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Funniest Blogging Screw Ups
By Todd | January 23, 2009
We all screw up sometimes and more often than not we want to keep it to ourselves because we all want to look like pros but the reality is we all screw up and sometimes it’s just too funny to keep to ourselves.
It all began innocently back in May of 2007 when I decided to take the leap and move my blog from blogger.com my own hosted wordpress blog. Unfortunately the tools available to help with this migration simply didn’t work. After searching for solutions I discovered many people had the same problems and it was a generally known thing that migrating from blogger to wordpress just plain sucked. (note to self … just use wordpress from the start)
So anyway, the exporting and importing functionality wasn’t working for the post comments I just said to hell with it and I hired someone to manually cut and past the blog post comments over to the new blog for me. Of course I instructed my outsourcer to ensure that the urls that were entered for the user were also correctly copied over so the commenter would continue to get the backlink credit they deserved.
Well the job got done and the new blog was born and all was well in the world. I was happy. Things moved along nicely for a number of months.
Then about 8 weeks ago I decided to make a few changes to my blog and add support for gravitars, those little pictures you see beside people’s comments (get yours at www.gravitar.com). Cool I now had gravitars and I was on my way to building a better blog and community … until a buddy pointed out that my picture was showing up on a dozen or so different commenter’s names!
It turns out that way back when the outsourcer moved the comments over, although they moved the correct website urls, they didn’t think the emails mattered because they weren’t used for anything so they put my email as a default for all the email fields for the comments.
If you don’t know about gravitars the important thing here is that the gravitar pulls an image that you specified when you created your gravitar at gravitar.com based on your email address. This is how when you leave your email on other sites comments your image then shows up in the comments.
Well adding the gravitar feature immediately pulled my image for a whole pile of comments with different user names! I freaked out because it looked like I just populated my own comments and made up different names. What a great way to kill your credibility!
Anyway, it wasn’t clear to me at first what was going on until I noticed all the comments in question were posted before my big migration many months before. So after another couple hours of painstaking manual work to fix the problem all was resolved but I was embarrassed as hell.
The issues was brief, it got resolved, and maybe a handful of people might have caught it … or maybe not, but in the end my panic far exceeded the reality of the situation.
The moral of the story is that everyone makes mistakes and sometime they can look bad and sometimes they are really bad, but almost all the time it seems much worse than it really is.
So when you screw up just roll with it and move on. It’s probably not as bad as you think it is.
What’s YOUR funniest blog screw up?
Come on, don’t be shy. Tell me what your funniest blog screw up was in the comments below. I promise it will feel good!
Topics: blogging |
When I first starting blogging I use to get my husband to proof everything I wrote - so I’d write a draft with comments and ask him to check it out. Once instead of saving as draft I published it with comments like:
“do you think people will get this or should I dumb it down?”
It was up for about 6 hours before my husband had a chance to look at it. Likely since my blog was pretty new and my readership wasn’t massive only about 3 people had seen it. I was very embarrassed and one person left me a comment about how dumb do I think they are? Yikes!
hey Cher,
That’s pretty funny. I wonder if that particular reader ever came back?
thanks for the story!
cheers,
todd
Hi Todd,
I’m very impressed with the way you administer your Long Tail Treasure course.
I’m wondering if I could pay you do make me a quick vid tutorial on how to set up an online course using Wordpress 2.7, aWeber and PayPal. No need to make it pretty with Final Cut/iMovie or anything. I just need to know how to set up the course.
My niche involves the fiction writing world. Would you email me so I can give you details?
Thanks,
Suzanne
Hey Suzanne, thanks for dropping by!
I’m thrilled to hear you like the way the course was done.
What you’re asking for is actually something I’m investigating right at this moment as it’s something I’m trying to setup for a a new niche I’m moving into.
Once I get the details worked out I’ll send something out to the course members.
cheers,
todd
Todd,
Thanks!
If you’re going to promote the Teaching Sells program at some point, I’ll wait and join through your aff link. (http://teachingsells.com/)
If you do any private consulting work, let me know. I’ve got plenty to do developing content for the time being!
Suzanne
Suzanne,
I’ve heard the teaching sell site is pretty good, although I have no experience with it.
The tool I’m looking at using is this WP membership pluggin.
It’s a WP pluggin that turns WP into a membership site. It seems pretty flexible and apparently can integrate with Paypal,1shoppingcart as well as aweber. They seem to have excellent support and are very actively developing new functionality.
I bought the single license thinking I’d check it out first but now I wish I had bought the unlimited lic because it looks like I’ll be using it on a number of sites. The upgrade will cost an extra $40 more than if I had bought the multiple lic. to begin with.
anyway, once I would through it al I’ll send out a short lesson to the course.
cheers,
todd
Maybe you screwed up again? It is gravatar and not gravitar. Gravatar.com.
LOL, yeah I guess I did
Spelling has never been my strong point.
One of my buddies is always talking about your blog at work - finally came and checked it out today, nice work! I’m subscribing to your rss feed - keep on posting!
@tucsoncarinsuranceguy -
Hey thanks for stopping by and thanks for the comments. I’m glad to here you like the posts and hopefully the free course too
cheers