Never Mind

As I mentioned before (in a note since deleted), my recent efforts to edit The Rap Sheet’s considerable blogroll and move some dormant links to my Archives page triggered resistance from Blogger, the online content management system I use. It promptly declared the results in violation of its Community Guidelines. Fortunately, it gave me the option to update my material and resubmit it for review.

What it didn’t do is provide me any clues as to why that content had been blocked in the first place, or how to go about restoring the Archives page to public visibility. So I slowly went through each link that was provided there, checking to make sure none of them now led to, say, a porn site. And none did. However, there were some few that brought up information unlike what had they been furnishing previously, and others that had simply disappeared.

In the latter category were Keith Raffel’s Dot Dead Diary and Les Blatt’s excellent Classic Mysteries blog, both casualties of Typepad’s demise earlier this year. (Blatt’s Classic Mysteries Podcast is still available, though.) Other formerly just inactive sites, such as The Lady Killers, Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room, and the original Seattle Mystery Bookshop blog, are currently nowhere to be found, along with any Web presence of Chris Aldrich’s Mystery News, a bimonthly tabloid that sadly went out of print in 2009.

On the other hand, I discovered that Patrick Balester’s Picks by Pat blog and J. Sydney Jones’s Scene of the Crime have both been resuscitated. They’re now back on my regular blogroll.

Yesterday I presented The Rap Sheet’s revised Archives content to Blogger, and it reinstated the page to proper working order.