The person I can’t seem to forgive is myself.

Not because of the accident, but because I am out of creativity, and my blogs are coming to a fast head. I can’t decide whether I want to keep them or let the domains expire. I cannot forgive myself because I have not kept a promise I made to myself last year. I cannot forgive myself for giving up on my eighteen-year-old dream of being a famous writer some day. I cannot forgive myself because people tend to not like me. I cannot forgive myself because I have been mean to people in comments lately. I don’t mean to be mean, the words just flow that way, and they are mean spirited. I certainly don’t mean to be that way. I don’t mean to offend people. Some of them have exploded in single-sided flame wars because I refuse to play back, but I am the one who enticed these people, and it’s not right. I doubt that I would be blogged, commented and posted about had I not left an ill-thought comment. I have gone back and apologised to those people, told them I forgive them for lashing out at me. That has caused these people to post what a “wimp” I am. Ok. Whatever. I’m done. I won’t play the game. I won’t post link backs to them with snarky, sarcastic comments. I forgive them for calling me a whore and a slut. I forgive them for taking my pictures from my page and writing “whore” and “slut” on them to display on their blogs and as icons on forums. I forgive them for taking my apology and twisting it into something that it wasn’t meant to be.

I can forgive all of that.

But I cannot forgive myself.

Where did it all go wrong?

This month has not been good, financially. I deserve a little reward, right? I was good all month long. I went to school. I didn’t charge anything. I walked that line. So…. Other than a layout, what else could I reward myself with?

1. Treasure what you write.

2. Write your own content.

I’ve always written my own content, even when I was writing in an old NeatBook in the fourth grade with a flimsy felt-tipped pen. I don’t have to steal from other people to have great content.

The joke is on this person who is interfering, because I’m not a high-strung anything. I just think people are amusing and I’m not afraid to say that under my real name. The only thing I regret is the person didn’t exactly use Corny’s name. They made it seem as if it were him hiding under the cloak of anonymity and reporting me. Amusing. I won’t go into the ways they hid who they really were, or the repercussions they felt for lying, but they were amateurs.

Doesn’t excuse the whole “ghost droppings” things though.

The best reason I can think of for not having a free hosted blog, was the great BlogSpot outage in 2001. No one could publish to their Blogspot hosted blogs. If you had FTP you could publish through that, but it left me in the dark as to when I could update my blog. This happened the first week I got really into blogging. Then came the fall of Diary-x and the Journal Script. Anyone remember that? It just sort of faded away, but I knew people who were still using Diary-x up until it crashed and burned four years ago. All entries were permanently lost. People who had been blogging since 2001 lost everything after five years. Diary-X was a pre-greymatter program that allowed its Journal Script to be installed on a domain. You had to make the templates from hand, but that was ok. Many times I had a different template each day. But when Diary-X went under, all that was left were the sites that had Journal Script installed on them. Source. As long as I have my domain, my entries are safe, unless I delete them.

As a writer, I treasure my entries, no matter where they are. Every year I back up my journal, just in case something happens to it. It’s the only outsourced journal that I have and I don’t trust the company who hosts it, so I back up. I back up my hosted blogs too. More closer to the time that my payment is due, because you never know when I won’t be able to pay for my site any longer.

Another reason I pay for a site rather than getting a wordpress-hosted blog or blog spot: The simplicity of making my own pages and hosting them here, where I know I won’t get the rug pulled out from under me, is quite comforting. Josh has never removed my content before, and I don’t think he’s going to start.

One of the better reasons is I can ban people. Yep, if you fuck with me enough, I can add your IP range to my .htaccess file and not have to worry about you, until you start dicking around with proxies, and then you’ve circumvented the ban and I can file an official report with your ISP.

Then there’s email. I can go 5 years without logging into my email address here, and I don’t have to worry about someone getting a hold of it an re-registering in and then breaking into my stuff. And should someone attempt to log into my stuff on this site, their IP is logged and I can file complaints with their ISP. This usually ensures a rush to complain to Josh that I’m abusing his server because I caught them trying to break the law, but whatever. I’ve never had any content removed from the web, ever, so I guess I know where the line is and I walk it very finely.

Next Entry: A Second Pile of Entrecard Ghost Droppings

Shortly after making that post, he came by and commented on the post, asking me to delete the entry because he had deleted the ad. Oh, and I was slandering him. Hmm. Slander = spoken words that has to be proven via a recording device. I sincerely hope he’s not one of the more crazy people who visits my site and hears voices. I couldn’t delete the post because WordPress would just regenerate it. So I edited it and we went on our happy ways.

Now here comes the disclaimer: I have no proof that the person who commented in that link up there did any of the following. He certainly never admitted to it, and the only connection that I had was the person lived in Germany and wanted my blog shut down and my domain turned over to them. They cried slander. Without a confession, I just have 99.9% proof it was because of the person in the link. So no harassing and hating, ok?

A day after I made the post, I gave up, because someone was emailing my hosts to death about ‘slander’ on my site. Hmm. I didn’t intentionally lie about the guy, what I reported was fact: He had an ad on his site that screwed with my browser and it pissed me off. My friend who hosts me made jokes that I shouldn’t worry about anyone reporting my site; whoever was doing it was an idiot and they were in Germany and probably thought they were still under Hitler’s rule. BURN! I still giggle at that thought. In the mean time, I got emails and comments every few minutes about my post. Could I take it down? It was over.. These comments and emails happened while I was sleeping and in class and sleeping some more. I guess I should have deprived myself of sleep and my education to make sure someone was comfortable on the web.

