Mark Roberts Searching for a New Blog Provider

 

We had been reading Mark Roberts' radio posts when we were informed that his blog disappeared. The good news is that Mark is okay. The bad news is that Mark's blog provider banned him inexplicably and they are not cooperating in his efforts to retrieve his posts.  Mark explains in his own words after inquiries were made about his health and safety:

Thanks, guys. I'm doing great, other than not getting bike rides in due to the cold, wet weather that won't let go of the Bay Area.

I was in the middle of writing a post Sunday night about the Cambridge Model 88 when my MyOpera account access was cut off. There was no warning or no notice. Even after four requests for explanation over the past five days, there has been none.

I was able to get all the blog contents from a cached Google Reader feed. I have not been able to get to the photo galleries so I will have to reconstruct them at some point.

It is Opera's system so they can do what they want, obviously. It does highlight the perils of relying on free third-party sites that can change their policies on a whim.

So I am considering what my next steps will be. I would like to get some of the posts back. I have a longstanding site that has no blogging software, which means I would have to (re) code the HTML mostly by hand. I can do it but the Google Reader HTML is not easy to work with. It will take time and when done I will have to do w/o RSS or Atom feeds, but maybe those aren't so important any more with the advent of Twitter and Facebook.

The path of least resistance is for the Opera people to restore my account, and then I can retrieve my content in a more usable form. But that requires their cooperation, which does not appear to be forthcoming. I am now even more leery of using other third-party sites, even Blogspot, than I was before.

Ideas and thoughts will be much appreciated. And props to Jason for his Internet search skills!

 

Comments

[John]

I would like to see what you have to share about the Model 88. I had two of them and gave both away. The damn subwoofer ruined an otherwise great radio.

[Mark Roberts]

For now, I've gone with Tumblr: markrobt.tumblr.com -- while somewhat restrictive with photos, it should be able to easily handle the text from the posts that I managed to save.