The Real Blogger Status

I published this blog to the "Notable" theme of the "Responsive" class templates, in February 2018. I never spend a lot of time tweaking and making blog formatting changes - there are so many other Blogger issues to write about. But that ugly big black box, at the top of each post page, was in my list of improvements needed. And last week, I found the motivation, and instructions, to improve the look of this blog.

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.

To encourage email subscriptions, and other social connections, some blog owners provide gadget toolbars, with useful links. Some blog owners would like to position their gadgets in fixed screen positions . I want to have a subscribe button hover at the top of the page, while people read my blog. This blog has a hovering AddThis toolbar , which provides selected social sharing options. And, it has a hovering "Top of Page" button .

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.

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.

I've been seeing the Pinterest "Pin It" hover icons, in various blogs, for a few weeks. Today I decided to try adding an icon to this blog. I spent more time reading the instructions, then installing the icon.

A few folks have asked me about my social media toolbar, that I added a couple months ago. It took very little work, to develop and install this gadget. I just went to the AddThis website , registered, selected the options, and got the code. Then, I added one more HTML gadget, to my blogs.

One of the neatest ways to combine photos (images, pictures) and text is to display a photo in the middle of the text. It takes very little work to make text "flow" around a photo, or to wrap the text around the photo.

One of the simplest - and most user friendly - displays that you can add, to your blog, is a custom "404 Not Found" display. A standard Blogger blog, by default, provides a terse advice, for invalid URLs. Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist. Would it not be more user friendly, to use relevant slang, maybe. Sorry, bro - that's not on! You can do this - and more - with a little imagination.

Ever since Blogger improved the comment count caption / link, they have gotten criticism. They just replaced the vague 0 comment count, that was originally part of the link to the comment form, with a more indicative caption "No Comments" (or whatever language equivalent may apply, on your blog). But they cannot please everybody. People think I don't want comments, what can I do? I think the old saying Don't try to please everybody! applies here, in spades. So people ask, periodically, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , about template customisation. How do I replace "No Comments" with something more reader friendly? And the first question needs to be Are you comfortable with editing the template? This can be a rather forbidding question, to some blog owners.

This week, I added a gadget that's been needed, on this blog, for some time. You may see my new "Top" button, at the lower right corner of this blog. If you have a normally wide browser window, with wallpaper showing on either side of the posts / sidebar section, you'll see the new gadget floating on top of the wallpaper. If you have squeezed your browser window to save horizontal space, you may see the new gadget floating on top of the sidebar (but beneath the sidebar gadgets).

When it comes to encouraging visits to your blog, by people who need help, a properly presented "Contact" form is a very useful feature. Some time ago, I used a comment form, and a specially written post, " Contact Me " (titled "Leave Comments Here"), to provide private contact . For this blog, with comment moderation before publishing, I simply read the unpublished comments published against my post "Contact Me", without publishing them. Time moved on, however - and various changes made by Blogger made my unpublished comments based contact form less useful.

Ever since Blogger (finally) gave us the option to add static pages to our blogs , blog owners started asking How do I make my pages URLs cleaner? The "/p/" in the URL is so messy looking. Our typical response would be simple. Sorry, you're stuck with the URL, as is, for a static page. And, that was that. Later, Blogger gave us the ability to redirect URLs within the blog - and that changed.

The recently observed problems with some third party gadgets , previously added by many blog owners to their blogs, leaves these blogs lacking various accessories. One of the gadgets identified is the "Recent Comments" / "Recent Posts" gadget pair. For many blog owners, this gadget is not impossible to replace. Blogger provides us with a native accessory, called a "Blog Feed" gadget, which will provide acceptable "Recent Comments" and "Recent Posts" functionality, for many blog owners. Look at the sidebar of this blog, for "The Real Blogger Status - Comments", and "The Real Blogger Status - Posts". Those are "Recent Comments" and "Recent Posts" gadgets, which are based on the Blogger supplied "Feed" gadget - which is not a third party accessory, and is not subject to future third party peccadilloes.

This blog started out using a Layout template, name "Minima". When I applied a Designer template, I selected the Designer equivalent of "Minima", name "Simple". Long ago, I picked a template background - which looked slightly better than boring - for this blog. The blog looked fairly decent with the content text floating over the background, when viewed using a high resolution, full colour ("32 bit" palette) display. Unfortunately, not everybody who views this blog uses a high resolution, 32 bit colour palette. During the past couple years, I have observed various comments published here, from people who did not find it easy reading the text, floating over the naked blog background.

With Following becoming increasingly important in many blogs, as part of creating an exciting and ongoing community, many blog owners are using improved versions of the Followers gadget. Repositioning the Followers gadget, outside the sidebar, will let you show more Followers - or you can show the same amount of icons, but larger ones, in a gadget with the same height. If you want to encourage more Followers, using larger icons wouldn't hurt. All that you need to do is publish the Followers gadget as a static page, using the Pages Editor, in "Edit HTML" mode. You can display Followers in a separate page, without having to edit the template . Or, you can use an HTML / JavaScript gadget, instead of the default Followers gadget.

When it comes to encouraging repeated visits to your blog, by people who are interested in its content, a properly constructed labels array is a very useful feature. Unfortunately, a blog of any substantial size, and fully using the potential of labels, is going to have a rather large labels array - and this blog is no exception to that rule. Long ago, I realised that indexing the label searches in this blog was making my sidebar unacceptably long. Repeat visitors to this blog have complained occasionally, because I removed the labels index from the sidebar, to try and speed up the display load time. This week, I remedied that situation, by making my labels index gadget display as part of a static page, and moved the gadget from the sidebar to the main part of the blog.

Some time ago, I wrote how to make a static home page, where the key element was an HTML gadget, tweaked to display only with the home page of the blog . That's a useful tweak - and it's a tweak that can be used in various other conditional displays also. If you know a little template XML code, you can construct alternate conditional statements, and have template objects display in any of several other specific conditions.

One of the kewler features of the Blogger templates is the GUI wizards that let you change settings, like fonts and colors for the various text elements in the template. Of course Blogger programmers have one idea what settings are useful - and we may have other ideas. When the Layout templates were provided in 2007, it didn't take too long to discover the fonts and colors possibilities there, and then to discover the limitations. So I found how we could enhance the GUI Fonts And Colors menus. And this evening, I decided to see how a Designer template could be enhanced, similarly.

Blogger blog owners, like dogs, always want more. Cue the super annoying commercial currently running on some USA TV channels. More, please! And when I suggest using an HTML / Text gadget, tweaked to show only when the "home" page is displayed , I hear cries for "more". But how can I show my latest posts for a given label, on my home page? Surely, I can do that too? The answer here is that yes, you can do this - and fortunately, it's not difficult. It simply require a little more thinking.