I must admit, I've become a google-fanboy over the past few years... as it's been one service I can honestly say... "it just works." It's always been reliable, and amazingly simple to use (from the user-side) but still provides full-featured APIs well documented for public use, as well as built on public standards, and a strong supporter of the open-source community... and even more amazingly... it's FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Admittedly, they pay the bills with advertising on everything you do... and who knows what else... but honestly, the ads are subtle enough that I don't mind them... and any other avenues of revenue generation they may use I have not yet found personally intrusive. No crazy psychedelic blinky banners of doom.... which all-too-often make me never want to return to a site.
That being said, Google is also notorious for acquiring other "bits" to improve their internet-footprint. This "brain-dump" is stored on one such service. Google acquired Blogger... and after quite a while decided to integrate authentication schemes. This is exactly what caused me to almost completely lose my blog... and reevaluate my faith in Google. Truthfully... even though I was able to recover my blog... it was not due to any direct communication with Google... and was not due to any help from any of their many help-documents... and further still... was not even from their forums or the many helpful people who tech-support Google's stuff. It is much like me (an individual) trying to get Microsoft to acknowledge a bug in one of their products... without forking out crazy-amounts of cash. In-short... I followed every step they recommended to get help... and ultimately it ended up in a forum which never gets read or responded-to by anyone.
In Google's defense... I can honestly appreciate the complexities & difficulties of trying to merge two completely separate authentication systems into one. You can't simply keep both sets of usernames/passwords alive... eventually one has got to prevail. There was notice that google wanted everyone to transition to a google-account, and I thought since my account was associated with my google-apps enabled domain, everything was good-to-go. Well... sadly, I wasn't. I'm not exactly sure when Google finally flipped the switch... but there-after when I tried to log into my account I was presented with a blank blogger account. But my site still had all my posts. Browsing to my site when logged in, only showed me the traditional guest page. I tried posting on forums... password-resets... there's even an offline "recover-your-account" page which seems forever-offline with no ETA to being back-online. I was about to give up & remove DNS entries and perhaps look elsewhere for something else.
Well As you may be reading... I didn't give up. I somehow stumbled upon this page: http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=27443 which I didn't have a lot of faith in... but figured, what the heck? It's worth a try. Well... following the "Do you use Gmail with this account?" with the "yes" option was completely useless... but for kicks... I said no... and ended up at the "password-assistance page" (https://www.google.com/accounts/recovery) which after submitting my email address at my domain... came back with a rather strange option to send me a reset-password link... the strange part was that the email address was "myadmin%mydomain.tld@gtempaccount.com" ... well... that's not my email address... but the gtempaccount ... looked like perhaps google went & associated my blogger account with a bogus temporary account. For kicks... I logged in using my old password with the "myadmin%mydomain.tld@gtempaccount.com" as my username.... and voilà... it worked.
Just to be safe... I went and invited my proper "google-account" account with this & removed the gtempaccount.
It's a shame that there's a huge number of posts out there that also seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. I listen to many other bloggers/podcasters/etc... out there who have run into various issues with google's tools... and it seems when they have a problem google jumps as fast as they can to fix the problem ASAP... Google would be fools not-to... but the fact that I searched repeatedly across every document Google offered... followed their advise to the letter, and submitted multiple requests for help in their forums... waited over a month and still didn't get even the time of day. It seems that Google's users are only as important as the number of their followers. But hey... it's freeeeeeeeeee...
To all who have fallen into my shoes... I can truly feel your pain... it may not work for ya, but try to log-in using yourolduseracct@gtempaccount.com with your old password.
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