Friday, December 19, 2008

Actually they suck

When this blog lived at Blogdrive, I paid $2.95 a month to remove ads. Paying a little bit also afforded me more space to upload pictures. For a few months I even paid $4.95, but I can't remember why I did that. At any rate, I was paying the $2.95 when I left to begin blogging here. I started blogging there in 2005 and if you've known me for any of that time, you know that they were a constant thorn in my side. I haven't had any response from Blogdrive yet about the old place being disabled, but I'm pretty sure the reason they did it was because I'm no longer paying that small fee and my picture storage is over the limit for the free version (seems I'm using 4886% of the allotted MB). I'm willing to delete pictures, but since the blog is disabled, I can't even see what pictures were posted where. I suppose I could pay again and take the time to do some photo deleting or possibly just grab my content and be done. I'm so frustrated. I'm trying to decide if there was anything written in all that drivel that was worth keeping. (Stories about Daddy...the whole week before he died...the memories I've written about my kids) Is it worth the (huge amount of) time and (seriously huge amount of) effort to do that? Maybe I could take the $2.95/month and give it to a jobless person and hire them to copy and paste for me. Oh wait...I forgot I'll have to pay to get it to even show up. There are over 750 entries there. Impossible. Just impossible.


I've learned a lesson though. If I want to keep any of this stuff, I need to do it as I go. We all know Beej is brilliant and she doesn't like learning lessons. It makes her look like she didn't know something. Beej would much rather the blogdrive people just be good to her and answer her email like a proper business and not like a website run by amateurs. Instead, I get this statement, written to me on the page I visited to submit a trouble ticket, before I ever even began to complain....


"Due to the large number of trouble tickets received, we may not respond to all."

17 comments:

Paul Mitchell said...

Here's the only way that I can find and determine for sure that you can get your stuff in one fell swoop. Pay the money to Blogdrive. Create a Feedburner account and burn the feed of your old Blogdrive blog. Choose "Burn full feed."

Install Firefox and the screen/page grab plug-in. Page by page capture the Feedburner feed and save it to your harddrive. It will capture all photos and text in a printable format without the Blogdrive formatting and it will only take you about three FULL days to do that with over 700 posts. Of course, you can just pick and choose which posts you want to save that way, as well.

There is no other way to import the entire blog to any other format because Blogdrive doesn't publish an RSS feed on their blogs. That would be because Blogdrive sucks.

Hope that helps.

Beej said...

Once I figure out what you just said, I'm gonna do it.

Thanks. Mostly thanks for saying they suck. Cause they do.

Deirdre said...

Don't pay for anything.
Email me. I know what's going on and I will try to help you get your page back.

inspired11 at gmail dot com.

<3

Duble said...

Hence the migratation of you, me, abby, ute, and penny. Infact brandy is the only blog i read still over there.

Beej said...

I'm pretty surprised that they don't listen to the complaints and try to do better. Way too much competition out there.

Abby said...

That's the reason I left. Too much smart @$$, not enough real help.

I never even paid as little as 2.95, just feeloaded and put up with the ads. I'm not important enough to need to be adless. I've since deleted the whole old blog in one fell swoop. Very cleansing.

Brandy, if you're reading.... come on over!

Junebug said...

You really need to save all those stories. I kinda want to save all mine, too, but I'm not sure I would ever figure out all that stuff Two Dogs said.

Paul Mitchell said...

i have no clue why I forgot about the Internet Archive, but all of your posts are there up until December 2007. Try this.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http:/brillianceduplicated.blogdrive.com/

Unknown said...

When a blog is disabled, the general notification of such act is a contact form sent to the email on file with the account holder. When someone leaves a Blogdrive blog to go somewhere else, and leaves a note saying why they are leaving and a link to where, often that blog is disabled so as not to utilize member webspace for an abandoned blog.

All information published to this blog is still available in the blog management area, including posts, pictures, images, etc. Blogs are never disabled because the person no longer wants to pay for service, and to my knowledge, no Blogdrive blog has ever been disabled for being over the storage limit. Hope this helps.

Beej said...

Well, I suppose I didn't read the fine print and that would be MY fault. However, blogdrive has been completely unprofessional and difficult to deal with for three years. The mass exodus from blogdrive only verifies my claim.

Sinja, I told Deirdre this morning that I have tried to refrain from being negative based solely on my online relationships with her and with you and JFZ. I'm sorry if this is offensive to you in any way.

Finding help there is close to impossible and for paying members, that is unacceptable. I don't care how trivial a blog is, if somebody is dishing out money then they deserve proper service.

The posts and pictures are only available to me if I go into them in edit mode. So, no, my blog posts are not available to me in the form that they were previously.

Blogdrive could have easily sent me a notice. There is plenty of evidence that somebody bothered to take the time to discover my error, but didn't take the time to email me and let me know the plan to disable it so that I could remedy the situation without name calling. I was only guessing about the picture overload being the reason because NOBODY bothered to answer my email or my trouble ticket.

Am I wrong here?

I'm ticked.

I do appreciate Deirdre's help, and if they will enable it again, I'll get my crap off there in a more reasonable manner than copying and pasting 175 entries in edit mode and then I'll shake the dust off my feet.

Unknown said...

I emailed you :)

Anonymous said...

Yeah, see I keep everything simple, if you don't expect anything, you're not disappointed

terri said...

Ooooh, they DO suck.

I can't help you with your blogdrive stuff, but it looks like you've got that covered now. Here's something I saved in my favorites and have yet to explore, but it sounds like something you may be interested in to make sure all your current stuff is preserved: http://www.blogbackuponline.com/techrigy/

Herb said...

I was one of the first to jump ship over there. I think Two Dogs has offered good advice. I type everything in Word first, then cut and paste it into my blog (on those occasions when I update, I know) and have done it that way since I started because at first I was afraid that any of the providers could go belly-up at any time. I was glad to leave BD. They were frequently rude or condescending when they deigned to respond at all.

Beej said...

Just an update...

The problem has been resolved and I now have all my content tucked safely away on my computer. I was right about most of it being drivel, but it was MY drivel and I wanted it.

All is well.

KJ said...

I guess I'm too late..
but whenever I used to try to send them a trouble ticket, it never,ever got answered.
So many times I requested a password thingy to chat on the tagboard, but nup..

Blogger 'aint much better really when it comes to trying to contact them..but I much prefer their layout etc..

Junebug said...

what did you do? how did you save it?