The Real Blogger Status

In the late 1900's, people would find promises from Publishers Clearinghouse You may have won A Million Dollars! in their mailboxes. Some recipients of the mail would rush down to their neighbourhood car dealership, and buy the car of their dreams - so they could drive to the post office, to receive their first payment of the award, in style. This kept many repo businesses quite busy. Every month, someone posts a new example of paranoia, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . Who is this ominous Follower, "uGotCrossedSon"? Am I being hacked? This is another example of needless worrying - and it's equal in reality to the PCH fraud.

This week, we're seeing a new flood of complaints from people who report I posted my comment, but it vanished! and blog owners, who report My readers report inability to find their comments after they are published. And no, they are not in my "Spam" folder. Why are all of these comments disappearing?

For over a year , I've been suggesting that the time for using Classic (HTML Based) templates has become a thing of the past. This month, we are hearing suggestions that we are truly nearing the end of support for the Classic templates. As many blog owners found out about the end to FTP Publishing , you do not benefit by waiting until the last minute.

The process of transferring control of a blog , from one Blogger account to another, involves 4 distinct steps, using 2 different Blogger accounts, alternately. If you do any step out of sequence, or if you fail to properly keep the 2 Blogger accounts separate, you end up with a blog successfully controlled by neither account. There are 3 ways to keep the two Blogger accounts separate - and the easiest yet most reliable is to use two separate browsers.

Many blog owners, mindful of the various ongoing problems with Following , fear loss of their Followers when planning migration of their blog to a custom domain . Various anxious questions about Following, and custom domain publishing, are seen from time to time, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? . Can I setup custom domain publishing, without losing my Followers? This is one concern where the perception is much worse than the reality.

We see evidence of confusion, from time to time, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , from owners of private and team blogs. My friends have contacted me this week (only one week after receiving the invitation to my blog), saying that they could only access it once with the invitation - and now cannot sign in. These blog owners fail to observe that membership invitations have an expiry date, to prevent unwanted sharing of invitations .

A persistent complaint, seen periodically in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken is I can't stay logged in to my blog! Like many symptoms of Blogger login problems , this complaint can have multiple causes.

Many imaginative blog owners are finding out, from time to time, that deletion is not the way to continue - or to start over. I deleted my blog, and now I can't recreate it! and My domain is offline, and the registrar refuses to help me! or even I deleted my post, and now I get a weird URL! Each of these complaints are examples of people who tried to delete something to get something done, to a Blogger blog. In the first two cases, they were trying to transfer control (a blog, to a different Blogger account / a domain, to a different domain registration); in the latter case, they were trying to clear out unwanted content from a blog post. In neither of these cases did the blog owner accomplish the attempted goal.

A few folks find unexpected content in their Reading List. How do I stop Following that blog? It's not listed, in "Manage Blogs I'm Following", and I never Followed it! When you check the "Manage Blogs I'm Following" wizard, you get a list of the blogs that you Follow, with the Settings link for each. Oddly enough, these mysterious blogs - that you can't remember Following - won't be listed, under the observed title, on the "Manage" wizard display.

A few Blogger blog owners, trying to resolve their custom domain publishing problem , may see Google Apps mentioned in the diagnosis procedures, and try the brute force way out - deleting the Apps account. Unfortunately, the Google Apps desktop, when (only when) it provides administrative domain control , simply gives the domain administrator the ability to recycle the domain settings .

We see this naive question, from time to time, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? . I added my friend as an administrator, to my blog. He changed permissions, locked me out, and now I don't have access. Can Blogger get my blog back? Here, we have bad news for you.

We've known for some time, about problems with GMail based Google accounts, and reports of disabled accounts with mysterious mention of "unusual activity on your account". This problem gives frustrated Blogger blog owners yet another exercise in frustration, where they spend time getting their Google accounts reactivated. This month, we are seeing reports of another, rather alarming detail, now involving Picasa.

Like problems with people who can't remember their GMail email addresses , we're seeing complaints from blog owners who never bothered to remember their non GMail based Blogger account name or password, and who now cannot login to Blogger . Help me! My previous email account is defunct, and now I can't access my blog! Everybody makes mistakes - and some mistakes must be resolved by the blog owners.

Slightly less than 1 week ago , we started seeing reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , suggesting yet another hijack of Blogger blog readers. When trying to view my blog I am redirected to http://rpc.blogrolling.com. Has my blog been hacked? The titles (questions) are phrased so differently, and posted in such numbers, in the forums (and as comments to my blog), that suggests that nobody publishing these questions sees how many other people are reporting the same problem. And even with many of us knowing about the problem, and having developed a simple diagnostic procedure, the reports keep coming. Why do we see so many reports, about one simple problem?

One question that we see regularly, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , comes from worried new blog owners. Why do my pageview counts go up and down all of the time? or, less normally Why have my pageview counts been going down, recently? In many cases, this is a normal result of (for example) more traffic last week, than this week. This won't always be the cause of the questions, though.

Mail-To-Blogger is a very simple way of using your email client or mobile computer, to submit photos and text as posts in your Blogger blog. As simple as it is, it offers less options than some folks would wish. Some post content can't be immediately published, using email - but must be later added into the post, using Post Editor.

Blogger has been making it progressively easier for us to manage our blogs, ourselves, without having to waste time posting in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken Help me!!! They have provided us with various tools, such as the ability to restore an accidentally deleted blog . The tools that they provide are not immediately, perpetually, or universally available, however.

Less than 2 months ago, Blogger announced their new and shiny GUI, in Draft Blogger . This week, they made it an option, in Production Blogger . As you may have heard, things are starting to look a little different across many Google products—and today, Blogger is the next product to get a makeover.

This week, we're seeing a new small flood of complaints about redirecting blogs, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . When I try to view my blog, I am being redirected to http://rpc.blogrolling.com! Many blog owners have forgotten the past, and the accessories they installed on their blogs, long ago. Sometimes - as now - the past can return, to haunt you.