Olive Juice Studio

Yayyy!  You found us! 

I’ve heard that many of you were surprised to find that our blog no longer exists at http://www.olivejuicestudio.blogspot.com.  Guess what?  You weren’t the only ones taken by surprise by this action!  Blogger deleted our account!  We were forced to move so I decided it was best to start our own website with our own URL. 

Why was http://www.olivejuicestudio.blogspot.com deleted? From the vague email I received, it was due to our first newsletter sent out to Memory Miser customers.  Apparently, everyone was intrigued and visited the OJS blog causing a bit of a traffic surge.  Blogger’s spambots immediately flagged our blog causing it to be deleted as if it were a spam blog.   After two weeks of trying to contact someone (FYI…I found out that there is no help line for Blogger other than a Help Forum that I don’t think they really read….I’ve posted seven times with no response!) we decided it was time to seriously make some major changes – so we moved to our own URL website – which is where you are at now!

What’s all this mean? Well, you’re guess is as good as mine but I like to think that it’s due to the fact that so many people were intrigued by the newsletter sent out, from the increased traffic caused by the Master Olive Guest Designer and Olive Craft Challenges launch the day before our blog was deleted. I would be able to give you a  more detailed explanation if I knew myself.

Could this happen again here?  I spent a few hours talking to a support specialist through our new web host and was reassured over and over that this would not happen.  If a traffic surge were to happen again you might see an error message for a minute or two until the bandwidth of our site matched that of the traffic. For instance, let’s say our bandwidth allowed 100 people  to be on our site at any given second but there are 101  people trying to access it.  The 101st person would get an error message until one of the first 100 left the site.  Our URL would not be shutdown or deleted.

What did I learn from this fiasco?

1.  That I have truly missed all of our followers and readers over the past nine days! (Please!  Come back!  I’m lonely over here all by myself!  Olive company…anyone?  Bueller…Bueller? (Recognize that?)

2.  That I truly appreciate all of the support our friends, followers and readers have offered during this chaos! Olive you guys!  I thank you from the bottom of my pimento (I just had to say that!) for being so encouraging and understanding during this chaos!

3. To never assume that your blog will be there the next time you go to make a post. (Yep, really!  PLEASE use OJS as an example to learn from.  Tell your fellow blogging buddies what happened to us so it doesn’thappen to you or someone you know.)

4.  To make sure to ALWAYS backup your posts and everything else important  to you on your blog. (Seriously, fellow bloggers…you REALLY need to make this an everyday habit in case you are - deleted from blog world… have a computer glitch… a solar ray hits the satelites -anything could happen so protect yourself!)

5.  That I’m capable of putting on my big girl panties and grabbing a challenge by the horns to find a solution! (Yeah, about that…after losing my entire blog I was ready to crawl into a hole head first and cry like a desperate baby!  In reality, the big girl britches part started after waiting for nine days…. I realized not only was this a terrible tragedy that happened but that you also can’t sit back and wait for the Jolly Green Giant to  ride into cyberland on a beautiful white horse to  sweep you away from your miseries and fix all of your problems..but if any of you have been so lucky you better plan on commenting!) *wink*

6.  That it’s of utmost importance before doing anything new to research your options – please don’t think I’m trying to sway you to leave Blogger, it’s just not the right fit for us! (Yeah, this is pretty true and ended up being quite a learning experience.  I only went with Blogger because every other crafter I know was using Blogger!  Of course, I didn’t take the time to see what other blogging platforms were out there but now that I have I’m surprised at how many options there are to choose from!)

Why does the NEW Olive Juice Studio website look so different/plain?  Since all of this happened so suddenly and with no notice, we have been forced to move quickly – learning how to use the platform on this new site, moving content over and attempting to organize the posts.  We have contacted several designers who work with this blog platform and hope to have a gorgeously designed  website for you to drool over soon!  We’ve been messing around with many of the free themed backgrounds so don’t be surprised if it’s different the next time you stop by! ) 

And now to play catch up with where we left off…from Thursday, July 2nd to the present. 

MASTER OLIVE Guest Designers I am in the process of uploading Part II of Carrie Mason’s Interview and her project.  Since we’re also a bit behind this week with our second guest designer, Jeannie Phillips I will be posting Jeannie’s bio, Parts I & II of her interview and her project over the next few days for you to view.  Hopefully, by next week we will be back on track!

OLIVE CRAFTS CHALLENGE In regards to the first “Olive Crafts Challenge – FRAMES,” we will be extending the date to 11:59 PM, July 13th to make up for the lost time.  All entries will be posted on the blog and  voting will be open for 24 hours.  The winner will be announced on July 15th.  Our second challenge will begin on August 1, 2010 -this way, we should have things situated and pretty much back to normal!

Please understand that our website is still under construction and will be a work in progress over the next few weeks.  Starting a new website is a big undertaking.  Please don’t get frustrated if you find that things are being moved around.  We’re trying to make it as user friendly as our last site that everyone always  seemed to appeciate but to get to that point takes some trial and error and feedback from our readers!

I’m so happy that we’re all back together again and hope that if you were a follower before that you will consider following us again.  If you’re new to our site we would love for you to follow us too!  We  have many exciting things in store and would love for you to be a part of it! 

 Please help us spread the word that we have moved to our own URL http://www.olivejuicestudio.com.  We have no way to redirect traffic from our old blog and would appreciate any help we can get!  If you post our link on your blog  please send an email to olivejuicestudio@yahoo.com so we can reciprocate the favor!  I thank you in advance!

New blog buttons will be available shortly to help spread the word!  Please grab one, two, three and add them to your blogs!

Olive that we’re back, don’t you?

x Kim

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 1:17 PM and is filed under A New Olive Juice Studio Website!, Random Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.