Probably none of you are still here, probably none of you will ever see this, and yet I must apologize. I am sorry the comment you so generously wrote in response to one of my blog posts never appeared below that post, that it seemed to vanish into the blogosphere. That was not intentional, I promise you! The good news, such as it is, is that your comment has finally made it onto my blog.
When I started blogging in 2012, when someone would make a comment in response to one of my posts, I would get an email. I could decide to approve the comment which would then appear on my blog or not approve it and it would not. Mostly I approved comments, rejecting only those that clearly were advertisements having nothing to do with my post. I never got very many comments so when, sometime in 2018, I stopped getting them at all, I didn't notice.
Recently, I had an unrelated issue with Blogger. A draft post that I had been working on for months simply vanished one day and nothing I could do would bring it back. I searched the Internet for a way to get my content back and found that this was a known, replicable bug that Google (who maintains Blogger) is apparently ignoring. All of a sudden I became very concerned about protecting my content. In the past, there had been a way of backing up an entire blog with one click and and went looking for it and found that, apparently, that got silently removed. What I ended up doing to backup my blog is to go through post by post, all 200+ posts, and print them as PDF files. (I had many fewer drafts and saved those by cutting and pasting them into a file on my desktop computer.) However, before I gave up and took that approach, I went through every option and setting in Blogger looking for that missing backup capability, and in so doing, came across an option I had never seen before, an option called "Comments." Clicking on it, I found nine or ten comments on various posts, sitting in limbo, waiting for my approval. With no notification whatsoever, Google had stopped sending me emails so I never knew to look. I immediately approved them all, but for some of you, that was three years late. Sorry!
I have a love/hate relationship with Google (more love than hate.) When, in terror of losing my blog's content, to where did I paste my draft blog posts? To Google Docs, that's where. More than that, my entire digital history is backed up onto Google Drive. The biggest problem with Google software is that it is free. At that price, what right to I have to complain about anything? (I do pay for my Google Drive backup space.) Several weeks ago, I was fuming in response to another Blogger problem and ran across a post advising all future bloggers to avoid Google's Blogger software in favor of WordPress, a for-money product that the poster claimed was more reliable, feature-rich, and credible. A few years ago I had the opportunity of working with WordPress and think, if I could set my Wayback Machine to 2012 when I started my blog, I might advise myself to pay the money and take that approach. (Switching now would be much more problematic.) Realizing the absurdity of pasting my draft content into Google Docs to protect myself from the flaws in Google Blogger, I looked to see what it would cost me to go back to Microsoft Word and I have started to wonder if I should be taking another look at Apple Cloud for backup. But what assurance do I have that Apple or Microsoft or WordPress wouldn't let me down as well?
This post is meant to be an apology to those kind folks to commented on my blog only to have their comments (accidentally) ignored, not an assault on Google. There is no such thing as perfection in this world and certainly not in computerverse. I have been involved with computers since 1980 and for most of that time have felt that too much attention was being paid to feature novelty and not enough to stability and reliability. About twenty years ago, the IT staff at the university where I worked begged me to move all my emails onto their system, promising me they would preserve them forever. A few years later, at the advice of university attorneys, they deleted all but the last three years of my emails. When I complained bitterly, they merely shrugged. So Google is far from unique in struggling with these issues. Nonetheless, I continue to be frustrated with problems which, though not unique to Google, are problems to which Google is not immune. But mostly I wanted to explain to you, kind commenter, what went wrong.
I am probably following you 10 years or so behind. Less wisdom and possibly sl more potential fitness...and concluding that exercise science doesnt have definite answers and might even be a baseless faith. Having recently bought a Garmin (doubling my confusion) I agree that it would be motivating to link heart rate etc via load to fitness and fatigue and so am hoping that you can find a publically available algorithm that is credible to you.
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