The Real Blogger Status

Too many blog owners have been lured into Internet publishing by the promise of easy riches. We see various optimistic promises, in the many blogs reported in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , under hopeful topics like "Please restore my blog - I don't spam!". If you don't even have a website, there are so many ways to earn money online. You can Get paid to take online surveys, Get paid by reading email, Get paid by surfing the Web etc. You can work from home, without any knowledge about building websites at all. Here, we've put together a list of the best, and the most popular money making methods seen today. We try to cover all methods and companies, which give various kinds of offers for making money online. Making money online is a dream for many people in this world - but it's not hard as you might think. The person who wrote this blog introduction is probably not the first to believe this, nor will he be the last. He's just one more.

The World Wide Web - the most popular service that runs on the Internet - contains millions of websites, all interconnected. Why do they call it a "web", anyway? This blog, and my blog cluster , are a microcosm of that concept. Many blogs, and static websites, participate similarly. Affiliate networks are, likewise, a part of the web. This blog has several casual affiliate links, with other blogs providing similar content. Affiliate networks let the publishers of one website say to their readers Hey, here's another website with similar information! and the readers of one blog can read another blog / website for different / more insight.

This week, Blogger developed new spam review / appeal procedures , designed to make everybody's life (except, maybe, confirmed or self aware spammers) a bit simpler. Unfortunately, as we implement the new procedures in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , we are starting to see other problems, which may affect the success of the new procedures.

I've been referring to the old Blogger 4 Step spam classification / review process for some time. This week, Blogger released a new review process, designed to make everybody's life simpler (except maybe for the confirmed and / or self aware spammers). The process starts with a new notice, posted in any "My blog is not spam!" report in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken .

We get an occasional odd report about a blog, recently setup with a custom domain using " Buy a domain ", which cannot be accessed using either the BlogSpot or domain URL. Upon investigation using a Whois log , we see an odd detail. MYNONXDOMAIN.COM IS AVAILABLE mynonxdomain.com appears to be available An HTTP trace will appear identical to an improperly published domain. Upon further discussion with the blog owner, we also learn that the blog owner has seen no charge against the bank account provided for the purchase process. The only sign of the purchase is the BlogSpot URL, redirected to the domain URL. In this case, the only choice is to publish the blog back to the BlogSpot URL , then repeat the purchase, again using " Buy a domain " - but after diagnosing and possibly correcting your credit card information . >> Top

Blogger has been using CAPTCHA verification for some time, to identify you as a person, and to make sure that you are not running a computer based script. 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. Unfortunately, spammers eventually figured out how to automate CAPTCHA processing .

This week in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , we're seeing another round of frustration coming from blog owners who use Internet Explorer I can't see my Followers. and I keep getting logged out, when I try to access my blog! and I can't publish to my blog - it just keeps spinning!! and The Template Designer never loads - all that I see if the big "B" in the middle of the screen!!! All of these reports, combined with understanding of what last Tuesday was , to users of Microsoft products, hints of yet another problem with layered security on our computers , and another set of Microsoft Security Updates. Some blog owners, oblivious of the details involved, will require immediate, and detailed attention to their problem. Just tell me, in nice simple terms, what settings I should check or change! Here is where the security analysts, and the Geek Computer Repair experts, need to step up to the plate, and educate the computer owners - so they do not keep pain

Many blog owners are familiar with the confusion or despair felt when logging in to Blogger, and not seeing a dashboard with the expected owned or Followed blogs. Help! I can't manage my blog! or Why can't I see my Reading List? These are problems that we deal with, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , daily.

Recently, we've seen a few requests in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger about removing old, unused blogs. How can I remove my old blog, if I can't remember the password to the Blogger account? In some cases, we can see the blog owners had previously participated in another popular discussion topic How do I get control of this dormant blog, so I can use the URL? The two requests are not coincidental.