Why am I bringing all this up again?

Tonight I seen a post on a popular site that the culprit is ‘slandering’ other bloggers! OMG! He has two posts up about his shoddy investigation in all of this. To quote the wonderful Sheila in all of this, I have some commentary on her post that I didn’t think was wise to leave in her comments.

“Instead of researching this finding to make sure that there is no other possible explanation for these drops to show up -this blogger posted defamatory comments, calling these bloggers cheats and scammers.”
But it was wrong for me to call out his perverted ads that plagued my computer. Ads that load any modern computer up with spyware and viruses and caused me to have to purge an otherwise perfect MacBookPro.

“It didn’t take long for other bloggers to join in, saying they would be sure to not visit those blogs anymore.”
People online are basically sheep. They see someone who is popular in some way and they will cling to them. Other than the one comment that he left on my call out post, I have no proof that he’s ever contacted me in any other way, so I can assume that he doesn’t care about me as a blogger. I can also assume the same thing about the bloggers who are blindly following this person’s “research” and not doing any of their own.

“These accusations will follow the bloggers forever.”
Not really. You’d be surprised at the drama and lies that were said about me almost a decade ago. The people who said those things about me? You can’t even find their blogs now.

“This is not the first time that he has made accusations like this.”
He must have liked it when I did it to him. O-o

“remember when he had some ad service connected to his blog that redirected you to another page – one time when I was dropping on his blog the page redirected to some porn site (this was not a virus – but something he was doing to earn money) .”
“Do as I say, don’t do as I do!”

I gave this guy the benefit of a doubt four months ago. Now… I know that those redirect/resizing ads are against Entrecard’s rules. If any more pop up on any of his 3 blogs (ok…here’s my personal complaint–this guy is a dad, but he has three blogs and the time to write up these things and complain, complain, complain about people who write up things about him…where’s his wife? His child? My husband is inseparable from his kids when he’s home. He can’t even keep up with his journal. It’s hard to believe that someone has a wife, kids, a life, when they can update three blogs and drop 300 EC’s per blog per day. It takes me over an hour to do two and that’s if I don’t get any distractions.)….As I was saying, if anymore of these ads show up on his site and he’s an EC member, I won’t blog about it. I won’t message him. I won’t do anything, except report him to EC, and I encourage you to do the same thing, which will get his entire EC account removed. Including all of his blogs. He won’t have to worry about stepping in the Ghost Droppings on EC Road anymore because it will be a road he won’t be traveling down. Oh I am a bitch. I make mistakes. I’m a proud bitch. But not too proud to admit when I’ve made a mistake and I try not to make the same mistake again and again.

I’m positive he’ll show up here an whine about this entry and Josh will mysteriously be spammed, and I’ll be mysteriously spammed, and then reported to the WordPress boards again. Or outed on his websites as a scammer or an EC cheater (OMG! I have two blogs on EC! I hope he does it. I need a good laugh.). I’m not editing it. I’m not taking it down. One of the things this guy needs to learn is that if you’re going to have a public website, you’re going to be a public person. Public people are talked about, blogged about. It comes with the territory. Grin. Bear it. And STFU.

Before I continue, I feel the need to point out that I somewhat know what I’m talking about when it comes to Blogger.com. I was the 49,107th person to sign up for Blogger, and I have used the service on and off for nearly ten years.

Moving on, I see a few things wrong with this. For one, if I were still dependent on Blogger to publish my site, and my hosts are set up to use Blogger.com specifically, I would be in a pickle right now. For you see, my hosting expires on February 2end. To keep my site, I would naturally, pay for a year’s worth of hosting. Blogger sent out the notice to FTP users, that they were discontinuing the service on March 26th, on February 3erd. Unless they transfer their domain and hosting over to Google’s webhosting. Well, I’ve already paid for my hosting, as have 99.9% of the .5% of the “affected” FTP Blogger users, for the year, and I can’t get that money back. No refunds. $120 gone. I don’t know how much Google webhosting is, but I’m assuming they’re expecting their users to jump over to blogspot.com for free. Huh? I’ve just renewed my hosting for a year, with no refunds, and I’m either going to have to be forced to go to a free, non-professional site, or uproot everything and go to a new CMS. Which isn’t a bad idea to install something on your server so you have 100% control.

Then comes this part of Google’s excuse: “FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger.”

Ok. Well. When I was using Blogger back in 2000/2001, there was no bells or whistles for Blogger. Not even a title box. You had to do every little piece of HTML by hand. And I did, starting with the title tag at the top of my post, then typing everything out. I still do that in my WordPress entries. I’m not that lazy. Posts were numbered references on a page published once per month or week and updated periodically throughout that month or week. Blogger also featured a list of updated blogs on the front page. A Blog of the Month. A blog directory. The front page of Blogger was updated by people with souls, not Google drones.

Blogger was great.

Then in early 2003, Google acquired Blogger, and it became the abomination that it is today. Limited everything. One thing that really made me turn away from Blogger was the fact that in 2003, Google disliked something I published with their software to my personal, privately owned domain, hosted on a server other than their own, so they took the liberty to log into my account, delete the post from my domain and then delete my blog from my account. I never got it backed up. I had to just link to my old archive page. After that violation, which was not even against my hosts TOS and they should have had the final word on whether my content was removed or not, I went into self-hosted publishing platforms.

The moral of the story? Get your blog and go with WordPress. Or something that you’re comfortable with. Blogger is on it’s way out. You can thank Google for that.