Please remember firstly that I don't remove blogs from the list unless I've been asked to or I find the material more offensive than I would let my kids see. It's never, ever personal. So if your freebie didn't get picked up it's not because I purposely changed anything or I don't like your work. I only remove blogs when one of the following happens:
- the blog is proven to violate copyright;
- the blog uses offensive material;
- I am asked to remove the blog by the owner;
- the blog feed doesn't work for 7 consecutive days.
First, check and double check that your blog hasn't been listed and please wait at least 2-3 days before contacting me. I get hundreds of emails from people asking me to check if their blog is working… I've almost removed my email address below many, many times out of frustration that 99% of the time they didn't really look properly. I just don't have the time to check each blog so please please don't be upset when I don't respond to your email. The very first thing you should do is use the search form on the sidebar. E.g., enter your blog URL (without the http://) and some words from the title of your blog post you are looking for. E.g., entering this:
mollynmax.blogspot.com "Christmas Quick Page"
Will give this result where I can see when my post on a Christmas quick page can be found.
If you are absolutely sure that your blog isn't being picked up anymore then there are a few common reasons why your freebie might not be listed, and I've listed them here from most common to least common:
- The most likely cause is that you've changed where you host your freebies from something like 4shared to a place the system doesn't know about. See below for how to make sure your freebies are recognised.
- The next most common cause is that you're confused about time zones. The search engine runs on Australian time - our time zone is a long way ahead of most of the US! So don't rely on the blog POST timestamp (this is the reason for the Sydney clock at the top). If the system missed you it might pick you up "tomorrow" (or indeed it may have listed it "yesterday" so look at the previous post). The timestamp recently used on this blog looks something like: 15 Jun [LA 09:59pm, NY 11:59pm] - 16 Jun [UK 04:59am, OZ 02:59pm] which in this example means that the system began looking for freebies at 9:59pm on the 15th of June in Los Angeles, which is 11:59pm (almost midnight) in New York on the same day (just!), which is 4:59am on the NEXT day in London, and 2:59pm in Sydney. I have also just updated comments posted on blogs to reflect the timestamp to make it easier for people to find the posts which contain their freebies.
- The third most common cause is that there is a problem with your blog feed, which can range from you accidentally setting it to limited, to an error on your blog host site (like feedburner) right when the system looked (believe me, this DOES happen!) through to there being no feed for your blog. Every so often blog feeds get corrupted. I have a few work-arounds in the system but there is only so much it can do. If there is an error the system often picks up the freebie in the following day(s).
- Right at the time the system ran, your blog server could have been down - hopefully "tomorrow" it will be okay.
