Grief Counselling for Bloggers

Every now and then you hear of someone who has lost. You hear of the crying, the wailing, the gnashing of teeth (teeth will be provided for those without). They can sink in to a seemingly interminable depression and all because they forgot to set a secondary email address to retrieve their lost login details.

You never think it will happen to you or your family. But, it does. In fact, more than one in three of us are likely to forget a password or worse still a username before the year is out. Others will remember their password, but have forgotten which email address was associated with their account and so be left with the same sense of loss.

It can happen to emailers, bankers, tweeters, pokers, bloggers, even Orkut addicts.

When you have tried all possible combinations of your kids’ names, memorable dates, mother’s maiden names and have gone cross-eyed trying to read captchas it really is time to let go. I should know, it happened to me when I lost a beloved Gmail name early on. I registered the address, forgot to give it the love and attention it needed, and it was only when I really needed it that I realized it was gone. No amount of hacking or cracking can ever bring it back.

The same kind of grief can strike at other times in your online life too. You may be running a lively little blog, its keywords gamboling up the SERPs like a newborn lamb. Then all of a sudden that most insidious of diseases hits, toolbar dropsy. One minute your little green vital signs are emeraldine and growing, maybe you were 4, 5, even 6 long. But, the big G wields its cruel cyberscalpel and slashes you back to 2 or 3 at a stroke, you may never recover.

Worse, you may find you’ve been sandboxed or been filtered from the results altogether. It doesn’t seem to matter what color your hat – black, gray, or sky-blue pink with orange spots. The only chance of a remission is if you got a benign malware and can persuade Google that you’ve given your site virtual antibiotics and are now clean. Recovery can take weeks, even months.

Same too if you follow your feedcount, it can be slowly climbing for weeks, when one day it drops like a stone. You feel abandoned, alone, and edgy paranoia bites. What did I do? Why have they all abandoned me? Will they ever come back?

Thankfully, feedcount deficiency is a temporary but episodic illness, it comes and goes. On good days you’re high with all the ranking, but each morning as you press that refresh button your heart is pounding as the chicklet blinks off and back on. If the count is down, then so are you, if it’s up, then a short burst of euphoria hits, at least until you read the multiple injuries inflicted by qwitter, the twitter unfollow program.

But, take heart, you will get through it. We’ve all been there at some time in our lives. Whether it’s a slashed PR, that forgotten login for a cobweb site, a bipolar feedcount, or simply your best friend unfriending you on Facebook. Be strong, move on. You can always login another day.