The Real Blogger Status

Occasionally we see the anguish. I was just about finished with a long post, and just before I Published my post, I managed to clear the content. And just after I cleared the content, Auto Save went and saved the empty post. All of my work, gone in a second. Now what? And the "what", unfortunately, is "nothing". If you compose a long post, and depend upon Auto Save and Draft copies - and you lose the Draft content, or delete the post - you're out of luck. You can recover a deleted Published post, under specific conditions . You cannot recover a Draft or Imported post, under any conditions. Sorry, there is no magic here. This is another reason why I do not use Auto Save . >> Top

The controversy about " third party cookies " in general, and about Google Stats and their use of "third party cookies" in particular, never ends. Some Bloggers do not yet understand the issue. I do not allow third party cookies. I do not believe that third party cookies should be involved, at all. Blogger needs a simple setting in Stats that say "Do not track my visits." And here is another case where people look at a forest, and ignore the trees. Blogger created a simple setting saying "Do not track my visits.". Since the vast majority of your readers have Internet service that provides a dynamic IP address, the setting is stored on your computer, so your computer can be identified. The setting, stored on your computer, has 2 advantages. Even with your computers IP address constantly changing, your computer will be consistently identified as your computer. Since you, reading your blog, contribute but a small amount of traffic against y...

High class universities, such as Eton, Harvard, and Yale, have a unique and intriguing sport that's enjoyed by both participants and spectators - team rowing . The participants work together, and propel their oar driven boats through the water at astounding speeds, by synchronising their oar movements. In team rowing, the team manager, or coxswain, is an essential participant. The coxswain does no rowing, but still contributes to the success of the team, by keeping the rowing synchronised. Without synchronisation, a team is useless. Team members not rowing - or worse, rowing out of step - slow the boat. The new comment moderation system is designed around the principles of team rowing.

Various blogger customers in or near Indonesia are reporting inability to access Blogger blogs. Preliminary analysis appears that the problem is seen only with Blog*Spot blog addresses - custom domain URLs appear to be accessed with no problem, with the corresponding BlogSpot URL being inaccessible. We have a Problem Rollup question in Blogger Help Forum, where the epidemiology of the problem is being explored. If you are experiencing this problem, please state your country and city, and name of ISP. Next, please help verify nature of your outage. Here are 5 replicas of the same article. Please click on each link, one after the other, and observe which links provide content to read. Please be specific - which ones can you, and which can't you, read? http://blogger-status-for-real.blogspot.com/2006/07/help-my-blog-is-gone.html http://bloggerstatusforreal.blogspot.com/2006/07/help-my-blog-is-gone.html http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2006/07/help-my-blog-is-gone.html http://gr...

As many of us are discovering the benefits of the new comment filtering system , and the collaborative heuristic filters, some bloggers are finding an unfortunate corollary. If "n" number of people, reporting together that a given comment style constitutes spam, manage to get the new filter entry created in "x" number of days, "n / 2" number of people will require "x * 2" number of days to accomplish the same thing. Taken to the extreme, 1 person reporting a given comment style as spam will require "n * x" days to get the new filter entry created. As the more blatant spam, shared by more bloggers, is detected and added to the filters, the less blatant spam will become progressively more individual, and will require longer to create new filter entries. And an increasing number of individual bloggers, observing the spam taking longer and longer to be added to the filters, will start to question the validity of the new system. Bes...

Blogger blog owners, like dogs, always want more. Cue the super annoying commercial currently running on some USA TV channels. More, please! And when I suggest using an HTML / Text gadget, tweaked to show only when the "home" page is displayed , I hear cries for "more". But how can I show my latest posts for a given label, on my home page? Surely, I can do that too? The answer here is that yes, you can do this - and fortunately, it's not difficult. It simply require a little more thinking.

Any time that we give advice about transferring control of a blog to another Blogger / Google account, or using another email address with your blog, we try to include additional advice If the blog contains pictures that were uploaded using post editor, do not ever delete the Blogger / Google account. This detail, in some cases, seems to be seen as a myth or superstition. Some superstitions have basis in reality - and this is one such superstition. When you upload pictures using the post editor photo upload wizard, they are hosted in a Picasa account that's tied to the Blogger / Google account. You can transfer control of the blog itself, using Settings - Publishing. Unfortunately, this transfers only the blog. The Picasa account, where the pictures are hosted, remains with the current Blogger / Google account. If you "clean house", and delete the unused Google account, your pictures go away. Here, you may wish to review the connections between Blogger accounts...

One of the most useful skills to have, when diagnosing a problem with your blog, is looking at the page source code. Every browser has this alternative, called "Page Source" or "Source", and generally accessed from the "View" menu. I'll instruct you to View - Page Source for such basic tasks as Determine the blog feed URL . Identify the blog owner . Verify the template name and vendor . Extract HTML code, to use when embedding a gadget in a page or post . Sometimes, even this basic task is impossible.

In a new volume of the series " Tales Of The Hijacked Blogger Blogs ", today we have multiple reports of blogs redirecting to "hijriah.jentayu.com/hijriah.php". This tale is somewhat less exciting than the previous episodes in this long saga, however. The problem code, which is causing the hijacks, typically appears in various HTML gadgets, and is not difficult to find. The code appears to consist of simple HTML gadgets, intentionally installed by the blog owners. You'll probably not find this hack by editing the template HTML code - it will be an HTML gadget , located in your sidebar or maybe the blog footer / attribution section. If you use a text only proxy , like the Rex Swain HTTP Viewer or the Web-Sniffer View HTTP , you can retrieve the blog in safety. Then, do a simple text search on "hijriah.jentayu.com". You'll find something like </div><div class='widget HTML' id='HTML7'> <h2 class='title...

