Hostile Takeover

...While taking a break from school work I came across a few things that might be of interest to anyone whose computer skills are as rudimentary as mine and whose blog is important to them.

...Last night, just before I was about to log into Blogger, I noticed a recently updated blog scrolling by called The Real Blogger Status. The odd name piqued my interest, so I decided to check it out. It’s a blog about blogs, run by an IT consultant named Chuck. The information on Chuck’s site made me a bit more aware of a few things going on in the world of Blogger that will no doubt affect those of us who use it on a regular basis. Among the important things:

• Over the last few months, the number of Blogger-deleted and hijacked blogs has increased. Some blogs have fallen prey to a new Blogger anti-spam program, whereby the blogs are mistaken for spam and sent to the Internet graveyard. Other blogs have been stolen from their owners by hackers, and in some cases—such as this poor guy—the thieves taunt the victims.
• Some of the hijackings have been carried out by individuals with a grudge, others by spammers who see an opportunity to have yet another site to sell their crap.

...Either way, there are quite a few interesting things which are on The Real Blogger Status that might be worth doing if you have a lot of time invested in your Blogger blog:

• Never delete an address. Even if you want to delete the posts, hold onto the address because your address might be ranked on a search engine, and that creates a prime situation for spammers who can easily grab the address if you give it up.
• Make some kind of back-up for your blog if possible: save the template code, save the post text, etc. This doesn’t take much space if you copy and paste the information to a Notepad file, but remember: Don’t copy and paste to a Word document because it might “fix” things that shouldn’t be “fixed,” such as perceived spelling errors.
• Make your password disgustingly random. Don’t use anything that might be found in a dictionary because software to decipher passwords has become so sophisticated that it can detect words spelled forward, backward, and in patterns. Make it a sick soup of letters and numbers that have no significant meaning whatsoever. P-Synch offers more information on this topic if you’re interested.
• Posting on a regular basis can be a good thing. Two folks (Person 1; Person 2) have reported their blogs being deleted after having not posted anything in several weeks.

...If anyone happens to see anything odd occurring with this blog in the future, it should be known that it’s not my doing; I have no intention of deleting or changing anything on Faint Expectations. The only thing that has been tweaked in the last few weeks is the font, from Georgia to Verdana for easier reading.

...If anything negative should happen to occur, I’m not sure if I’d return to Blogger. I’d cross that bridge if I came to it.