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.

Some blog owners buy domains, for publishing a Blogger blog, and ask about how to address the domain. What address do I use for "Points to"? Other owners may ask a similar question, referencing "Destination" or maybe "Target". There is no real difference, between all 3 labels. "Destination", "Target", and "Points to" all refer to the same DNS address value. To compound the confusion, 4 different addresses are required , when addressing a Blogger custom domain root.

The new Followers gadget is out - and is causing some confusion. If you are Following a blog - either your own blog, or somebody else's - and you examine the Followers gadget, you will see a button labeled "UnFollow". Long ago, "UnFollow" was a selection, in the "Options" menu.

Custom domain setups continue to confuse blog owners - and lead sometimes to frustration, expressed in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . When I am trying to set up a custom domain for my new blog, I'm not getting the 2nd CNAME Record, but the settings get saved. In some cases, the domain may be operational - and other times, the domain will be broken, and no corrective instruction is provided.

I recently updated an old post, to add a link to a newly published post - and experienced panic. Adding a link to an old post, Deleted / Locked Blogs Have Several Causes , I discovered an oddity which caused extreme heartburn for several hours. Maybe you have experienced this, also. Editing my post, and adding a simple single sentence, with embedded link, at the end of the post, I refreshed the display (always test your changes - no matter how minor!), and watched as the paragraphing scrambled itself.

In BlogLovin, the ownership verification process is termed "claiming your blog". Claiming your blog involves installing a BlogLovin link, with embedded token, on your blog where it can be seen, by the BlogLovin claim verification process. Getting the claim link, from the BlogLovin dashboard, is not an obvious process.

There is some confusion, about including "search description" meta content , in blog template code, to provide source for data shares to social sharing sites. In various topics in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , I've seen references to "data:post.metaDescription", "data:post.snippet", and "data:post.pageTitle" used, in providing the blog post source for the FaceBook "og:description" tag. As far as I can tell, none of these exist.

Some blog owners see encoded special characters, in Blogger dashboard displays - and do not understand why they are there. I recently noticed that the comments, that I view in my Blogger dashboard page, have like a series of numbers and symbols in some of the comments. This owner is looking at comments, displayed in the Dashboard Comments pages ("Published", "Awaiting moderation", and "Spam"), which right now may contain strange character sequences. The " HTML entity codes " for special characters, like ampersand, apostrophe, and quote marks, are HTML code - that will probably be with us, forever. Blogger blog content (like many other blogs and websites) uses HTML - and those characters have syntactical importance. Using them in blog content, unencoded, causes problems with browser operation.

One of the more mysterious causes of blog loss involves deleted blogs, with the owner being forced to recover account access because of "suspicious" / "unusual" account activity . In general, with the report made in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , we may dismiss the owner as a "hacking victim". We may suspect just one more botnet in operation, stealing peoples accounts and blogs - and the victim unwisely revealed his email address. Sometimes, the story is more bizarre.

We're seeing some signs of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about the current rewrite of Blogger Followers / Google Friend Connect . When it says that ' non-Google accounts and profiles will be removed ' does that mean my blog will be deleted - since I use a non GMail based Blogger account? There are two bits of confusion here. I've explained a few times that a Blogger account, GMail based or not, is still a Google account . That detail does not change. Next, we should recall how Blogger provided login to the Followers gadget, for those surfing the web without using a Google account.

Some blog owners can't figure out how to add the Blogger Followers gadget, to their blogs. We see occasional confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about installation and use of Followers. After typing https://www.google.com/friendconnect/ into my browser, I am redirected to Blogger Help: Manage blogs you follow How do I install Followers?

An occasional blog owner reports frustration with various "Advanced" Template Designer wizards, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . I have entered my new colour palette under "template>advanced>" - and the colours will not show up on the blog. I even checked that the colour values were right under "Edit HTML". This blog owner wants different background colours, than are provided as defaults - and does not understand why the wizards, that advise Template applied. simply don't work.

One useful alternative to the "Archives" gadget , when you want to help your readers index your blog by Title, is a LinkList. You can make a LinkList in 5 minutes - and you can add a new entry, when you publish a post, in 10 seconds - and index your blog by Post Title. Just don't confuse the terms "linklist" and "list", when you add a Title index.

Occasionally, we see signs of confusion, in in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . Where are the buttons, in the toolbar? or Why don't I have a Colour / Font / Jump Break / Video Upload / whatever selection, in my post editor? The reason is very subtle - and not easy to spot. Blogger page / post editor is very elegant, with no feature being colourfully different. Most people compose their posts in Compose mode - and don't use HTML Mode, except for specific needs - or maybe by accident. And the people who don't use HTML mode, intentionally, can't always spot the difference, in the mode selector buttons.

Occasionally, we see real confusion, involving the email address. I can login to Blogger - but I can only change my email address, or remove myself from the blog. This is a blog owner who is logged in as a blog author, who now sees just two dashboard menu pages. Posts Settings In many cases, this will be a blog owner who is trying to recover access to the blog , having forgotten the account name - or who is inadvertently using a second Blogger account . Running afoul of the Blogger / Google blind login , the would be owner has just managed to login - but sees a very empty dashboard. And, the confusion may not end there.

People worry about the Quick Edit icons - sometimes, needlessly. I was logged out - but I can still see the edit tools! or My visitor logs show people clicking on the "rearrange" links!! Fortunately, no matter what can be seen - or may be clicked - only administrators will get any result. I use the "rearrange" links for many blogs, frequently. The links are unbelievably useful, when instructing a blog owner how to remove a misbehaving gadget on her / his blog .

Not every blog, that gets readers - or pageview counts - is going to get comments. We see the disappointment, periodically, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . I have received over 2,000 page views, but only close friends comment. Is there a setting or something that makes sense as to why I'm not receiving comments? And yes, there are various settings, which may restrict your readers abilities to comment - but that may not be the only possible problem.

Some people are particular about the colors used, in their blogs. They may spend hours - or days - choosing the right shade of gray, to complement the text in the posts. Later, they look at the blog, and discover a glaring discrepancy. Why are the post titles so nasty looking? The titles clash with the posts! These owners may just be discovering the reality of Blogger blogs, and the ever changing title colors .

We've seen a few reports in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , mentioning mysteriously resurrected posts, appearing in email or on peoples desktop displays. When investigated, the blog owner will observe that a new post, which had been originally published after the one mysteriously appearing, was recently deleted. Further investigation shows that the mysterious post, that just re appeared, was the 26th most recently published post.

Occasionally, Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , we see concern about another search efficiency report. I'm getting a report mentioning Multiple meta descriptions found for the page What do I do? Similar to the long known panic about blocked label search indexing, this is more confusion about label searches . If you spend time adding search description meta tags , to new and previously published pages and posts in a blog, eventually you will have some posts with search descriptions, and with a common label. A label search page, for a label containing multiple posts each of which have a search description, is going to have multiple search descriptions.