The Real Blogger Status

I've written a few posts about editing post content - and discuss clearing cache after editing, to see updates. Generally, my posts reference cached posts content. Sometimes, blog owners need to clear cached feed content, in addition to / instead of clearing cached post content. There is a difference between post content, and newsfeed content - and how both are cached. Newsfeed cache is not as frequent a concern.

One popular Stats related accessory, which displays pageview information to the public, is the "Popular Posts" gadget. Popular Posts identifies from 1 to 10 of the most popular posts in the blog, by comparing Stats pageview counts. Optional parts of the display of each post are a snippet of text, and an ever popular thumbnail photo. Like many Stats features, blog owners have found imaginative uses for "Popular Posts" - and overlook the limitations of the gadget. Both the dynamic nature of Stats, and the timing of the various pageview count recalculations, create confusion, when Popular Posts is examined.

In some blogs, a popular accessory is a dynamic "similar posts" index, with image captioned links to other posts. Sometimes, the links can rival the usefulness of label lists. "Similar Posts" is not a Blogger feature - but there are several third party services which provide this feature, generally used in blogs which consistently use photos in the posts. This feature will be more useful, with photo rich blogs - and less useful, with label rich blogs, and blogs which link to other posts in text (like this blog).

Some blog owners like to validate their Stats displays, using third party visitor logs like StatCounter. Since Stats displays aggregated page view counts - not individual visitors - a blog owner will find many discrepancies between Stats and StatCounter. One observation might involve Stats indicating periods of no activity, where StatCounter shows an interesting visit. A visit, registered by StatCounter - but not by Stats - indicates an apparent problem with Stats. Or, so the blog owner might think.

Occasionally, someone may publish a blog as private, invite / accept readers, then later decide that results are not as positive as desired. It's easy enough to change a blog, from Private to Public. Just go to the Permissions wizard, in the dashboard menu Settings - Basic, and change Blog Readers from "Private" to "Public". Unfortunately, this may not leave everybody able to access the blog. I made my blog public, last week. Some of my friends are now seeing Your current account does not have access to view this page. Why is this still an issue? The blog owner, in this case, is seeing the effect of cache, and authentication. In many cases, simple instructions to " clear cache, cookies, and sessions " may resolve this problem. This does not always work, however - and the mystery why it does not always work may frustrate us, almost as much as the original symptom.

One of the stranger confusions, seen occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , refers to the posts feed, from our blog, displayed on other people's blogs. I just published a new blog post - but it does not show up on my friends blogs. Is there a problem, with my feed? When we investigate, the blog feed shows no problem. We display the feed in the browser, and compare with the blog main page - and everything on the main page is in the feed. It just does not show up on our friends feed gadgets. So, what's the problem here? Were we imagining a problem? No, it's not imagination.