The Real Blogger Status

Owners of private blogs have, periodically, lamented the lack of options for distribution of comments and posts. We've seen a few queries, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . How do I let my readers subscribe to my private blog? There's no good answer, to please everybody, here. You can't use EMail, FeedBurner, or Reading List, for sharing private blog content. FeedBurner requires the blog comments / posts newsfeeds - and private blogs don't produce newsfeeds .

We see occasional questions from blog owners, and readers, about options for reading posts, from a given blog. The most obvious way to read the posts is to read the blog, as published, online. If the owner of a blog that interests you uses Google+ publicity , reading either online, or in the Google+ stream, may be your choice. For Blogger hosted content, both owners and readers have a few more possibilities.

We see occasional questions from blog owners, and readers, about options for reading comments, and comment updates, from a given blog. The most obvious way to read comments - or replies to comments - is to read the individual posts. If a blog that interests you uses Google+ hosted comments , reading either on the post, or in the Google+ stream, may be your choice. For Blogger hosted comments. both owners and readers have a few more possibilities.

Long ago, when diagnosing a problem thought to involve email, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , we would ask a very simple question Is your Blogger account based on a GMail - or non GMail - email address? And we would carefully add Please, do not state your email address, here! The latter request was to prevent theft of peoples Blogger accounts .

Some blog owners don't always think about the various email settings, which are part of their Blogger blogs, and the possible effects to their email - or somebody else's email. There are several settings, where a blog owner may enter an email address. Email posts to Comment Moderation. Comment Notification Email. These settings don't require acceptance by the recipient, making for some interesting possibilities for causing problems in other people's email , as well as one's own email.

Ever since Blogger gave us the ability to have team blogs , blog owners have been asking How do I track what my authors are posting? as if Blogger blogs have an audit trail option. The unfortunate truth is that Blogger is a website publishing platform - it is (or was, at one time) called Blogger One Button Publishing Blogger, quite simply, is not a Content Management System . However, even if Blogger does not provide a packaged audit trail, which would be a standard feature in any CMS, this does not mean that we cannot set one up, with very little work. If you publish a team blog (or a single owner blog), you already have this option.

Recently, we've seen a few questions in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , about email distribution of blog posts, from private blogs. I previously used a Google Group, to send an email to more than 102 people. This is now no longer working - my Google Group is not notified of a new post, automatically. Any idea what could have changed or be going wrong? Here, we see signs of the use of Google+ becoming more necessary.

A year ago, we noted a security change to BlogSend, which left many blog owners with severely deprecated ability to publicise blog updates , when using a private Google Group. At that time, the recommended workaround was to add "no-reply@blogger.com" as a Google Group member. Today, we see that the ability to add Google Group members directly is no longer offered. It appears now that the use of private Google Groups, for distribution of Blogger blog updates, is not an option.

Ever since Google+ was released, blog owners have been asking how to post blog updates to Google+. Previously, there was only the possibility of publishing from Google+ to our blogs - and that option was not well designed . Last week, Blogger released this option , in Draft Blogger. Today we’re excited to announce the first way you will be able to leverage Google+ -- by making it possible to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile. In addition to giving your readers a more robust and familiar sense of who you are, your social connections will see your posts in their Google search results with an annotation that you've shared the post.

This week, a few blog owners who use BlogSend to distribute notices of new posts to various readers noted a change - and not a change that they appreciated. Various reports were noted in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . The email notification about my blogs new post is not in my spam, nor is it "pending approval" in my Google Groups management. It appears that the notifications are just not going out via BlogSend. and I wrote a new post today and then hit publish. I checked my email and it had arrived, but the sender was not my name, it was "blogger.com". Blogger Support informed us that they recently changed the address that notifications get sent to - from the users' address, to "no-reply@blogger.com". This was changed as a quick fix, for a security vulnerability that they found. This change will cause two issues of confusion. For blogs which depend upon direct email from BlogSend to your readers, the recipients of BlogSend will see e...

To further answer the regularly asked question "How do I let my friends know when my blog is updated?", we have FeedBurner. Properly setup, a FeedBurner feed will provide a neat subscription form for your blog, and help you maintain your subscription list, for any publicly accessible blog which publishes a feed.

Many of us use BlogSend, with or without the inclusion of Google Groups, for notifying ourselves and others when a post is published to our blogs .

If you have a blog with multiple authors, you may have learned by now that you need to watch what's being posted. If there's lots of posting activity, though, you can't always check the blog - or even the newsfeeds from the blog - as often as you'd like, to see if something has been added. BlogSend saves you from that task, by simply notifying you ( or your designates ) when a post is added.

Every day, we see the question "How do I let my friends know when my blog is updated"? My personal preference would be to use a syndication feed (Atom or RSS) . A newsfeed reader is very convenient, and easy to use. But a newsfeed isn't universally useful. If your blog is private (requires authentication to read ), newsfeeds won't be available . Some readers can't, or won't, use a newsfeed reader.