Monday 3 October 2016

Where have my Favourites gone?

Until today, one of the gadgets in the sidebar of my blog was one called "Some of my favourite blogs", giving links to some of the blogs I read most often - and support - along with a thumbnail photo and the title of their latest post. Now this gadget has disappeared. Why? Who removed it - not me, that's for sure. I'm presuming it is yet another instance of the drive by Google to take over the world and prevent any of us mere mortals having any say at all in the way we run our lives!


Has any one else had a similar experience, or have I been singled out for special attention?


I have a dilemma now. Should I try to re-create my list (I probably can't even remember all of the blogs that were on my list), or should I just wait for a while in the hope that Dear Old Google will put things back the way they were?


And Yes, I have used the "Send Feedback" facility - but I hold out little hope of any response from Google, let alone a positive one. I have used this facility before, and it seems to be just a worthless one-way traffic.

17 comments:

  1. Same thing happened to me. Just wait.

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  2. And the gadget got put back, did it? If so, how long did it take?

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    1. I can't remember. It was only last week or so. Maybe a half day, maybe 36 hours. But do nothing. Not your fault unless you changed something. Gooogle's problem

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  3. I don't think it was a google one, but a 3rd party one that you installed via google. Either way, lots of strange things happen when you only use other people's "things". My "My Blogs list" or "reading list" often disappears...comes back within a few mins. I ran my own ISP for 12 years and worked for an ISP for 15 and believe me there are more innocent reasons than you can shake a stick at as to why something stops working, but probably someone, somewhere has changed something with what would seem unrelated to your list but has affected your list....someone somewhere will be sweating until it's working :)

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    1. OK, thanks Andy, that's reassuring. I hope that Someone person is working hard on this right now!

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    2. I have a lot of patients when something like this stops working, I've been there in a data centre at 1am to do a 10min job. Before you know it you have been hours because a data centre has thousands of severs all making noise (fans) and you go to the back on a load of servers and sweat with the heat, return to the front and freeze with the cold of the air cone. The noise of all those fans and beeping stops you from thinking. Very intelligent people make very very stupid and amateurish mistakes in that environment. Believe me, growing plants with the problems that you have is nothing to the stress caused by a simple fault in a data centre. Be patient and know that some poor sod (probably in the dead of night somewhere in the world) is sleep deprived with all that noise stopping him from making a simple fix. :)

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    3. Tut! Tut! Software changes should never be made by engineers in a data-centre - they should be made by programmers sitting in a nice peaceful air-conditioned office, where they will be under no stress and therefore will not make silly mistakes. OK, now I'll go back to the real world... :) [Prior to my retirement I taught IT Service Management.]

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    4. Prior to my current lifestyle I was an Engineer and programmer turned technical manager who then took over a small ISP as the owner. I was the programmer, engineer who designed the system, wrote the software and had the pleasure of messing it all up once in a while. Small company, several thousand customers, the buck often stopped with me...fixing my own mistakes :) I used to pride myself on no outages of any kind...but we all rush and all take short cuts sometimes. You really know when you've made a mistake when you make a change from home, on Xmas eve, drive 100 miles only to find you broke something and hadn't checked. A few years ago I did that and spent Xmas eve / Christmas morning sweating in a data centre till the early hours. Not a favourite person with the wife nor many customers :) When the phones ring constantly and emails flood in and you're 100 miles from your data centre on Xmas eve you know you've made a mistake :) Big companies with all their resources and personnel shouldn't have that problem but a small company often does and a lot of plug ins for blogs and websites are made by one man bands etc...they look big but these things can be run by one or 2 people, and you'd never know...until it goes wrong of course and you have to wait ages for it to be fixed :) I'm glad to be away from the sharp end.

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  4. I have not a clue about any of the tech things so I just go with the flow and hope someone works it out eventually.

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  5. Now I'll be waiting for it to happen to me. Have you tried using the Blogger forum as often you can find someone who can suggest what is happening and if it is a problem being worked on,

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  6. I think I can identify with much of what what Andy is saying, since I spent over 30 years working in IT myself. When people ask me why things stop working, I usually tell them it's a miracle they ever worked at all! Especially if the internet is involved. I did choose to use a self-hosted Wordpress blog since I wouldn't have to put up with the Googles out there, but now I have to deal with my hosting site plus all the other players. I am thinking your blogroll will be back before too long.

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  7. The same thing has happened to another blog that I follow, unfortuantly there are two other blogs that are on that one blog that I also follow, this happened a week ago it's still not back to normal.

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  8. Very strange - I use the "Blog List" gadget that comes in the Layout and mine is still up. I had an issue, which I'm not sure if it's a Blogger issue or not, a few weeks ago where my most recent post was not being updated on other people's sidebars. That issue mysteriously came, then mysteriously went and everything seemed to be working fine again after a week or so.

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  9. The same thing happened to me . And I thought I was the only one affected. Recently, my comment section had disappeared but it came back. I have added a few blogs but it would be good if my original list returned.

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  10. As you know I am busy in the process of rebuilding mine, I'm not waiting for 'Someone' to reinstate it for me ;-)

    Blogger seems to be a law unto itself!!

    One good thing about it is that I'm discovering a whole new list of people to add to my new list as well as the old regulars :-)

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  11. This appears to be a very common problem for Google Bloggers across the Internet. Google only says they are working on it.


    Meanwhile there is the Wayback Machine
    https://archive.org/web/

    Type in http://marksvegplot.blogspot.com

    Choose 2016. April seems to be the last time the robots visited you, but your blog list is there.

    It is dynamic, but very very slow.

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    1. Thanks, Jane. I didn't know such a thing existed. I shall explore...

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