start again in January. Or if I have some things that I feel I really must share with the world, then I might do some posts before then. But in the meantime, we're back (yes, my blog and I are a "we") and I'm very happy about it!
*An added note: I realized after I published this post that it was almost exactly seven years ago to the day that I started this blog, on October 26, 2007. (You can see that post here.) I just happened to have it on my to-do list to try and restore the blog yesterday on October 26th, too. Isn't that weird? I'm taking this as a sign that the blog is something I should keep in my life (no matter what Google has to say or do about it!). Happy birthday, again, dear blog, and thanks for coming back!
