Oh Blogger, how unstable you are...

The Blogger migration has set off a firestorm of problems for many users, particularly the BlogSpot-hosted users. Disappearing images, disappearing BLOGS, mass deletions of blogs for supposedly being spam, the list goes on. What makes it worse is that people looking for help idiotically flood the Blogger Help Group with problems that have been posted over and over again already, which makes it worse for people who are smart enough to search first find the solutions to their problems or people who have new problems to add to the group for help. I haven't run into any major problems, but I believe the worst one I could run into now is my blog not publishing to my web host.

Anyone who hasn't been hit by Blogger's instability should now realize the value of BACKUPS. Please take the time to backup your entire blog, template and all. Cheapest and easiest ways to back up your posts is to 1)add your email address to the "BlogSend Address" box under the "Email" tab in Settings so you can get your blog emailed to you; and/or 2) subscribe to your site's own RSS/Atom feed and download the feeds via a news aggregator client like RssReader or adding your feeds via email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, which can read news feeds. Then there is this way of creating a backup: "How to backup your Blogger blog". It republishes the blog as one page, so at least when users try to import their blog into the likes of WordPress, they don't have to open multiple emails and feeds to cut and paste each and every post. Since Blogger is now revamped, there is no other way to import entries to another blogging service, but at least blog recovery won't be a pain in the ass. 

I don't think anyone can stress it enough. If you're looking for an alternative to Blogger while they get their act together, then make sure you properly prepare for a move. The end.