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.

Like many of the .com boomers, I despised advertising on my sites so badly that I broke away from Blogspot.com completely. Back in those days, they put annoying animated GIF graphics on your blog. There was a paid option, but I figured if I was going to shell out $50 for an ad-free, free blogspot site for 12 months, I might as well just get hosting for my neglected domain (this one here) and be done with it. Why not have a fully hosted site for just $10 more? I could put all my files on there, and get a custom email address, and never, ever have to deal with advertising again! Then the froobs moved in. They wanted free blogspot.com sites, so the paid blogspotters were blotted out. They got their free blogspot sites when Google took over (no, I will never, ever get over that!). Then they started making money off of their free sites. They paid nothing for the site, but they want funds to advertise on it because Google blogs are at the top of Google? Makes a lot of sense!

Then we come across Spott Advertising. The ‘anything goes’ advertising that brought us Cassie’s World, complete with a picture of a woman giving a blowjob next to an entry about keeping kids safe and off of adult sites. Hmmm. Now comes along a Christian site, that says some of the songs she is posting are not Christian, but we should keep an open mind. Her Spott Advertising suggests that we should keep an open ass, too:

And that’s why I love the internet. XD

So during my browsing, I found a site called Psychotic Letters From Men. It deals with emails that deranged and crazy men send women. Most of them are people who met in real life, and that’s where my story comes in. I was going to email this to the people at that site, but I don’t think it’s extreme enough. Though it is amusing. To me anyway.

On December 26, I was browsing the Myspace forums and someone posted that their 11 year old daughter had been beaten up by a boy at school just before Christmas break and the father was wondering who he should sue–the public school system or the parents of the bully. He went on to post how the boy frequently bullied his daughter and made some derogatory remarks about how the boy bully was ‘clearly a [gay] because [he] hated his daughter’.

I clicked on the man’s profile because he was in my old home town, and guess what? He was MY childhood boy bully! When I was just a year younger than his daughter, he approached me in the school library, tore my glasses off my face and punched me as hard as he could, then started kicking me. The school librarian pulled him off of me, but he was never suspended and harassed me until I moved away.

I sent him a message though Myspace reminding him of this, and asked him if he was sorry he did it to me.

The following was his reply:

“yea, when i hit u i was just playin. this [gay] aint playin. [gay] was pissed! u hav no rigte tellin me how teh past waz back then! u dont no shit! ”

I sent him back a message that it certainly didn’t seem like he was playing to me, back then, and that he had broken my nose when he hit me. I even offered to scan my old medical record to prove it. At the end of the message I explained that I just wanted him to own up to what he had done to me and apologise so I could have closure. I thought that being the parent of a bullied child, he’d be more understanding. This is what I got as a response:

“i aint apolizin for shit! u derserved it! fuk u! if i ever see u again ill do more then break ur nose! watch ur back bitch!”

So…first he was ‘just playing’ and I was overreacting, and now it was intentional?

Today his Myspace account and the forum thread is deleted. His own actions, I suppose. I didn’t report him or reply back. I think he has serious drug addiction issues and a mental illness, but I’m no professional at diagnosing over the internet. I wish I had copied, pasted and saved my emails to him. It was fun and amusing, to say the least.

BTW, I am not worried that he’s going to track me down and physically assault me again. He lives in a completely different state than I do, and I doubt that he has the funds to track me down and pay me a visit. Thanks for the concerns, anyway.

Today Crimsonsparkle.net is ten years old. My blog’s birthday isn’t until June, and I’m aware that probably everyone who’s ever had a site online has already celebrated the 10th anniversary of that site and I’m the last to do it. But it’s still some kind of an accomplishment to me. I know people who have had sites for a decade and the site isn’t really about them. My site has been 100% by me and for me. I hope that it continues on for many more decades.

Sorry if anyone was expecting anything really ‘big’. This is somewhat big. To me.

For anyone who doesn’t know, I used to blog with that CD playing back in the glory days of blogging.

I found out via AOL’s main page on the 30th. I even saved the screen caps from back then. I don’t know why, but I’m glad that I did:

Everything went as planned. Perfect holiday, perfect family. I got up at 7am, put the turkey on, and crawled back into bed.

I played around with my old scanner today. It can ‘melt’ pictures: