Battles with Blarg.

The former host of the Vitamin Fred site, Blog.com, is still making me nuts a year after I switched over to Blogger.

When I started doing this mostly useless but occasionally entertaining feature more than three years ago, I wanted to go with an outfit that wasn't an overbearing Silicon Valley Internet Death Star, but maybe a plucky bunch of guys who had the smarts to reserve a great domain (blog.com seeming to be the perfect place for a blog, n'est-ce pas?) and, being number two (or three, or 23,412) would try harder.

Didn't work out.

Many were the days that I would get the dreaded 502, the bad gateway that meant that my site was down, and sometimes that the entire Blog site was down---all two million users, according to Blog's home page. This often came at the most inopportune times, such as smack in the middle of one of my serialized stories, or when the great IMAO was planning put up one of my pages as the Link of the Day.

And let me point out that I was paying actual cash money for the privilege of using the site; it's generally free to use, but I paid a fee so I could post Amazon ads for my books.

So last May I threw in the towel and made the switch to the Internet Death Star. When my subscription ran out on Blog.com the Amazon ads went away, but the rest of the site remained up.

But when I checked in to reference an old entry---after the 502 error cleared up---I found that now all the pictures are gone. Every image I posted on the site: gone.

Which sucks. Because there were a lot of cartoons up there. And product humor. So now there's a lot of pages like this:

Found this in the dollar store! For reals! Can you believe it? Look at this thing!!!!1!!!!!

Har har! That's the most amazing thing I ever saw! 

Yeah, so I'm a little peeved.

I'm planning to take the damn site down, after I save some entries that might be worthwhile. I'm sure that will mean a lot of dead links from this site, but I'll fix whatever I find.

Not sure if there's a takeaway from all this, except to say that maybe Twitter would have been a more appropriate site for the semi-ephemeral nature of the Internet. If there's a video online of me getting my face shoved in a cake, it will be posted for all to see for the next century; but if there's a cartoon I'm really proud of, it will vanish into electronic dust at any given moment. That's e-biz.