Last night I'm talking with some people in a Google hangout and I'm suddenly thrown out. I'm forced to log back in and have them send a text message to my cellphone to prove its me. I've seen this before and this can mean only one thing - my blog was deleted.
The first message I got from Google:
Hello, Your blog at http://vaporjoe.blogspot.com/ has been reviewed and confirmed as in violation of our Terms of Service. In accordance to these terms, we've removed the blog and the URL is no longer accessible.
Fuck me right? Can you be anymore vague???
12 hours later I get this message:
Hello, upon further review we have determined that your blog was mistakenly marked as a TOS violator by our automated system and, as such, we have reinstated your blog. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused in the meantime and thank you for your patience as we completed our review process. Thank you for understanding. Sincerely, The Blogger Team
The first time my blog was deleted (about a year ago) we took steps to make sure we never go offline. I have servers and mirror sites. We keep blogger as part of our network because Vaporjoes started on blogger. We have thousands of back links and posts over the years from blogger so it still gets an incredible amount of traffic. While blogger is no longer our main site - many people still use it as such.
We still don't understand why they periodically delete blogs for TOS violations and then reinstate them - but I'm sure it has to do with keywords and algorithms.
To our readers - ALWAYS use http://www.vaporjoes.com first. That is our main server, and that is under our control. Blogger and Tumblr (mirrors) are there as backups.
http://www.vaporjoes.com/blog
http://vaporjoe.blogspot.com
http://vaporjoes.tumblr.com/