The Real Blogger Status

Every time I carry this computer with me, and login to Blogger or Google from another location - and get the repeated demand that I Insert my USB key, and touch the button. I growl just a bit. Then, I consider what using Google 2-Step Verification means, to me. Many blog owners become unhappy, when they use Blogger. I tried using Blogger from my friends computer - and I have to tell them when I setup my Blogger account! or I need to recover control of my blog - and even though I supplied the right phone, and got the recovery email message, I have to check off which Google services I have used, in the last month!! WTF?? These are simply people who do not use Google 2-Step Verification - and have to prove their identity, in a different way.

One of the most intriguing subjects, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , is about account access - and the dashboard menu. My menu only gives me Posts, and Settings! How do I manage my blog? This blog member (owner?) may be simply logged in to the wrong Google account.

One challenging question, that we see from time to time in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , is about one of the neatest Blogger social networking features, Following. How do I find blogs to Follow? And that is a simple question, with not such a simple answer. What came first - the chicken, or the egg?

We've been seeing suggestions, for years, that the Reading List is unreliable . Many Blogger account owners have reported the mysterious disappearing Reading List . A few have reported a second problem - inability to remove blogs from the Reading List . Few account owners connect the two problems. The two problems may each affect different account owners. Of the few affected by both problems, not many are likely to see them as having a common cause.

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 .

Occasionally, we see the query, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? How do I change these captions? / Add this feature? / Remove specific components of this feature? Conversely, we see in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken Why does this new Blogger feature not work in my blog? These questions, in many cases, may be related. We can see the connection, when we look closer at how the changes are applied.

Too many would be blog owners are unable to create a blog, because they don't understand how to check for availability. I can't seem to type in a URL, without it saying it's not available. Some people don't understand that you do not type a URL - you just type a blog name , when checking for availability.

We're seeing an occasional report, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , about inability to manage the Reading List, using the dashboard "Manage Blogs I'm Following" wizard. Clicking on the dashboard "gear" icon to the right of "Reading List", one should expect to see a list of Followed blogs, in the familiar menu. In some cases, what is seen will be bad news. We are unable to load your FriendConnect data at this time. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again shortly. Upon trying again, the same error is frequently seen, repeatedly.

Occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , we see a query from a confused blog owner. I made a large number of posts today, and Blogger is now requiring me to solve a CAPTCHA, for every post. I tried to find the form to submit, so that my website could be reviewed, but I could not find it. What do I do, now? This blog owner, like too many, does not understand the spam mitigation policy.

Occasionally, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , we see questions about publishing a blog, anonymously . How do I publish a blog, without having my identity revealed? One of the best techniques for keeping yourself anonymous is to use different Blogger / Google accounts, for different blogs. But, there's a downside to that technique. I can't regain access to my blog, because I don't remember the email address! Sometimes, it's a bit more embarrassing. I can't regain access to my blog, because I don't remember the GMail address! And here, we see blog owners who took the need for secrecy a bit far.

People make mistakes - and that bare fact is the basis for so many interesting problem reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . If you made a mistake and deleted your Blogger account, maybe you're just now noticing that the blogs owned by the account have disappeared, also. Blog has been removed Sorry, the blog at mydeletedblog.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs. Now, what to do?

As a Blogger blog owner, and being human, we occasionally make mistakes. If this were not so, the "Delete" key would be unused - instead of being the most worn down key on my keyboard. One commonly seen mistake, reported in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , involves deletion of our blogs. Help me! I just deleted my blog!!! This is a cry, seen almost daily.

Not all blog owners, who publish blogs outside the BlogSpot address space, have any feeling for the complexity of the DNS infrastructure . We see the questions periodically in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . My readers are still reporting seeing the well known problem 404 Server not found or I added the "CNAME" for my domain, and I'm still seeing another old friend (not) Another blog is already hosted at this address. when I try to publish the blog to the domain. or I added "blog.mydomain.com" to my domain, and published to it with no problem, but some readers are seeing 404 Server not found Why some - but not all?

Blogger promises us that our blogs will be ours, forever , and that we are free to publish our blogs in privacy , if we so desire. They do this by protecting our Blogger accounts behind Two Factor Authentication . Both the name of our Blogger account, and the password used, are our secret to keep. Since both the account name and the password are secrets , you can't just write to Blogger Support one day and say I forgot my account name - can you tell me what it is? When you setup a Blogger account, you provide an email address, which will be used for recovering forgotten account names and passwords.

The process of "bidding" determines who is best suited to take on a given task, in some multi party games and relationships. In the game of Contract Bridge , the players of the game get a chance to assess their personal holdings of the cards dealt to them, and the probable holdings of their prospective partner and opponents - and predict the number of rounds ("tricks") that they expect to win, in the game to come. In the "game" of construction bidding , contractor firms get the chance to predict how much funds they will require, to perform a given project, given the chance by the firm bidding the project. In both cases, different parties bid for the right to perform a task. Some would be blog owners think that procedure should apply to blog ownership. I want this URL - It's the perfect URL for my needs - for my blog. The URL is in use, but it hasn't been updated, recently. Why can't Blogger give me that URL?

I've been arguing the plain facts about URL non availability for years - if the BlogSpot URL of your choice is in use, you can't have it . That's not an easy answer for many bloggers, and some don't accept it without a lot of arguing. The other side of the coin is that any available URL is there for the taking, by anybody. Relevance of the name in question, to any physical existence outside the Internet world , has no validity.

Sometimes, you have 2 blogs - and you decide that maybe the content of one blog would really be better under the URL of the other blog. Content might include any or all of comments, posts, reader population, structure. That's not so important - if you swap properly. Maybe you want to keep both blogs, so deleting one would be stupid. The good news is that swapping the two is not all that difficult.

Sometimes, your readers will benefit from more than a navbar based, direct blog search, of a single blog. As I discussed some time ago, if you have a single blog, and want to provide a very simple search, you can do that using a Blogger dynamic search in an HTML / JavaScript gadget . You can provide a gadget to do a direct blog search, in addition to the search gadget in the Navbar - or (if you block the Navbar), you can do this instead of the search gadget in the Navbar. But what if you have multiple blogs, maybe in a custom domain cluster, that you want your reader to search in combination? Or maybe you would like refinements to your search? That's when you use the Google Custom Search Engine.

When your blog gets larger, you'll want your readers to be able to find the content easier - sometimes using more detail than can be found in the Archives index. You can generally use Labels for a more comprehensive index of the blog contents - but both labels, and titles, index the posts based on your vision of the blog. What if you want your readers to view your blog, on their terms? This is where the Navbar, with its search box, becomes useful.

According to Blogger Help This blog looks abandoned, can I have its address? Blogger accounts and Blog*Spot addresses do not expire. That's good news - if you're the blog owner. Short of your blog being hacked , what you publish will remain online - and your property, forever . Of course, your ability to maintain your blog and URL will be subject to your ability to maintain the account that administers the blog. And the future online status of the blog will be subject to how it's published, and its future after you're gone .