The Real Blogger Status

We see an occasional question in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue about blog links - and the captions that change colour, mysteriously. Some blog owners seem to regard the colour changes as one more Blogger pecadillo - ignoring the fact that colour changing link captions have been part of Internet design , since the early days.

Recently, we have some blog owners observing that use of Post Editor leads to generation of an extra draft post. If I edit this post, then save my changes, I may see an empty post when I hit "Close".

SSL has been an option, for BlogSpot published blogs, since late last year - and we still see occasional questions, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about its use. When I saved my post, I saw the error message This page contains HTTP resources which may cause mixed content affecting security and user experience if blog is viewed over HTTPS. I clicked "Fix" - and the error message went away. Should I have to go back and "fix" all my old blog posts, this way? This blog owner will be better off, with "HTTPS Redirect" disabled.

One of the most useful skills, when maintaining and publishing a blog, is backing up the content. As you publish a blog, it's a very good idea to periodically backup the content - comments, pages, and posts. Sometimes, backed up content may save you hours of anguish.

Ad blockers are popular Chrome add-ons, which let us manage various websites abilities to serve ads in our browsers. Many ad blockers include a script blocker. Like NoScript in Firefox, ad blockers may interfere with various Blogger features - such as the "Don't track" script, in the dashboard.

We see occasional frustration, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , involving broken or unreliable custom domains. I setup the Custom Domain properly, following the Google directions . For some of my readers, my custom domain is not opening. I can see it is going in an infinite loop in the browser - and after a long time, it's throwing errors. My domain is setup, properly. Why do I have to deal with this? And we will investigate - and in many cases, we find the domain is setup properly .

We see an occasional report in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about custom domain publishing. My readers can't view the blog - they get a redirection count error! DNS analysis shows a properly setup domain . When we try to examine the blog, we see a private blog notice - or we are required to login. But why a private blog, using a custom domain?

Some Blogger blogs cannot be viewed, in some proxy servers. Proxy servers are useful, when diagnosing connectivity and other blog display issues . They are more useful, though, when the content of the blogs being diagnosed does not contribute to the problems. The reported discrepancy appears to start with blogs published using dynamic templates .

Some blog owners want to know why custom domain published blogs are subject to daily activity spam control limits. We see the occasional query, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . Does the 50 posts / day limit apply to all blogs that use the Blogger platform - or only for these hosted on BlogSpot? With Blogger, all blogs are subject to a daily publishing activity limit - pages and posts, combined.

If your blog is published to a dynamic template, neither you or your readers will have a navbar, when your blog is being viewed. The navbar, found on blogs which use a non dynamic template - when selected by the blog owner - has a number of reader friendly icons and links. Dynamic templates have a "menu bar" 1/5 of the way down the page - which provides a combination of the Pages gadget, and limited navbar functions. At the far right end of the menu bar, you'll see 2 tiny icons - when you are properly logged in as the blog owner. New post, the "pencil" icon. Home, the "home" icon.

There are three possible dashboard wizards, used to recover a blog with a corrupt template aka "500 Internal Server Error". The Template Designer page. The Template page. The Template Editor ("Edit HTML") page. With most blogs, one of the three can eventually be used, to install a clean, new template - and recover a blog that's offline because of the broken template. Some blogs, unfortunately, cannot be recovered this way.

Viewing comments, on some popular blogs, one may get the idea that not as many comments are being published, as are immediately visible. With a large comment complement, comments are paginated - with some comments hidden behind a link, captioned "Load more". The "Load more" link is JavaScript based - and there is a problem. The "Load more" link does not always work, on all blogs.

Some blog owners add pages - dynamic and static - to their blog, then discover that the Pages gadget lists them in the wrong sequence. We see an occasional question, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . My pages are poorly organised. How do I change the sequence? This is not a difficult problem, to correct.

People frequently observe significant differences between products from Apple / Google / Microsoft . Since all three corporations are separate (and highly competitive), they have their own corporate philosophies and development timelines. Despite all of that, Blogger tries to make their product supportable, across all corporate lines. Unfortunately, the Blogger service is not always consistently usable, with all browsers - or mobile computer / smart phone apps.

Custom domain setups continue to confuse blog owners - and lead sometimes to frustration, expressed in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . When I am trying to set up a custom domain for my new blog, I'm not getting the 2nd CNAME Record, but the settings get saved. In some cases, the domain may be operational - and other times, the domain will be broken, and no corrective instruction is provided.

We see questions about content requirement, in both AdSense Help Forum: Blogger / Host Partners , and in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . My blog was just deleted, as a spam host! I Don't publish spam! and Why can't I get my Earnings button activated? My blog is over a year old, and contains hundreds of posts!! Neither blog owner publishes a blog which contains blatant unwanted commercial content - or hacking or porn. But neither blog is suited for hosting AdSense ads, either.

When we use Blogger Following, we create a link to our profile, from each blog that we Follow. That's the primary purpose of Following - to see, and to be seen. We also create links from our Followers profile, to each Followed blog. That's the purpose of having a profile - to describe ourselves, by the blogs that interest us. Everybody does not want other people knowing about every blog that we Follow, though. To let us Follow blogs without being seen, we can Follow anonymously - or hide a blog, from our profile on other blogs.

We've been experiencing - and discussing - referer spam, since 2011 . We still see unaware blog owners, asking in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . When I checked my stats for my blog, and looked at traffic sources, I noticed a link from a different country - and it just seems weird that Russian readers would then go to a US site. When we explain that they're probably seeing another referer spam attack - and that clicking on the links is not always a good idea, we get a variety of responses. Some want to know if there is a purpose, to this noise.