Many blog owners - or prospective blog readers - do not understand the significance of " third party cookies ", in Blogger. Recent changes in Blogger commenting, and setting changes by blog owners, possibly related to the new comment filters , have created a variety of problem reports which involve "third party cookies". Blogger authentication cookies, which are created under "Blogger.com" and read under "BlogSpot.com" - or whatever non BlogSpot address the blog in question is published to - are affected by the "third party cookie" option. "Third party cookies", as with all cookies, are affected by filters which may be found in any section of a layered security policy .

The new "Preview" mode in Blogger Post Editor is a considerable improvement over what we used to have - but it still can cause confusion. Lately, we see occasional glimpses of confusion, about it's use. I changed my blog, and the changes were visible when I hit Preview - but the blog was unchanged when I Published, and then viewed my changes.

Blogger has been using CAPTCHA ("word verification") screening , to verify human presence in various Blogger processes , for several years. This is necessary, to prevent spammers from automating the processes of creating new blogs, and submitting "unlock" requests for spam locked blogs. CAPTCHA verification has its weaknesses though; and as spammers have been exploiting those weaknesses for some time, Blogger recently added additional tokens in some Blogger processes. You may be required to provide the number of your mobile / smart phone, as a token. When you setup a new blog. When you submit a request to have your blog unlocked after being (falsely) classified as spam. When you attempt to publish too many posts in one day. This requires that your phone receive / send SMS messages from / to Blogger, to verify your identity as a person, and not an automated process. You provide the phone number of an SMS capable mobile phone. Blogger sends a verification re...

Many times when diagnosing a problem, we may need to examine the URL that is attached to a link. Every link has a caption (that we see) - and a URL (that we can't see). The URL is the important part of a link - and knowing how to extract the URL can be a crucial part of diagnosing a problem. This post has a title "Extracting The URL Behind A Link", and the title (as with every post in this blog) is the caption to a link. The URL that is attached to the link, in the title here, is http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2010/09/extracting-url-behind-link.html .

Let's be honest - blogging is an activity. Like every activity in the world, not everybody can do it. And like every activity in the world, not everybody, who can do it, can do it equally as well. There are billions of people in the world, and everybody is different. Some people build things. I don't do that. Some people race cars - or motorcycles. A nice cop, that I met once, asked me to not do that. I've tried scuba diving - and I'm not good at that, either. So, I found other things to do.

Our newest buddy, Davidson , is proposing the perfect solution for the spam problem - Spoogle. we will have to develop another Google you need a competitor in this field if not nobody can make any income from the point you are driving at and soon if your opinion goes through you will have lesser people patronizing Google and blogger and Google affiliates mark my word for that. This is the best news of the week. The spammers can have their own Advertising platform. Blogging platform. Browser. Email system. Search engine. They can PTC, PTS, and PTW all they want. And yes, there would be lesser (sic) people in Google. Count the number of spammers in Google right now, subtract them, and add them all to Sploogle. Good riddance. Don't block the door, on the way out. Oh, if life was so simple. >> Top

There are a lot of details involved, in setting up a custom domain. Some details are not so apparent to every blog owner, when choosing a DNS model. From time to time, I get confused queries about whether there is a practical difference between the "asymmetrical" and "symmetrical" DNS models .

The ability to have a static home page for our blogs has been on the wishlist for many blog owners, for a long time. The wish, for a static home page, became even stronger when Blogger released the static pages option, and the Pages editor. With the tweak to index label searches and other dynamic pages , some folks really wanted a static home page, to accompany their indexed label searches and other dynamic pages. After Blogger continued to ignore our pleas for a static home page, we found a 2 step workaround for this omission. In Settings - "Posts and comments", we set "Show" to "0 posts" . With some clever custom template code, we make a text gadget that only displays on home page . This gives us a home page with nothing but a static text gadget displayed - and links (where provided) to other dynamic and static pages.

Almost all features of Blogger One Button Publishing are free - though not entirely from an altruistic decision by Google. One of the few Blogger features that is not free is the ability to publish a blog to a non BlogSpot URL, also known as "custom domain" publishing . Even though custom domain publishing is not free, it's not a feature from which Blogger / Google directly receives income. The cost for a custom domain registration goes directly to the registrar - and for very real services . The need for payment creates the need for some decision by the blog owner, when purchasing the domain.

The new comment moderation system, which was initially not available on all blogs , has been in place for just over 2 weeks. As it becomes available on more blogs, some blog owners have decided that it's actions are not to their liking , and would like to return to the old, manual moderation process.

The recently released Stats feature, which competes with well known third party products like SiteMeter and StatCounter , has the option to block your own visits from being counted. This option is required by any serious blog publisher, as anybody who wants to rely upon the accuracy of the visitor meter of choice is certainly going to want to see information about their readers - without the distraction of their own activity .

One of the neatest ways to theme decorate a website is by adding a relevant font. There are music fonts, which look good on musical websites. And classical fonts which look good on classical and literary websites. And everybody knows "technological / computer style" fonts, which can decorate computer / Internet relevant websites. You can change the font for your blog, using the Template Designer "Advanced" submenu , which will let you choose from a dozen or so commonly installed fonts. Special fonts work best for specialised websites, where the majority of the readers are expected to have installed the fonts in question on their computers. Fonts are essentially code, which transforms numbers and letters coded in ASCII, in your blog, into pixels on the computer screens used by your readers. There are thousands of different fonts, available all over the Internet - and not one computer will have all fonts installed.

Occasionally, a blog owner may find his blog prefaced by one of two possible content warnings. The two warnings may look the same (to some folks), but they are set - and removed - in completely different ways. Blog owners need to understand the differences.