Taking Lumps

Google owns Blogger/Blogspot.  I went through Google to buy the domain name "Better in Black and White" for my old Blogger blog by that name.  It was set to auto-renew on my debit card, but I got a new card with a new number this year and so it won't go through.   So I keep getting notices from Google that the domain is going to be cancelled.  These are automatically generated notices and I can't reply to them.  But when the directions for setting up the new payments are followed, I end up with a screen that reads simply "Invalid Request."  Ironically, you can do a Google search of  "Google account invalid request" and find a host of similar complaints.  The bottom line is that a lot of people are going to lose their domains and so far Google has largely been unresponsive.  Certainly the directions they email you to fix the problem don't work.  At all.  Fortunately, I already retired from that blog, but I did intend to keep it up.  I have tried to do something about this for the last three Sundays and I just don't have any more time to waste on it.  I guess it will revert back to the Blogspot default name soon and I will post that link,  but this has been a very annoying experience.  If anyone else out there is using a domain purchased through Google, you may want to make sure now that you can access and change your billing information.

First they eliminated the excellent Google Reader for blog subscriptions, and their handy iGoogle page is going down at the end of October.  With Yahoo's disastrous (in my opinion) change to Flickr and my irritation with Google, my relationship with some of the big guns in the online world is pretty rocky this year.

With that rant over, I will say that at least one thing went well this week.  Ann's lumpectomy.  The path to being cancer-free may be a difficult one, but at least we've now started down it with some actual treatment, and we have the light of a long life at the end of the tunnel to focus on.  So yeah, you're right, my qualms with Yahoo and Google are pretty minor in the grand scheme.  Still, I'll leave you with two links: Ipernity and Wordpress.