Seven years, now, I have been blogging. I came out of the barrel straight shooting at everything that I saw was tearing apart this country, from the War on Terror, the actual invasion of Iraq, the stealing of elections around this country by Republicans through the use of electronic voting machines, and the new trend of Republicans to be ugly, angry and lying Americans.
As I watched how quickly the corporate entities put gobs of money into the hands of politicians (both Dems and Repugs), and then saw them become shills for corporate interests over the people, watched this country go through Hurricane Katrina and saw the stupidity that has become known as the Bush era, my faith in this country as a leader waned. To see the “media” consistently be called out as having a “liberal bias” while simultaneously spewing out bile and lies on a daily basis made my stomach ache, and my head spin. Truth was, and now is, irrelevant in today’s politics, and it has spread to the “liberally biased” media (cough, cough) such that, as posted and reported a few months ago, those that watch NO TELEVISION news programs are smarter than those that watch Fox News or other news programs (by smarter, just that they are more aware of the world and American news, as a whole, than those that are actually attempting to get their information from the media). I stopped feeling the need to use my blog to pass along relevant commentary to inform my readers of the stupidity and lies that were being tossed around by media and politicians (both parties) alike, and started to open up and share personal stuff, like my music, my interest in sports and my take on other issues non-political.
Make no mistake, though. I am still a ferverent liberal, and nothing will change that. But with SOOOO many blogs covering the issues of the day, it feels a bit redundant to just cut and paste what they say and then add my personal two cents. When I first started out blogging there were not many (if any) multiple host blogs. We were generally all just one person taking on the world. In the intervening years, bloggers gave up their independent voices and joined together to make super blogs (like Daily Kos, Think Progress, and AMERICAblog), just to name a few, and that made my ability to get the lede out before them all that much harder, especially since I still had a day job to attend to, while these blogs started accepting donations and paying their bloggers to work full time. That was just not going to happen in my world, even if I wanted to blog full time, it was never going to pay my bills.
I have been on Blogger since day one. I spent a great deal of time using my knowledge of html language to take one of their standard templates and redefine it to make it my own and not a copycat that I would see over and over by other bloggers. When Google bought Blogger, the first thing they did was try to force us to change over to their new, uh how should I phrase this, blogging for dummies format. Just drop and drag here and there, and voila, you have instant blog! Fortunately, I was able to withstand that, and was never forced to utilize their new format at that time. However, the other blogs that I created and manage, like my grandson’s and the one for my uncle, were subjected to the new format, and there was really nothing I could do, although I was able to still use html to tweak things to my liking.
But, this new forced change is horrendous. The posting options remind me of old school email choices. The layout sucks, most of the options do not work, such as the ability to look at older posts ... click, click, click ... goes nowhere. Try to upload a video or a picture and click, click, click ... nothing appears. Heck, for the past couple of years, most people come to my blog just FOR the videos and pictures !!!! If I can’t even get that stuff up with the new Blogger, what is the point?
At any rate, this is my blogversary, as they say, seven years and counting. I am still not sure what I will do with Carrie’s Bar & Grill. I am tempted to just leave it hear as it is, and make up a new place, still owned by Carrie, but just not a Bar & Grill, so to speak. Maybe take on a new persona for the blog, where it will be less political and more personal. And then find a new host and hopefully, like the posting options and features better than Blogger.
As an aside, during the time my blog was offline, one person was able to find a Goggle cache of the blog which I had no idea you could access. From 4/20 through 4/25, there were no posts, and when you tried to go to my blog, you got a page that told you the blog was no longer there. Except on 4/23, someone read like 6 pages and spent about 15 minutes on my blog, and when I clicked on the referral link, I was taken to a place that stated by Google it was the last known “cache” of my blog, and you could actually pull the entire thing up as if it was still working. Very interesting, to say the least.
Anyway, in closing, between yesterday and today, I see Blogger has begun to “fix” some of their problems, such as the label category (which when I tried to pull up the list of labels I have created it went nowhere, click, click, click) and I see that I can now access my prior posts. Let’s see if later on, over the weekend, I can pull up some pictures and videos. Not saying that would make me stay here, but at least until I find out what I want to do next, I can work within the new parameters I have been forced to accept.
Ahhhhh, America ... oops, I mean Corporatopia, the land of the enslaved and oppressed peoples, where we are all assimilated by the Borg.
UPDATE: 4/29/12: There was a link in this new Blogger that was entitled "old format" and when I clicked on it, voila, the old format came back, although at the top it says "this format will be disable in the future." We shall see. For now, I have the old Blogger options and page, so I'll keep on keeping on, as they say!
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