Defecting from another blog...

I come here from Blog-City. For 3 years I had a great blog there. I loved it. I had also managed to build things up to a respectable 20,000 hits per months readership. And then they sort of sprung yet another 'upgrade' on me which rather than make life easier for long term maintenance, made it more difficult. The problem with their upgrades are two fold: (1) For the most part, they involve a lot of back editing of previous entries, which after 3 years, can add up to quite a few, or (2) seem to involve reformatting large chunks of the blog in a manner which is not user-friendly initially. This time, they wanted me to rebuild the entire custom theme to the blog, without even othering to migrate the previous theme's I had developed. I had the gaul to complain. They sent me a shirty reply saying they thought I should move on. Given I was a paying customer, I thought that response was unbelievable, so I am moving on... Hello Blogger!

And in case you were thinking of going to Blog-City, check out my complaint and their reply:
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My complaint to Blog-City:

Questions wil undoubtedly follow as it is not working for me but I have just spent the last 90 minutes TRYING to get this blog to resemble something similar to what it looked like before you FORCED us to go to widgets and do far, failing. Why do you persist in constantly 'upgrading' your system??? When I joined 3 years ago, you were VERY easy to use but now???? And in all honestly as someone who has had to suffer every single blasted change you have made so far, not one - I repeat, NOT ONE has made my life, my blog, my blogging any easier to maintain or improved it. None of them. And as far as I can tell, these widgets are not making it any easier yet. So in 3 years of ever increasingly complicated changes I completely fail to see the benefit of this and all it has done has made me madder and madder that you are making it more difficult and I have to build my blog up again every damn year. I am a WEB DESIGNER and I can't work out you've done this time. Even if I manage to resurrect my old theme, it will take me so long, I wont' have the energy to resurrect my other themese. And the fact I can't even migrate my saved skins, my saved theme's or my layouts or ANYTHING across and have to rebuild this blog from scratch SUCKS! Worse, who the hell can tell what your customised CSS scripts mean anymore??? How can I relate it to the blog body or the header panel??? I can't - I have to sit and play with 5 tabs under each heading,hoping one will eventually yield a style result similar to what I had before. I used to like you, but I tell you what, if you keep on 'upgrading' your system and making it harder and harder to retain the settings which made it so easy to maintain 3 years ago, I will NOT be renewing my blog subscription because I am getting very tired of battling for more and more hours every year to try and keep up with your changes. And this one is the most devsatating because if it is unworkoutable to a web desginer, how is someone who thinks blogging is just a matter of logging in and entering some thoughts going to work out your latest incarnation??? I am really going off Blog City and will no longer be recommending it to my friends as I can't even help them now.

And this is the reply from Blog-City - disgraceful!!!

I'm quite prepared to close you down today. This change to widgets has been available for 7+ months. And you email this on the 2nd last day? If you want a flat boring unchanging service there are millions of them out there. We change because we have users requesting changes, requesting features daily. We have the pressure of the blogging standard to conform to, and new sites coming up with different way for competition.

Version 6.0 is coming in the next few weeks - you can take a look now if you like just go to http://travelblips.blog-city.com/console/admin/v5/

If you don't like whats coming, you're not going to like the next 2 years at blog-city. I suggest if thats the case we can part waves now.

Best Wishes,

Mayoress, blog-City Team

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So give me time and I'll gradually get my other blog entries up and running in here - but it will take a while to migrate 3 years worth of entries across...