Today Alex and company are hosting the Oh How I Miss You Blogfest
Amanda and Jonathan Welling (husband and wife team) and Emily Bedwell are the wonderful team behind the blog Hippies, Beauty and Books, Oh My!. I loved visiting this blog which was so well put together, had people who loved books and delightful giveaways to thank those who stopped by. The creators kept expanding the blog until by Summer 2012 there was also book forums included. Then came the fateful day of August 24, 2012. You can read the post here but in short Amanda and John told us they were shutting down the site. They didn't take down the blog but it was made clear there'd be no future posting. Why? Below are some excerpts:
For the past several weeks we have been bombarded with rude, vile and offensive comments being left on our blog in the comments section of our posts and in our emails. We've done our best to ignore and delete as much as possible, but we can (or rather I can) only handle so much negativity.
Something occured this week that was an eye-opener. A young girl we knew decided that she would rather die then go to school and be bullied. She was also tormented relentlessly on the internet. A few days ago, her mother found her passed out unresponsive. She tried to hang herself using a belt around her neck. They had hopes she would pull through when she was rushed to the hospital, but she died yesterday morning.
She was only 11 years old.
Jon and I have decided we are shutting down our blog for good. This will be our last post.
And that was that. I must confess that for a while I did look back hoping they'd return but alas they didn't. I respect their decision but I miss this blog team's wonderful blog so much. It is sad that bullying caused them to stop blogging. So HBB, Oh My and it's blogging team are who I miss. God bless you all in your future endeavors.
Now for a blogger I would miss he or she were to go. That would be Cassie Mae. I met blog to blog with this twenty-something funster early 2012 and haven't been bored by her personal posts and fun jottings since. She's married, has kids and still finds time to blog, write books and now even has an agent. We readers got a real scare when we found out earlier this year there was some cyber vagrant trying to put down our sweet Cassie. But many readers including myself assured her that both she and her blog was super awesome and she got out of her funk and kept right on blogging. I love you Cassie and your fellow readers and bloggy friends love you too. Don't ever go away. We'd miss you something terrible. And laugh less. A lot less.
Now hop around to all those taking part and enjoy your blogger friends. You never know what might happen in the future. But I know one thing. NO ONE WILL BULLY ME OFF MY BLOG. *Growls*
Love Ya!