Not all blog owners realise the difference between the main page, and the individual posts pages, in their blog. Some blog owners would like to display all posts in the main page , so their readers don't have to spend time clicking links to the archive pages, or to the individual post pages. The differences between the main page, and the individual post pages, doesn't become an issue, for some blog owners, until they try to reconcile the individual numbers in Stats. My Stats doesn't count my pageviews correctly! We have seen a few problem reports about Stats - and some of the reports seem to come from people who don't realise that the Posts section of Stats provides pageview counts for the 10 most popular individual posts - and not for the main (home) page, archive retrievals or label searches.

Auto Pagination has been an accepted part of Blogger life now for just over a year . Almost all blog owners are used to this feature, and complaints about its interference are finally rare. Recently, we've seen a new scenario where it is involved. The best way to look for a problem with auto pagination is from looking at the source code , for the blog page being displayed. Recently, we see very odd code, using the browser View - Source menu option . Note the " ... " snippet, in the example below, represents several hundred lines of similar content, intentionally removed just so this post can be displayed, without triggering auto pagination.

I've described several oddities about how you can Follow a blog. There's the different account hosts that you can use, the different profiles that you can use, and (in some cases) whether to display an individual blog in the list of Followed blogs for the profile used, or even to allow access to the profile used.

Last week, we explored a problem with photos not displaying properly in the blog . A few blog owners have noted the published fix Edit the post HTML and remove all "height = 0" and "width = 0" attributes. Recently, we're seeing suggestions that the above suggestion helps - but not always. I looked at another post that said to manually remove the height and width = 0 tag from Edit HTML tab of the new post editor, but that has not solved the problem. Looking at the HTML in some blogs, we can see another, similarly interesting detail. Here's an example. <a href=" https :https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvDrBkec8w7oKGmhyphenhyphen7b8iJrpXHZ7FyVdQw_GnKJodvnLxXytwAhu-rNeg9MXbSvpBBvsNtzcji4D5W7OM4AViBY8TBQE2233dvt49Y_eSIGYtJ5z35qGb-7d7J5zof57GBGAkW/s1600/DSC_3337.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img r6="true" src=" https :https://blogger.googleuser

Two questions we see, seemingly unrelated, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , relate to anonymity, and to search engine indexing. Why is my blog not listed by Google? You'd think that Blogger and Google would work together! Every non Blogger blog that I have is automatically indexed - why not Blogger blogs??!! and Why is my private blog indexed in Google? I don't want strangers reading my blog, certainly not from finding it listed in Google!! Both are valid concerns - and nether will ever be answered, unilaterally. We are permitted to publish our blogs, anonymously . Major world events - such as the Iranian revolution in the first decade of 2000 - legendarily were enabled by use of anonymous Internet resources, such as Blogger blogs. However, true anonymity is extremely difficult to guarantee - and simply won't happen without a lot of planning , starting before we " Create a blog ". On the other hand, most people who publish a Blogger blog want

Just last month, we observed a problem with Blogger Stats displays, which was diagnosed to involve the "Content Warning" Interstitial display . The problem was escalated to Blogger Support - who fixed the underlying problem, and who is now working on a second problem , possibly a problem which resulted from the fixing of the first problem. Many blog owners who suffered from the first problem are also suffering from the second problem - and some blog owners are confusing the two problems. Some of the latter are not being objective, and are angrily accusing Blogger of ignoring them, in their hour of need. Very few of the people reporting the second problem have spent a great deal of time objectively evaluating the urgency of that problem. Stats is not a major functionality in Blogger blogs. It's a feature that helps the blog owner evaluate blog traffic. Lack of a Stats display (let alone one portion of a Stats display) does not affect blog functionality. The reader

Last week, we observed a problem with Blogger Stats displays, which was traced to the involvement of the "Content Warning" Interstitial display . The problem was escalated to Blogger Support - who fixed the underlying problem, to some degree. Now, we have reports which show that Stats is now displaying figures for "Traffic Sources" and for "Audiences" - but not for Posts. The details of the displays for the different time ranges - "Now", "Day", "Week", "Month", and "All time" are interesting - and noting the varying reports, from the different blog owners affected by the problem, is also interesting. One of the more obvious observations comes from the nature of what has been fixed, to date. I see counts for Audience, and for Traffic Sources - but my Posts display still shows No stats yet, check back later. This is because the Content Warning interstitial display has apparently been corrected to allow