The Real Blogger Status

Some blog owners speak / write in multiple languages - and want to interact with their different readers, separately, in each different language. Blogger, and Google, support the need for publishing multiple blogs, each written in a different language. The "hreflang" tag, added to a blog, identifies other blogs, published to different languages, with identical or similar content.

People who speak (read / write) languages, that do not use Roman character sets, need to publish in their native language - and the Internet now supports that need . Some registrars will register domains which use non Roman character sets, in the URL. Not all Internet services will accept non Roman characters, however. My favourite online DNS diagnostic services, DigWebInterface , and intoDNS , and Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer , only use ASCII. One cannot use non ASCII ("non Roman") characters, with either service.

Some blog owners keep coming back, requesting review, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . My blog has been deleted and restored, repeatedly. Last time, after Blogger unblocked my blog, I received this email ....Upon further review we have determined that your blog was mistakenly marked as a TOS violator by our automated system and, as such, we have reinstated your blog... That was just last month. This month, the same thing, my blog is gone again. This blog owner is failing to read the handwriting on the wall. Unfortunately, to have any future, a blog requires continual new material.

Spend some time surfing Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue - both in detail, for recent periods - and random sampling, over long periods. Read the comments, and questions. You'll see both complaints about spammy (aka "abusive") content - and objectionable (aka "adult") content. And, you'll see review requests, referencing previous abusive and adult content penalties. Given enough surfing, you'll discover that each is simply the other side of the same coin.

One Blogger feature, that is occasionally mentioned in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , is the issue of scheduling post publication. Setting up a scheduled post is extremely simple - and that may be part of the problem. Before you publish a post, you give the post a published date / time that occurs in the future. The post date / time becomes the scheduled posting date / time. And there is where one possible problem, with scheduled posts, may start. Long ago, when scheduled posts were first introduced, the wizard for setting the date and time was rather simple. Since this is a new post, I can look under "Post settings", to the right, and see the "Schedule" option. If I expand "Schedule", I can see the selected default of "Automatic". If I select "Set date and time", the fun begins.

As Blogger blogs become more popular outside the U.S.A., we see various blog owners who are multi-lingual - and who want to publish simultaneously, in multiple languages. We see the question, occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . How do I publish my blog in English, French, and Spanish - and keep a good relationship with my readers, the search engines, and the anti spam bots? This is not difficult to do - just publish a well balanced and linked blog cluster, with the "hreflang" tag defining the related blogs, to the search engines.

If you publish a set of blogs in multiple languages, or customised for different geographical regions, you may have concerns about search engine reputation, and / or spurious spam classification. Blog sets which are legitimately replicated, for either different languages or geographical regions, have been known to be caught in the infamous Blogger spam trap . And blogs which contain duplicated content can be a problem, both in Blogger and in Google Search. Google provides a tag, which lets you indicate, to Blogger and to the search engines, blogs that are members of a legitimate blog set.

Some blog owners use Mail-to-Blogger, for publishing to their blogs, without considering the issues. Some owners can't get Mail-to-Blogger to work. I get Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: or I don't get any error - and the post never shows up in my Posts list. Other owners have no problems getting theirs to work, and later find posts that they didn't send - and don't appreciate . Where did all of the spam come from? Using Mail-to-Blogger seems simple - but maybe should not be treated so. The Mail-to-Blogger email address, at Settings - Mobile and email, is a major part of the challenge , in this case.

Some would be domain owners are reporting the sad truth about Google Domains . I tried to use a Google Domains invitation, and got a refusal. We're sorry. You appear to be in a country where Google Domains is not yet available. You may search for domains, but you will not be able to purchase a domain unless you have a U.S. billing address. Learn more Get notified when Google Domains is available in your country. So thanks anyway! Google Domains is currently a beta product - and as of December 2017, it is available in 14 countries.

Blog owners are periodically asking themselves How do I invite my readers to leave comments? Some blog owners think of commenting as the most important way to get new readers. One of the most seemingly insignificant components of the Blogger template is the link to invite the readers to leave comments. This is not a simple feature - it varies according to where the comment form is placed, and to different language and style decisions.

Recently, we've seen signs of confusion, from people who have problems with their Internet service, which shows them moving around their geographic region. I logged in to Blogger, with no problem, yesterday. Today, after logging in successfully, I am asked for more details, to prove my identity!! This blog owner has a problem with location based security. Not all Blogger blog owners or readers understand that Country Local Domain Redirection , and the ability to access one's Blogger / Google account (and prevent others from accessing it), both depend upon the ability to determine the geographical location of each blog reader.

