The Real Blogger Status

Real people live in various countries all over the world. Every country has Internet service - and people who surf the Internet. Some read this blog - and maybe your blog, too, My blog pageviews today increased from 150 to 1530 !! And almost all the visits were from Canada. Please Help Me! Why would you dread Canadian readers, eh? Knowing that your blog may host readers, in a worldwide community, would you fear traffic from unknown countries?

We see confusion, from time to time, about label searches in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . Why don't my labels work, consistently? or Why don't all of my pages work? Looking at a blog with the problem, we'll frequently see lack of consistency in label case - some labels appear in lower case ("label"), some in upper case ("LABEL"), some in sentence case ("Label"). This might seem like an insignificant personality issue - but it's not.

Sometimes, we see the frustration, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about custom domain setup. I try to publish my blog to my domain, and I get We have not been able to verify your authority to this domain. Error 14. even when I know I have added the necessary DNS addresses. Why does Blogger ignore my addresses? When we check, using multiple tools - such as DigWebInterface , or Kloth , or WhoIs , we see no addresses. Even, in some cases, when the blog owner is thoughtful enough to include well displayed copy of the zone editor display.

We see a few spam blogs, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , that are classified for having scraped content . Some nervous blog owners, who routinely copy content as part of their blog posts, want to know if their blogs are vulnerable to "scraped content" spam classifications . I suspect that there are several issues to consider, regarding use of copied content in your blog .

One naive attitude, about publishing a Blogger blog, involves adding features to one's blog - and the observation that every Blogger feature or modification is not uniformly available, with entry level instructions. We see the complaints, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , too frequently. I can't get this feature to work! Why is Blogger so complicated? and I have no idea what I need to do. Please guide me, in simple language - as if I were 6 years old! Both attitudes show lack of understanding about technical projects in general - and Blogger features, and modifications, in particular.

Similar to starting a blog and immediately focusing on making money , we sometimes see people who start a blog, and immediately start designing the template, with custom features. A beautiful, shiny design is useless, if your readers don't like it. Different blogs will attract different reader populations , who will respond to different designs.

This week, we're seeing the anxious query, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . Is my blog for sale? I try to view my blog, and I see This Domain Is for Sale Have I lost my blog? Fortunately, in most cases, the answer is "No, your blog is not for sale." - and "No, you have not lost your blog!". In mid 2014, NeoWorx, the publisher of popular gadgets like NeoCounter, closed up shop. Back end code for their gadgets, installed on thousands of blogs and websites, had been served from their private libraries. Having closed their domains, the gadgets stopped working.

We're seeing a scattered collection of reports, mentioning problems publishing comments, using OpenID authentication. This problem appears to be related to the Blogger rollout of SSL support, for our blogs, which is currently in progress. SSL, or Secure Socket Layer, represents the next step in blog / website security - a step which the Internet community has been taking, for many years. Blogger has been using SSL (aka "HTTPS" login), in their dashboard, for several years. https://www.blogger.com That's a secure Blogger login. The problem with Blogger using SSL in our blogs is that moving to SSL requires care, to avoid confusing our readers. Lack of care will subject our readers to the well known "mixed mode" warnings . This site has insecure content. Only secure content is displayed. Firefox has blocked content that isn't secure. These are several examples of what were normal, years ago, on many websites. Blogger does not want our readers subje...

Along with problems with comments and unwanted CAPTCHA forms, we're seeing some reports about problems with persistent and unwanted interstitial displays, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . The interstitial display, and its use of cookies, is similar to the new mandatory anonymous comments CAPTCHA form . If your identity can't be determined, or your decision to view a blog can't be remembered, an interstitial warning is displayed - just as the CAPTCHA form is displayed, when your readers are preparing to comment.

The new, mandatory CAPTCHA form , for blog readers wishing to comment anonymously, has been in service for just under a week. We're seeing a variety of problems , reported in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , by blog owners and readers alike.

One of the many controversial issues about Stats involves the daily pageview counts, which are reset daily. Most blog owners accept the daily count reset, in principle - they just don't understand why the counts should be reset during their day, instead of at midnight. My pageview count goes up during the day - but in the afternoon, it goes to zero, then starts over again. Why is Stats so unreliable? The pageview count reset would be better understood, were it to happen daily, at midnight, for each blog owner. Unfortunately, there are over 24 different time zones, worldwide - and Blogger blogs are surely owned by some persons, in each of the time zones represented.

