WordPress.com, despite being an awesome company has poor support.
Yesterday when I logged in to SL, I received a bunch of notices alerting me that iheartsl was down. When I checked the dashboard, I did not see any "messages" from wordpress.com about any issue that needed to be resolved, so I tried to get in touch with support. Finally, after the blog was suspended someone wrote me back to let me know that the advertisements on iheartsl was a TOS violation, but I didn't have a chance to remove them? Apparently support had been in contact with someone who is not me for a month and that person promised they would be removed (very puzzling).
That's why I moved the site off wordpress.com, because I had no choice. Over 650+ authors were signed up at iheartsl at the time and not having iheartsl would mean that a lot of people would not have a place to send their blog entries. For some, iheartsl was the only website they blogged on and/or were syndicated at, so I spent all evening moving the site over to Media Temple hosting.
I know that some people liked that iheartsl had a community feel, because readers can leave comments on posts and interact with each other. But, since iheartsl has the resources to syndicate again (which we originally did back in January 2008), I have decided to do that instead of requiring people to sign up as authors first. Even though readers lose the ability to comment directly on each post, the bloggers now have the added convenience of not having to manually re-post on iheartsl.
I'm currently working with support to get the iheartsl (wordpress) site back online so I can link to it, but I cannot import all 16,000+ blog entries because it exceeds the upload limit by A LOT! The wordpress upload limit for imports is 2MB, and with 16,000 blog entries the back-up file was 72MB, but I do have a copy of it if anybody can figure out how I can put it on, at least we would have an "archives" site and be able to restore all the comments from the past 2 years.
I should also mention that I have made the decision to not syndicate iheartsl to fashionplanet anymore, since it would result in a lot of double-posts. And besides, iheartsl gets more traffic than fashionplanet and I'm positive that it will be more inclusive since Tao has not updated the site with new requests since last year.
Anyways, I hope that clears up the situation a bit. I worked really
hard to restore iheartsl back to a functional state when I figured that
it probably won't be able to come back on wordpress.com, and I hope
that it continues to be useful to many of SL's bloggers.
If you haven't submitted your site for syndication, do it! 🙂
Yesss I loved that store, my only complaint was the choice of brown hairs… I may go back for the blondes haha