Ah, the blog's alive!

So, here I was catching up on and preparing my posts for the day. A few moments later, I decide to resume my work only to find this.

Yes, a sign saying that my blog had been suspended due to a violation of Wordpress' ToS. Obviously I was not very happy when I saw the sign because ever since moving my blog, a good number of my posts contain a large number of photos along with impressions or reviews of products consisting of over 1500 words. Re-sorting those photos back onto Imageshack would have taken an enormous amount of time and I certainly didn't have a backup of my posts.

They could have at least sent out a warning.

Immediately I looked up the service's ToS just to double-check they hadn't made a mistake. There were a few questionable terms but I hadn't really done anything explicit... i.e., my posts do not contain "unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites". I only write about products I have purchased, used or interested in and link to relevant sites that my readers maybe interested in.

I decided to e-mail support for an appeal. Even if they decide to discontinue my blog, maybe I could still recover something. However, being prudent and expecting the worst, I was already thinking about what I should do. The first idea that came to mind was to check how many posts Google still had cached so that I could recover the important write ups.

I also went searching for an alternative free blogging service even though Wordpress remains the most functional one I have used thus far. It's just a shame they've added in a lot more limits these days compared to when they first started i.e., customisation limited to widgets, no Javascript and links to third party advertising (although they are considering allowing Google ads).

This morning, relief came in the form of an e-mail. Apparently it was just a "technical glitch".

After this ordeal, I'm even more eager to get my own host and domain name. Then I would have much greater over the files on my website and I don' t have to change the watermark on my images every time I'm moving. I would still deploy Wordpress because it remains my blogging software of choice but, since I can't afford to do so ATM, I will just have to be resourceful.