Have you, as a car owner, ever had the privilege of purchasing a new car? Maybe you budgeted / planned / shopped around for months, to buy the car of your dreams - certain that you would be so distinctive in the purchase of that particular colour, model, trim level, what have you? Maybe, the day after you took delivery of your new car, you drove it to the nearby shopping mall - and there, to your dismay, you discovered reality. You are not the only owner of that particular make / model / trim level. Look at all of the other people, driving your same car! Where did all of the other cars come from? People with blog problems, needing technical assistance, will go through the same reality adjustment.

Blogger and Google want to make their services available to the entire world - and this involves recognising that the entire world does not speak English . Not only is the English language not spoken by the majority of the worlds inhabitants, it's not even the second most common. With this detail in mind, Blogger / Google tries to display their pages in the language of the local inhabitants, based on geo location of the Internet connection.

Computers today are simply another consumer product - and provide challenges accordingly. I, and others like me, can remember not so long ago, when that was not at all true . Blogs, which are in part a computer product, are simply another part of that scenario. Not so long ago, my personal web page, based on a web host called Angelfire , was just a collection of links to a few dozen web pages which I enjoyed reading, linked in a static community called The Line Around The World . I did all of that because it was kewl, and because other geeks like me were doing that. Now, people like my mother (who actually could do this if she tried) are creating online scrapbooks and diaries, and publicising their daily family activities online. My web page (which is now a domain cluster ) provides advice to thousands of bloggers, daily. And all of the above illustrates the expanding blogosphere - and the problems, too.

Have you ever visited your personal physician, and instructed him My neighbour has the same cough as I have. Her doctor prescribed xxxxxxxx medicine. I want a prescription for xxxxxxx. Hopefully, not. Your doctor, if he has any professional capability, will know that a smoker's cough (in your 80 year old neighbour) won't be treated the same way as an influenza infection (in you).

Blogger provides an interface, and utilities, for us to create web sites using Blogger One Button Publishing. Short of ensuring that what we publish isn't illegal or other wise violates Terms Of Service , Blogger doesn't care about what we publish. What we publish is our business. And that includes maintaining our access to our blogs , and of keeping track of what we publish. Daily, we see the complaints I deleted my post, by mistake. Can Blogger restore it for me? or My sidebar is at the bottom of the page. Blogger, fix this. or I don't know what's wrong, it just stopped working. It looks fine in Firefox, but you can't see anything using Internet Explorer. and these are all problems with blog content. If your blog is subject to a Content Warning, it's possible that this is a recent problem that involve Blogger changes. Other than the interstitial which has been causing problems recently , problems which involve blog content are our responsibility....

In the recent past, bloggers have complained of an inability to access Blogger, because it was displaying in a "foreign" language. The language seen would generally be the native language for that locale. Even advice to adjust the Profile Languages setting in the Dashboard was useless, because they didn't know the "foreign" spelling for their language. In one case, with a gentleman complaining from Thailand, I had no recourse but to suggest that he head to the nearest Thai Internet cafe, where he could hopefully find a friendly Thai native to show him the selection for "English", written in Thai. Some time later, I observed that this advice was not quite so necessary.

How many people know what etiology is? Wikipedia defines it as ...the study of causation It's a fancy term for cause and effect. Fancy or not, though, it can have useful applications in real life. In the medical world, it might be used in a study of the spread of an epidemic. In computers, we might apply its principles for analysing a chronic network problem, as in deciding if multiple people, reporting the same symptoms, implies the existence of a major, widespread computer problem. Have you ever been to a hospital, and seen many sick people? If you did go to a hospital, would seeing the many sick people there lead you to conclude that there is a worldwide epidemic in progress? Most people are too analytical to lead to that conclusion. They know that a hospital is where sick people are expected to be seen. Oddly enough, though, many folks who wouldn't make an assumption about a medical epidemic, based upon being in a hospital, will visit a technical help forum,...

All of the companies that I've worked for in my history, which had computers, controlled everything rather tightly. Businesses do that. Businesses owned the big computers, aka mainframes. We, as programmers, would write code. We would test the code. We would give the code to a computer operator, who would run the code as a job. We would train the computer operators. All code ran on company owned and controlled computers, over company owned and controlled networks, maintained by company trained personnel. Every change was made, and tested, by people working for the company. Very tightly focused, and controlled.