A service advisory:
Last night I was noodling about and discovered, quite by accident, that something awful has happened to my archive; namely, most of it is missing from the front page, and nothing I can do will bring it back. Long story short, the same thing seems to have happened to some – not all – of the monthly archive pages on the blog proper, nor is it correctly displaying the last ten days, the way it’s supposed to. Hunting around on the Blogger help forums seems to indicate the this is what happens to people who use six-year-old blog templates. There are potential fixes that would involve an asinine amount of work and inelegant HTML, but the easiest thing seems to be dropping the old template.
Unfortunately, I’m not remotely good enough with HTML to do it myself, and I’m certainly in no position to pay for a web designer, so that pretty much leaves me with switching to “layouts”, nuking a lot of the little customised tweaks I’ve put in, and doubtlessly screwing around with it a bit until I’m happy with the look of it again. And then maybe switching out a couple more until I find something I can live with. The change is going to happen late Sunday or early Monday, and I’m going to put up an open thread at that point for people to chime in with opinions. This, at the moment, is just a heads-up that things are very abruptly going to be chaotic and possibly ugly here for a few days. Thanks in advance for bearing with me through these difficult times.
Added: Apparently this is actually a known thing involving a new pagination policy, except that Blogger is going out of their way to not make a deal about it. It might not be so dramatic a fix. Still, Sunday and Monday might be rocky.