The consequences of Blogger's shutdown.

Blogger shutdown for "maintenance" this week. Basically, the site had crashed owing to some problems in the new "upgrades". During this period about 30 hours of posts were lost, no new comments could be received and no new posts could be made. Now, Blogger is back, however, there are some after effects.

You might have noticed that the comments on Writing in a Vacuum, disappeared. That is due to Blogger's failure and not my doing. Also gone are all the labels on the recent posts. This is not, however, what most concerns me. Blogger has clearly changed its programming. Blogger does not want writers, like me, to post links after each post - because today I was unable to activate the links. Active links, when copied, became inactive ones.This is a change in the way Blogger works which considerably reduces the utility of the facility. Is this why many bloggers eventually move on to their own platforms...? Do they tire of the lack of control and self-determination in free blogging platforms?

If anyone at Blogger/Google ever reads this, could you please change the programming back to allow the placement of links after each post? Don't you realize that, by hampering what your bloggers want to do with their sites, you are encouraging them to move on to other platforms? There should be complete freedom to write in whatever way a blogger pleases, as long as it does not harm others. That should also include freedom in how the blog is formatted, including outbound links.