[a new place to get tired of thinking at] - 2012.12.29

blogger's been fun but i've just about had it with google rejecting my application for adsense, the latest rejection letter saying:

Thank you for your interest in Google AdSense. After reviewing your application, our specialists have found that it does not meet our program

criteria. Therefore, we are unable to accept you into our program.



                  [ ... snip ... snip 8<... ]

Please note that we may not be able to respond to inquiries regarding the
specific reasons for our decision. Thank you for your understanding.

in plain english no, we won't pay you for putting our ads on your site (hence the lack of said ads) and no we're probably not going to say why not, even if you say please.

and this rejection's different from all the others too: used to be, google took about 2 - 3 days to tell me to go away and leave them alone.  this one came in less than 24 hours after i reapplied.

rejection does funny things to people.  and unexplained and irrational (to me at least) rejection is at least 10 times more frustrating than plain vanilla rejection.  

but the world's not fair: they're google and i am just one of a thousand million people trying to get adsense on their blogs which are hosted on a service that google owns.

right now, i am nursing my badly bruised ego, and i can tell that i will be wasting my time trying to get google to explain why they want me to go away, and instead of writing google again to plead my case, my reaction instead was, "i'll pack my bags and go to another website host",  which brought me to www.wix.com.

a couple of months back, i had stumbled upon a wix, a "make your own web site" sort of place.  i wasn't interested at first, figuring "i have a blog, why do i need a website?"

then i got google's rejection again.  and wix was right there, waiting, whispering sweet geeky nothings into my ear.

so i took a look at wix and their tagline was catchy:  create your own free stunning website.  easy to customize. no coding. google friendly.

i read that and all i saw was "blah blah blah free blah website blah blah."

i was hooked.

sort of.

i hunkered down and slaved away at my new site dragging boxes around, painting the walls, and mucking around with their html5 editor and i was pretty happy with how sleek the site can look with minimal coding effort (never mind the hours of wasted effort when i repeatedly closed the html5 editor without saving my work).

finally, i was happy with my site and i was ready to write my first blog entry.  and pfft.  i clicked and dragged and hemmed and hawed and could not figure out how to create a blog entry.

so i googled (naturally.  google and me, it's a love-hate relationship: i hate them, but can't live without them, specifically their search engine, chrome, and gmail.  android is a separate conversation altogether.  google on the other hand, doesn't even look in my general direction.) and there it was, the bitter truth:

wix has no blogging support, at least not on their HTML 5 sites.

meh.

after a few more hours of googling around and an endless stream of swearing, cussing and hairpulling, i found out that indeed wix has no html5 blog but oh joy i can grab my blogger feed and suck it into wix my site via a wix app.

i can tell you, a blogger blog sucked into wix is pretty darn fugly: can you see how the blog entries sit in the middle of the page, with vast amounts of screen real estate sitting idly on the left and right margins? you'll be happy to know that there is no way to correct that.  oh and did i mention that wix will cut -- as in truncate -- any blog entries that it thinks is too long?  one of my pages has a sentence where only the top half of the letters are visible.  that's like trying to ride a bus when you're 7'2" and the driver lops off your legs right below the knees as you get in so you can fit in the door.

horrific.

rather unfortunately, that loathsome fugliness will have to do until the wix team comes up with the blogging feature.

so, wix, you had me at "free website" but we've got issues, especially with "when are you going to implement that HTML5 blogging that you promised was ready 10 months ago".

and blogger / google, i know you said "no, but you hope i understand", and yes i do (sort of) but two years and three no's is more than enough rejection for me.  i hope you understand that back.

but i'm stuck with you the same way people are stuck with venereal diseases after a drunken night out with a woman (or a man) named Lola, at least until the wix team get their act together and for the love of free websites build that html5 blogging feature.

but hey, my new place is up and running and spiffy and smells freshly painted too.  drop by and have a look [http://francisdancel.wix.com/noplaceforthinking].  

it will feel like home soon enough.

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