In reading about a few problems people had experienced in their update/upgrade from "old" to "new" Blogger, I decided it would be prudent of me to back up all of my posts and archives at a reliable location before attempting the upgrade myself. The easiest way to do this is to switch to FTP publishing, and thus I did.
Once I had backed up everything at my FTP site, I went back into the publishing settings to change "publish to FTP" back to "publish at blogspot.com", and reclaim my URL: nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com. It told me that the URL was unavailable.
First, I freaked, of course, then [after re-trying several times] I actually checked the status of the URL. A blank blog appeared where mine used to, and the profile was owned by some "RV" [now "NR" -- but still a spambot, I'm sure]. Then, an obviously robot-generated redirect to a search page appeared. I kept flagging it as spam and reporting it as a TOS violation, and sometimes the redirect page was unavailable, presumably fixed by some automated process, and it reverted back to a blank blog. However, the blog spam kept reappearing every few hours, and it appeared the spammers had an upper hand on Blogspot to have bypassed their system so easily.
Then, my friend Matt advised me to take this issue to the Blogger Help group usenets, as he remembered the same thing happening recently there, and the Blogger techs fixing it. I did as he suggested, and they fixed it within 12 hours.
So what's the moral of the story? Well, I suppose I would suggest setting up a new (unused) blog in your dashboard that you can use as a "placeholder" for your URL anytime you want to switch to FTP publishing, or have to leave your URL for any reason. As soon as you leave the URL open, just use the other blog to claim it. Then you can switch back after you're done.
I won't be making this mistake again. If my blog again disappears, then you can find an update on the situation by checking my "old" Blogger profile, which should have an updated link to the location of my blog. If you can't, try my new Blogger profile, my webpage, here or here, and be sure I'll be using one of the new URLs I've saved [just to prevent such a FUBAR-level occurrence as this]:
http://getbusybloggin.blogspot.com/
http://stevennonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/
http://danielmorgan2.blogspot.com/
Thanks for your patience, noble reader. Always know you can email me.
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