What's annoying me today? Why, it's Blogger!

I decided to create a blog to go with my Etsy shop, a sort of "this is how I made this" kind of deal. So I thought it would be a good idea to keep it separate from this blog, because it's probably not good for business for customers to be able to get from shop blog to here (via my profile), where I rant and swear and express opinions and generally behave unprofessionally.

I sign up for a new Blogger account for the new blog. I create a new blog, silverleafshinystuff.blogspot.com. Matches the url of the Etsy shop, yeah? Easy to remember.

All is good. But as soon as I create the blog, I realise that I'm signed in with my old account. No problem, I think. I'll just delete it, and re-create it with my new account.

But apparently things just don't work like that. Once a blog is deleted, that url becomes unavailable for other accounts, so I can't claim the address I wanted.

At this point I check out the help files, which say I should be able to recreate the blog using the original account and go through a process (which I won't bore you with) to transfer ownership to my new account - but it doesn't work. silverleafshinystuff.blogspot.com remains unavailable, whichever account I try it with.

The help forum is littered with others who have had the same sort of problem, mostly who've deleted blogs accidentally and want them back. Some seem to attract the attention of an admin-y Blogger employee type who had flicks a switch somewhere and gives them their blog back. Others get ignored. I don't know why.

And Blogger's help system is impressively frustrating and circular. You end up trying the whole process again, ticking different boxes in the hope that eventually you'll get to a form you can fill in and send off, rather than being cycled back to the forum or help files. Guess they make it difficult deliberately to stop lazy/stupid people from asking Blogger to fix their tiny little problems that they could easily deal with themselves, but it does make it very annoying for those of us who know what needs to be done but can't do it ourselves and just need to basically tell someone what the problem is.

I've now filled in three different forms, and emailed twice over the last couple of weeks. Absolutely no response. Not even a standard "We're busy and can't deal with you now, but we have your email and we'll get onto it as soon as we can" response. I have no idea if they've even got my messages.

It's just not good enough. Surely they must have enough employees for someone to compose a form email which gets sent out to everyone who mails support@blogger.com?

I want to print business cards, and promote my shop. But I can't do that until I know what url I'll be using for the blog, and I won't know that until Blogger contact me.

I'm actually considering creating it on Wordpress or similar instead - I just don't want to do that because I'm used to Blogger and I'm lazy and I know where all the buttons are here. It's comfortable. And I'm too cheap to get a custom domain.

Come on Blogger, sort it out! I have potential customers I need to hassle!