Owning my blogs

I have gone back to writing blogs on my website. A strange situation happened with wordpress, I assume it is a monetising process but I don't know.

I have had wordpress blogs for many years, and everything was fine; it was easy to write blogs using their platform. I had 3 different logins with passwords I'd used for years - simple passwords my blog had no money associated with it. Without any prior warning these simple passwords were rejected, it would have been simple and user-friendly for wordpress to tell me to strengthen the password on the login page. Anyway they didn't.

Now here is where I am at fault, I had not recorded my login information correctly. On the main blog it was correct, clicking lost password got me an email and I was able to strengthen the password. My two less-active accounts it was different. My email addresses didn't work. I had a long discussion about one of the accounts where I tried to get at the correct email address but to no avail. It is quite likely that the address would not have worked as I use email addresses based on domain names, two domains I don't use now.

The next account I have doubts about. The email address had been used for pingbacks but when I entered the email address in the "lost password". I don't understand this, it is suspicious but hey - I am nobody.

The real aspect of this that is most frustrating is that I had not lost my passwords, and they were unwilling to allow me to enter the password once in order to strengthen the password - I could then have just checked the email address and made sure it was active. This does not make sense if they were trying to enable appropriate ownership ie if they were working with me.

They then had an account recovery form with 3 options:-

1) Quote a receipt
2) Send the original URL for verifying the account
3) Use 2-way authentication.

My accounts were 10 years old so 2) is ludicrous. Why do I with a non-commercial blog need 2-way authentication? And that leaves 3), pay for something.

Anyway I have lost access to 2 accounts - Matriellez and ginsukapaapdee.

I had been conscious a little concerning content ownership so I had made regular backups. When I looked at the backups there was no content, the backups were only there to enable me to move accounts within wordpress. Again suspicious, if I want my content what must I do?

What is clear is that I did not own my content, and am vulnerable to the whims of a huge software giant who has no personal interest in whether I can access my content. So I am going back to hosting my own blogs.

Wordpress stuff is easy, and has many features; I looked at blogger the features were not as good. When I examine these features there are many I can't reproduce on my webspace. But the real issue is interactivity with readers. Well no-one comments (or even reads) my blogs so that doesn't really matter, comments are the problem and no-one comments. So I am making my own blogs again.

There is an interesting coincidence. I had a run-in with my website hosts. Without realising, I had regularly run over the size I had paid for, and they had tolerated this. When I fully understood what was going on I agreed to pay for extra. Now I have a use for the extra space.

Comments - If you wish to make a comment please send me an email. I will reply to you, and if there is not too many (time constraint) I will put it online - if appropriate.