On Thursday morning, I sat at the computer, ready to do some catching up. Critter Alley opened with no problem, but then...Surprise! Blogger would not let me log in. I went to my most recent remedy for such problems and clicked on "sign out". Usually Blogger will then politely allow me to properly sign back in. This time, no dice.
After trying the same method about 5 times, I gave up. No doubt some temporary little traffic problem. Surely later in the day things would be fine. I couldn't have been more wrong. Thursday night I went through the same process. Blogger still refused to allow me in. What's more, Critter Alley seemed to be doing some rather strange things. Comments disappeared, while some odd looking symbols showed up. What the heck did that mean?
Then I started to worry. Had Critter Alley somehow become corrupted? Could it have been hacked? All my attempts at solution failed. Once again I shut down the computer, hoping that Friday (the 13th) would be a better day. It felt so weird not to blog that I had to soothe myself by eating half a DQ ice cream cake.
Bright and early Friday morning I went back to Critter Alley hoping all would be well. But once again, I couldn't log in. Blogger doesn't provide a way to directly communicate with administrators, so while looking for answers in the "Help" section, I discovered that Blogger had apparently experienced some sort of major meltdown during maintenance work. The entire system had been put in "read only" mode while they tried to correct the problem.
Somewhat relieved that issues weren't unique to me, I shut down the computer and decided to try my luck on Saturday. To kill time, I finished off the rest of the ice cream cake.
On Saturday, signs of hope appeared. Blogger had posted a notice that issues were resolved, posts restored, and everything was back to normal.
Everything except Critter Alley, that is. After another hour of trying to figure things out, I posted my issues in the Blogger Issues forum. And I must say that would be a pretty darn handy place to visit if only you really got any help there. I still haven't heard a word from anyone.
So, amidst renewed sweating and slight hyperventilation, I went back to the drawing board, culling through the Questions and Known Issues Forums. Unfortunately, there were way more questions posted than answers. The hunt continued until much, much later.
Finally, I stumbled across a suggestion to clear my computer's history of cookies and cache. Now that sounded like pretty drastic measures to me. Delete my cookies? Clear my cache? And what in the world is a cache, anyway? Would this impact on my computer's functions? Erase valuable information? Produce the blue screen of death? Not to mention the fact that I hadn't the remotest idea how to perform such a deed.
After even more research, I found a step by step guide. Going into "Tools", I checked the appropriate boxes and pressed (gulp) the "Delete" button. A little blue bar traveled back and forth for a full three minutes.
Then, in a virtual sweat, I went back to Critter Alley. Attempted to log in...
Hooray! It worked! Finally, I'm blogging again and feeling so good about it that I didn't even bother to eat dinner tonight.
H'mmm. Do you suppose there's a 12 step program for bloggers?