Occasionally, we see signs of confusion, from people who understand Country Code Alias Redirection , in general. I live in Hungary - but I am reading blogs with the ".sk" suffix! This blog reader knows about alias redirection - but does not understand why he is seeing redirection for Slovakia (".sk"), instead of Hungary (".hu"). Not all Blogger blog owners or readers understand that Country Code Alias Redirection depends upon the ability to determine the geographical location of each blog reader.

People who publish blogs which are relevant to a specific country may be able to focus search engine attention, for their blog - and better target readers in the country in question. Google Webmaster Tools provides the "Geographical target" setting, which lets a blog owner select a single country. The setting increases search engine attention, for their blog, in the country selected.

We're seeing a few queries recently, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , about a little used option in mobile blog publishing. Is "go.blogger.com" down? I'm trying to claim a mobile token, but having no success. This blog owner, like a few others, is trying to use a dying Blogger feature. "go.blogger.com", and MMS / SMS , was the Blogger solution for blog publishing using "mobile" phones, provided several years ago. SMS is a protocol used for sending text messages between computers, that was used on "mobile" phones, before most "mobile phones" became just pocket sized computers using "cellular" (3g, 4g, etc) networking.

I installed the Google auto translator - using a custom front end, which I helped develop - on this blog, 5 years ago . I installed it originally because of the February 2008 Kaspersky problem with Blogger blogs - and hastily, because of the magnitude of the problem. I knew, at the time, that the Google auto translator was not 100% accurate. No auto translator will ever be 100% accurate. Every language in the world is always developing, as society and technology develops. There will always be nuances in every language, which are not yet detected by any one person - or by any one computer. That said, I think that it's obvious to many people, that auto translation is a legitimate feature on the Internet.

Since Blogger gave us The New Blogger GUI, in 2012, complaints about the New GUI have been numerous, and impassioned. One complaint, seen occasionally, mentions the date / time setting wizard, in the Post Editor "Post settings" Schedule. In the new blogger interface, it is very hard to backdate content. You have to use the calendar GUI, you can't just type a date it. I have content going back 13 years, do you know how hard it is to click the left-arrow on the calendar 144 times to get to the proper date??? It's a nightmare! This is one person who needs a more flexible date setting wizard, in The New GUI. In criticising the new date setting wizard, we need to understand the reasons for the design. I don't think that Blogger designed the new wizard, and removed the ability to just type the date, simply because they wanted the new wizard to look shiny.

The new comment filtering system has been in place now for almost 6 months , and we are slowly starting to see improvements, with signs that spam (aka "bulk") content is becoming more individualised . Recently, we've seen suggestions, from discussions in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , that the filters are being put in place in Asia. Reports of unfair filtering, similar to the complaints seen 6 months ago about English language filtering, are being seen now about Chinese, Japanese, and Thai language filtering.

The 21st Century is the beginning of new experiences for mankind. The Internet in general, and Blogger blogging in particular, are providing opportunities unparalleled in history - people of all nations and locations are coming together, casually and freely, to get acquainted. And with the opportunities come many challenges - some major, and others seemingly minor. One seemingly minor issue, with a significance which may not be realised by everybody, is how we write the date. In the USA, we generally write it as "mm/dd/yy", which stands, in computer speak, for "Month / Day / Year". A variation here is "mm/dd/yyyy", which denotes the year entered, and includes the century - which is also an important detail.

Occasionally, we see requests from folks who want to publish a blog in non English languages, and don't trust the Google Translator, or translated blogs using a Translator Gadget . Every different world language has its own peculiarities - character set, font, grammatical constructions, even direction of type will differ from language to language. To support these peculiarities, Blogger has a language selection, for each language which they support. This roughly parallels the ongoing development of the Google Translator.

Recently, I wrote about Following, and two reasons why it's only available (currently) for bloggers that use the various dialects of English . You'd think that it should be available, immediately, to anybody with a blog that's properly presented in the language of their choice. And that would by preference be the possibility, but reality says not. Today, we see one example why "not" is going to be seen more than "can", as more and more non English bloggers start to envy those of us who have Following. Jane, in Hong Kong, has a blog that (until recently) had a bilingual title Reddie's Page | 鸿屋 This was fine, for the blog, and it was good for her readers - some who prefer to read English, and others to read Chinese. But, she had no Followers for the blog, even though the Following gadget was properly installed. Whenever someone clicked on the link from the Following gadget in her blog Follow this blog (try it!!), instead of the popup window Follow...