Back in 2013, the entire blogosphere blew up with the demise of Google Reader, and people quickly began searching for an alternative method of following their favourite blogs. Thus, Bloglovin' quickly rose in popularity. By creating an account, you can follow essentially any blog that exists, regardless of the platform, and regardless of whether the owner of said blog has actually signed up. That's right, you don't have to have signed up for Bloglovin' in order for people to follow your blog. Strike one.
Nevertheless, it wasn't the invisible followers that put me off Bloglovin' (though that did piss me off for many different reasons). No, it was the fact that there is no delete button for posts you don't want to show on your feed. If you decide to delete an old post from your blog, you have to contact the Bloglovin' support team and ask them to manually delete it from their server. The worst part? It's never really gone. Somewhere in the beyond, your posts are never truly deleted from Bloglovin', and sometimes they can pop up when you least expect it - and occasionally, your whole feed can go to crap. Believe me, this is the voice of experience.
Let me start from the beginning. When I returned to this blog in January, I decided that I was going to expand my horizons and start incorporating new ways for people to follow my blog. Naturally, this led me back to Bloglovin', a platform that I never gave much thought to, even after discovering a bunch of followers I never even knew I had. What I didn't expect to find, however, was hundreds of posts that I'd just deleted from my blog still appearing on my Bloglovin' feed. Thus began my frantic search for a way to delete everything and start from scratch. As I've already mentioned, Bloglovin' doesn't offer you the ability to delete posts without contacting support so I sent an email out to them, asking them to delete everything, and a couple of days later, my Bloglovin' was wiped clean. Hooray!
Since Bloglovin' isn't something I use to visit my favourite blogs, I very rarely headed on over there to check things out. People were following, I was getting more visits, and things were looking good. A few months later, however, I decided to have a bit of a purge and delete some content that I didn't think was quality enough. Of course, this meant that I had to email the Bloglovin' support staff yet again to ask them to delete these specific posts. A few days later, they were gone, no problem...
And that's when things started going to hell. I decided to head on over to Bloglovin' to see how my feed was looking after a couple of different format changes, and that's when I noticed that some of my old posts from 2013 had reappeared on my feed. Thinking it was just some kind of glitch in the system, I decided to check back in a few days to see if the problem had resolved itself. Unfortunately, it hadn't, so I sent an email out to support to get them to delete any post prior to 2015. They apologised for the error and cleaned it up immediately.
I decided to check Bloglovin' on a weekly basis thereafter so I could catch these mistakes relatively quickly if they ever happened again, and it wasn't long before I noticed that some of my posts simply weren't showing up at all. Yep, another problem I had to contend with. I emailed support and they just said that it sometimes took a few days for the feed to update, so I waited. Sure enough, the posts showed up a couple of days later... along with nearly every other post that had been deleted.
Unfortunately, it was no longer a case of simply asking the team to delete posts before a specific date, as posts that I'd written this year (and deleted) had reappeared, too. Thinking it was too much of a hassle, I simply wrote Bloglovin' off as a lost cause. My feed is an absolute mess and I can't even begin to figure out how to fix the problem. After all, if all these problems happened once, they could happen again, right?
All in all, I don't think I'll be back on Bloglovin' until they figure out a way to allow us to delete our own posts manually. Though it's still possible to follow my blog via the platform, I'm asking you not to (you can subscribe to my blog via email or GFC as an alternative). Until the glitches are fixed and I can finally fix my feed, Bloglovin' is off my radar. Thank you to everyone who follows my posts, but it's a headache I could do without.
Has anyone else experienced problems with the Bloglovin' platform, or am I just that unlucky?
Since Bloglovin' isn't something I use to visit my favourite blogs, I very rarely headed on over there to check things out. People were following, I was getting more visits, and things were looking good. A few months later, however, I decided to have a bit of a purge and delete some content that I didn't think was quality enough. Of course, this meant that I had to email the Bloglovin' support staff yet again to ask them to delete these specific posts. A few days later, they were gone, no problem...
And that's when things started going to hell. I decided to head on over to Bloglovin' to see how my feed was looking after a couple of different format changes, and that's when I noticed that some of my old posts from 2013 had reappeared on my feed. Thinking it was just some kind of glitch in the system, I decided to check back in a few days to see if the problem had resolved itself. Unfortunately, it hadn't, so I sent an email out to support to get them to delete any post prior to 2015. They apologised for the error and cleaned it up immediately.
I decided to check Bloglovin' on a weekly basis thereafter so I could catch these mistakes relatively quickly if they ever happened again, and it wasn't long before I noticed that some of my posts simply weren't showing up at all. Yep, another problem I had to contend with. I emailed support and they just said that it sometimes took a few days for the feed to update, so I waited. Sure enough, the posts showed up a couple of days later... along with nearly every other post that had been deleted.
Unfortunately, it was no longer a case of simply asking the team to delete posts before a specific date, as posts that I'd written this year (and deleted) had reappeared, too. Thinking it was too much of a hassle, I simply wrote Bloglovin' off as a lost cause. My feed is an absolute mess and I can't even begin to figure out how to fix the problem. After all, if all these problems happened once, they could happen again, right?
All in all, I don't think I'll be back on Bloglovin' until they figure out a way to allow us to delete our own posts manually. Though it's still possible to follow my blog via the platform, I'm asking you not to (you can subscribe to my blog via email or GFC as an alternative). Until the glitches are fixed and I can finally fix my feed, Bloglovin' is off my radar. Thank you to everyone who follows my posts, but it's a headache I could do without.
Has anyone else experienced problems with the Bloglovin' platform, or am I just that unlucky?
