AOL assures us that we can "easily" transfer our blogs to a new location, click here.
So, I click here, and get taken to a log-in page. Since I don't have a blog there, I try to create a new account, but it says my e-mail already exists in their system. OK, so I try to log-in at the page that directs me to, which tells me that I can't log in because they have no record of my e-mail existing in their system. Grrrrrrrr.
OK, finally out-stubborned that, got logged in, created a blog, and can't find the link I'm supposed to click to import this journal. Hmmmm.
Finally found a link to Help, Importing AOL Blogs. Which says click here -- OK, maybe the problem is that I came in through the wrong link, and you've got to come in through this door to get the Import link. Go through all the rigamarole of setting up a second blog, and the word Import does not appear on that page in the spot where it appears in the picture on the Help page.
Go back, re-read Help, Importing AOL Blogs. It says you can also do it through the Advanced Settings page. Great. Click on Advanced Settings ... it tells you how to set up a blog there to be hosted elsewhere, but the word Import doesn't appear on this page, either. Not only where it's shown in the picture, but nowhere.
Click through a few million more Help pages till I finally find a link to Known Problems. This tells me what to do if my AOL blog does not complete the import process, but still does not do me one bit of good in starting the import process!
Click around some more, there's a Google Group specifically for this purpose, but all the posts deal with the process stopping midway, none of them tell me how the bleep I'm supposed to start the process.
So, an hour and a half later, I still have not been able to do the automatic transfer that AOL says is "easy". Haven't even found the magic button to push to start it.
To which I have only one thing to say:
Thank God this is a temporary fix and in a couple months we'll be doing all this in-house at CFSfacts.org, where I do not have to deal with this <steer manure> ... I'll have my very own webmaster to deal with it for me!
The only good news is, I am doing this now, and not 8 years ago when I could only use the computer for 5 minutes an hour, and can now think clearly enough to understand the instructions, and to grasp that the problem is not that I'm failing at the task because I don't comprehend the instructions, but that the instructions are telling me to click on something that doesn't exist.
8 years ago, I would've been totally exhausted and so frustrated with my inability to understand how it's done that I would've screamed and thrown the computer through the TV. At least now I know the problem isn't me, because I'm absolutely positive that the word "import" does not appear on any of those pages in any of the places the pictures show it to be. You can't click what's not there, and this time I'm not missing the word because of the mental fog.
So, in that way, I've come a long way in 8 years, thanks to finally getting the sleeping pills I needed instead of the anti-depressants that made me sicker. But the joy in knowing that I'm finally improving is overcome by the frustration of having wasted an hour and a half of my limited functional time trying to do the impossible by following inaccurate instructions.
And incredibly annoyed that it appears that instead of just being able to click one button to transfer all these posts to a new blog, as AOL assures will work with this one particular blogging site only, I am, in fact, going to have to waste several workdays manually saving each and every post so we can put them all up at CFSfacts.org when we re-launch.
Nothing is ever as easy as computer geeks make it sound, and I am quite sure that they will figure out some way to blame it on the user that their system is not displaying the correct page with the correct buttons.
LATER
AOL claims that this is simply a matter of Blogger's system being overwhelmed with transfers, which doesn't explain why I can't even find the Import button to click and be told it's not working.
I did find a place to go to ask questions:
http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help-aol-import
Since you've already created a google identity to set up your Blogger account, it's fairly easy to join the group so you can ask (or complain).
Later
8 hours after starting the supposedly "quick and easy" process of transferring this blog to google, I have given up. The only answer to be had is that I must be doing something wrong in the transfer process, when, in fact, I can't even find the place to start the process -- I can't be inputting my URL wrong when there's nowhere on the page to put it!
Google has never impressed me. I use altavista and GoodSearch and find lots of things that google doesn't. Their Usenet feed qualifies merely as "better than no Usenet at all". And now their promise that I can just click in one spot and automatically transfer my blog to their site has proven to be yet more empty promises from them, more incompetence, yet more reason to have my blog on my own website with my own Web Guru there to not only answer questions but do the work for me when I get frustrated.
8 hours and a couple hundred webpages/clicks/links later, and I am no closer to getting this blog transferred over, or getting any answers from a live person. There is nowhere that you can e-mail google from the Blogger site. I would urge all my fellow bloggers to boycott Blogger, since it's the most useless piece of crap excuse for a website I've ever seen. The pages that seem to promise you can contact them, simply result in an endless loop of clicking on page 1 to get to page 2 and clicking on page 2 to get taken back to page 1. THIS IS NOT CUSTOMER SERVICE!
8 hours after I first started trying to report it to google, 7 hours after I reported it to AOL, there is still NO "status" and NO "known problems" on this subject. All I get in trying to search the site is returned to the same Help page that shows where I should be looking for the word "import", and when I go to my blog, the word is not where it's shown in the picture. You're supposed to be able to do it through Advanced Settings, but it's not there, either. I've cleared my cache, removed my cookies, and the problem still remains, that the webpages that are loading on my computer do not have the magic word anywhere on them.
I hope every AOL member who's been caught up in this loop of unhelpfulness sues Google/Blogger for every hour that's been wasted. Not at the $15/hour you're paid, but at the $75/hour your employer bills your time to the clients. Maybe that will get their attention at how much time of how many people has been wasted trying to do the impossible. You can't click on a link that's not there. And if the link is not there, it does not help to blame the user for doing something wrong on their end.
Google/Blogger are the biggest bunch of idiots in Silicon Valley if they think this is going to impress me to keep my blog there. As soon as my website's up and running, I'm gone, and it'll be MY website that gets the ad revenue for the page views. I flatly refuse to use any google product ever again because this experience was the last straw in a long history of disappointments. And I hope that they've set up a news tracker that tells them when their name hits the web, so that some live person there finally reads what I would've said to them if only I could've found a link that actually led me to an e-mail form.
NOTE: instead of saying it to google privately via an e-mail, I've posted it on the web where the whole world can see it. Not quite the way any business wants a customer service problem to be handled. But they're google, they don't have to give a damn.
No comments:
Post a Comment