The Real Blogger Status

There are three possible dashboard wizards, used to recover a blog with a corrupt template aka "500 Internal Server Error". The Template Designer page. The Template page. The Template Editor ("Edit HTML") page. With most blogs, one of the three can eventually be used, to install a clean, new template - and recover a blog that's offline because of the broken template. Some blogs, unfortunately, cannot be recovered this way.

The "Featured Post" gadget is a useful tool, for spotlighting individual posts . One of the limitations of the gadget is that it, like many (though not all) Blogger supplied gadgets, allows only one copy on the blog, at any time . The gadget is, after all, called "Featured Post" - not "Featured Posts". Blogger does not give us the ability to feature multiple posts, simultaneously. Given a little imagination, we can make the gadget work, for multiple posts. We can't feature multiple posts, simultaneously - but we can alternate featured posts, sequentially.

Blog owners are always changing the URLs of their blogs - then asking why Blogger does not provide automatic redirection, to the new URL. We see the occasional query, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . How do I redirect my readers, to my new URL? And this is a need that will likely go unfulfilled. If Blogger provided automated redirection, spammers would abuse it, as part of a spam publishing strategy .

Thanks to the Followers rewrite - and the Followers database cleanup - this blog has lost over 500 Followers. Blogger Support suggests that we should publish a notice to our Followers , letting them know what is going on - and why some might be no longer Following. The notice, if published as a post, will go out to everybody subscribed to the posts newsfeed.

If you did not use a Blogger / Google account when you Followed this blog, years ago, you are probably not Following now . During the past month or so, this blog has gone from 5,300 to 4,800 Followers . Owners of other blogs have reported similar reductions. Look at the Reading List, in the Blogger dashboard - if you use Blogger. Is this blog listed? If so, you are Following this blog, using a Blogger account. If not, you may want to add this blog to your Reading List .

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.

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.