The Real Blogger Status

Some blog owners are confused about how domain ownership verification works - or should work. The domain ownership verification process involves two challenges. Both accessing the registrars zone editor, and parsing the displayed content, is a challenge - for anybody but the domain owner. Or sometimes, including the domain owner. Blogger uses an intriguing technique, to verify that the blog owner, submitting a blog for domain publishing, is also the domain owner. They give the blog owner a token to add, to the domain - then verify that the token was added, before publishing the blog to the domain.

The Stats "Audience" page is now showing a mysterious entry, in the "Pageviews by Countries" list, for some blogs. The list of the top 10 most active countries, for the "Now", "Day", "Week", and / or "Month" lists, for some blogs, includes a non country name - "Unknown Region". The "Unknown Region" entry appears to be associated with a second Stats oddity, a monochromatic "Pageviews by Countries" map. This oddity is causing some concern, in various forum discussions . Where one would hope to see a familiar Stats multi-shaded Audience map, with various countries displayed in differing shades of green or black, some blog owners are seeing a monochromatic pale green display. The monochromatic display appears to be accompanied by the mysterious "Unknown Region" entry, in the countries list. I am examining the Stats "Audience" page, for this blog - in different time range...

Your blog depends upon traffic for its success - and similar to custom domain migration, will suffer a period of lower search related traffic, while being upgraded to HTTPS. Larger blogs get better search reputation, all other details being equal. While your blog is being reindexed, after you enable "HTTPS Redirect", you will have a blog with two different base URLs - and both URLs will reference two smaller blogs, and have lower search reputation. All posts in your blog will not be reindexed under an HTTPS URL, immediately. Some posts will remain indexed under the HTTP URL, as others are re indexed under the HTTPS URL, one by one. While being reindexed, your blog will look like two smaller blogs - and both URLs will suffer from lowered search reputation.

The exciting, new "Responsive" themes are a move forward, for Blogger. Like every move forward, though, there's always a couple steps backwards. The "Responsive" themes are not as easily customised as the earlier "Designer" and "Layout" themes - and they lack some enjoyable features.

I published this blog to the "Notable" theme of the "Responsive" class templates, in February 2018. I never spend a lot of time tweaking and making blog formatting changes - there are so many other Blogger issues to write about. But that ugly big black box, at the top of each post page, was in my list of improvements needed. And last week, I found the motivation, and instructions, to improve the look of this blog.

One interesting feature of Blogger, now removed, was the Google+ Share counter. Similar to the FaceBook "Like" counter, many people used to enjoy watching the Share counter increase, for a given blog or post. I, personally, used to share my blog posts to Google+ - then watch happily, as the numbers climbed. The Share counter is no more a part of Blogger.

Over the years, we've seen various problem reports mentioning attempted use of SMS for identity verification, for emergency Blogger account access. It's possible that SMS based identity verification is one more service that has been replaced - by Google 2 Step Verification.

We've been dealing with a minor recent deluge of reports, from blog owners reporting mysterious redirection of their blogs. The original typical report, which started like any report involving a respected Internet service going out of business, was annoying - yet benign. Today, the status changed to malicious. Right now, "w i d g e t s e r v e r . c o m" is redirecting to "l i b o s t u d i o s . com" . Please enter your email address to continue. Many gadgets, long known for redirecting, are again redirecting - recently to "w i d g e t s e r v e r . c o m" - and now to "l i b o s t u d i o s . c o m". As some were diagnosed, a few owners advised that the misbehaving gadget had been installed long ago . We've seen, so far, a few old (not!) friends. M a u k i e , N e o C o u n t e r, and "S u n a n d M o o n P h a s e" can be seen, in some topics . A brief sample of forum topics involving "w i d g e t...