The Real Blogger Status

Earlier this year, Blogger upgraded their dashboard - and eliminated the opening "My blogs" / "Reading List" page . They changed from a dashboard home page, listing all blogs owned by a given Blogger account - to a home page, showing the dashboard for the most recently updated blog. To the dashboard menu for the blog displayed, they added a pulldown blog selector list. If you want the dashboard for a different blog, or need a different important "My blogs" function, you use the selector list.

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".

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.

This month, we have a few reports, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about problems Following some blogs. Why am I being blocked, from Following? Some would be Followers are taking this personally. Please, don''t do that.

Blog owners have been requesting the ability to position various post content items above the post body, for years. We've seen reports, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about problems moving Comments, Labels, Share Bar, and others. Several years, "Arrange Items" was upgraded to allow Labels to be moved above the post body. That option was provided briefly - then removed later.

Blogger is rewriting the Followers gadget, and removing some lesser used features. One of the features seeing some change is Followers Authentication and Profiles. Long ago, I wrote about Community Accounts , and later about Community Profiles - both features letting you (or someone Following you) provide a blog to Follow and / or Follow other blogs. At the time, Following (aka Google Friend Connect) was part of a complex network of different Followers services - with some Google users, and others non Google users. The ability to use non Google services, to Follow Blogger blogs, made a Blogger blog accessible to more people.

Last week, Blogger Engineering announced their latest feature, "Featured Post" . Whether you’d like to re-share that delicious holiday recipe from a few years back, spotlight a can’t-miss promotion you’re running, or just revive something quirky from the archives, the Featured Post gadget is a simple way to show off the content that matters most. This is a quick and easy way to highlight a specific post in your blog, that will be enjoyable or useful for your readers. I hope to use mine to provide useful advice, as "Read, and Learn" - once the Followers gadget has been updated , and is fully operational.

Google makes changes to their software environment, constantly. This week, they deprecated the Google Feed API . Unfortunately, many Blogger gadgets require that feature to display feed content, on our blogs. This week, numerous reports about broken feeds, in various gadgets, are being seen, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . The broken feeds are a direct result of the deprecated API.

If you like to multi task when using Blogger, you probably keep a few windows and tabs open, in the browser. If you have lots of tasks running simultaneously, and you try to Share to Google+ from the dashboard Posts page, you may click on the "Share" link, the "Share on Google+" window pops up, you watch the window load - and just as the window is almost complete, it vanishes.