Identifying And Removing Deviously Engineered And Marketed Blog Hijacks

We saw the symptoms of the first carefully engineered blog hijacks, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, two years ago. During each succeeding holiday season, each attack has apparently become more and more deviously engineered.

This season - each season starting in Fall of one year and lasting until Spring of the following year - we are seeing a hijack complement which appears to be devious in both marketing and installation technique, and which requires a complex search of the affected blogs. If you are receiving reports from your readers

Your blog starts to load - but is quickly replaced by a page full of advertisements!

you may need to exhaustively examine your blog for any third party code - and as always, the problem code may have been installed at any time in the past. When discovered, the hijacks are not consistently found in recently installed code.

Deletion Is Not An Alternative, If You Cannot Authenticate Yourself Or Recover Access

Some supposed blog owners, unable to login to their Blogger accounts because they forgot the Blogger account name or password (or never bothered to remember either), try to compromise. They figure that, if they can't regain access to the blog, then Blogger will be willing to simply delete the blog - and everybody will be happy. They appear to have overlooked the repeatedly stated policy

Blogger accounts and Blog*Spot addresses do not expire.

The fact is, blog deletions are as sensitive to illegal action as account recovery.

Retrieving The PostID, To Recover A Deleted Post

One of the challenges of using the Blogger "Edit Posts" menu (in the Classic Blogger GUI) or the "Posts" menu (in the New Blogger GUI) is the too easy ability to delete posts, if you are not thinking about what you're doing. Fortunately, under the right circumstances, accidental deletion of a single post won't cause a terrible catastrophe - though you (the blog owner) will need to react properly.

Search Engine Results Are Not Permanent

One of the oddest problem reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken comes from blog owners who only want their blog to be found, in search engine results.

I started a blog 6 months ago. I spent a week getting my blog publicised, it started showing up in search engine results, and all was well. 6 months later, my blog shows up nowhere, it's like it doesn't exist. What happened to my blog??

These blog owners do not realise that a position in any page of the search results is not permanent.

Why Does Blogger Use A Google Account, Which Is Based On Your Email Address, To Identify You?

One of the most constantly seen discussions, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, involves people who have forgotten their Blogger account name or password. Generally, it's a rather simple task to recover access to one's Blogger account, should you forget / lose access to any one Blogger authentication token.

The Blogger Forgot your username or password? wizard will send, upon request, an account recovery email message, to the email address associated with the Blogger account needed, for any active and online blog. Just provide the blog name, read the email, and follow instructions.

Unfortunately, not all Blogger blog owners can always use email based account recovery.

What Is The Mysterious 90 Day Period, After Blog Deletion?

We see periodic evidence of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I?, about deletion of our blogs.

I deleted my blog last year - can I get it back?

and

I deleted my blog last month - when will I be able to use it with my new Blogger account?

and

I deleted my blog, but it's still visible, on the Internet!

Not everybody is fully able to understand the "90 day" deletion policy.

Link Your Blog, Using A Dynamic Template, To A Non Dynamic Page In Your Blog

The dynamic templates have been available for just over 3 months, and for all their usefulness, there are a number of identified deficiencies. We see, every week, naive questions about one well known deficiency.

How do I add a bloglist (Followers gadget, labels index, popular posts, what have you...) gadget to my blog, with it using a dynamic template?

Adding gadgets to a dynamic template display just won't be a simple project. Not to be facetious, but there is really no space on the screen, for an accessory bar (also known as a sidebar). The dynamic views dynamically fill all horizontal space.

Two Level Comments, And One Known Post Template Update

From feedback being received about the recent release of two level commenting, and the many different problems attributed to the release, it appears that there is one commonly identified update to the post template. It's possible that adding this one change, to some blogs with tweaked post templates, may eliminate the need for a post template refresh.

This is a simple change - but it must be made in 4 different places. I highly recommend that you backup the template, before and after making this change. Allow 30 minutes, to concentrate properly on the task.

Two Level Comments, And Required Updates To Our Blogs

The new two level commenting feature has been out for a short 2 days - and already there are at least half a dozen separate problems being attributed to the introduction of that feature. Not every blog owner understands how intrusive this new feature must have been, to install, into Blogger.

The previous two Blogger feature releases - dynamic templates, and the New Blogger GUI, required major changes to the Blogger GUI. Two level commenting, while not requiring major GUI changes, was still challenging to develop. Two level comments required a significant upgrade to the content of our blogs, and were activated without the decision of the blog owners involved.

When You Search For Important Email, Always Search Carefully

Many Blogger / Google procedures involve email communications, with you needing to read - and respond to - email from Blogger / Google. Some email systems automatically sort incoming email, and put important (and not so important) email into different folders. Many times, email from Blogger / Google may be sorted into a folder where you would not always normally look - or may be sent to an email address that you might not think of, immediately. It's to your personal advantage, to find any email that is being sent to you.

Two Level Comments And The Comments Time / Date Stamp

Yesterday, Blogger Support delivered one long awaited improvement to our blogs - two level commenting. It was eagerly awaited - and as soon as the Buzz announcement hit the Blogosphere, people were busy checking out the new feature.

Predictably, problem reports have been rolling in, all day today, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken. One noticed problem report concerns the date / time stamp on the comments.

All of the comments on my blog, even on previous posts, now show an incorrect time. I double-checked my setting, it is correctly set my local time.

The general consensus appears to be that all comments are now posting as Pacific Time (USA), regardless of the blog time zone setting.

This problem, along with several others, has been reported to Blogger Support - and they are now looking into this issue.

Watch this space for updates.

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Two Level Commenting Now Available, For Blogger Blogs

Blogger blog owners and viewers have been asking for the ability to post threaded comments, for many years. Today (slightly late for Christmas 2011), Blogger released it's first answer to that request - two level commenting.

Blogger now supports threaded commenting, which means that it is now much easier to differentiate between whether someone is making a general comment on the thread, or responding to another comment on the thread.

This is not what I would call classic "threaded commenting", but it's a reasonable alternative.