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.

AdSense requires content - substantial amounts of text content - in a supported language. The term "contextual" means that the ads, which display on each different blog, are chosen to match the subject in the posts. This assures the ad companies, which pay for the ads hosted on the blogs, that their ads will be seen by people who appreciate the products. With the ads carefully chosen, AdSense can confidently charge appropriately - and the blog owner can be paid to host the ads.

Periodically, we see complaints about "Next Blog" content, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . When I click on the "Next Blog" link, I get sent to blogs from many, many different languages. Can I set this to send me to primarily blogs published in English? or "Next Blog" sends me to blogs about "xxxxxxx". My blog is about "yyyyyyy". Why can't I get more blogs about "yyyyyyy"? What these blog owners do not understand is that using "Next Blog" involves compromise.

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.

With Blogger blogs becoming more popular in countries where English is not the native language, we've seen a lot of blogs classified as spam - both righteously, and spuriously. Most spam reviews, originally, involved blogs with commercial spam - excessive advertisements, with little subject content. As the focus of spam classification shifted to blogs with content, we've been seeing more non commercial classifications - large blogs with unfocused subjects, and content scraped or syndicated. Combining the two trends - more blogs in non English languages, and spam classifications which focus on non commercial content, we see blogs which require more people to review. And the people required need familiarity with the languages, and the subjects, of the blogs which need review.

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.

Blog owners who live in Europe have a recently added regulation with which you need to comply. If you publish a blog, and host AdSense ads, you already have part of the requirement - the properly written Cookie Advisory. If you live in Europe, and view this blog, chances are that you have been offered the chance to view the Nitecruzr.Net Privacy Policy , which includes my Cookie Advisory. If your blog displays the Blogger Navbar, you have a compliant Cookie Advisory Banner which is provided by Blogger, in the navbar. If you have disabled the navbar - or if the blog uses a dynamic template (and has no navbar), you can add a Cookie Advisory Banner as supplied by Google Cookie Choices.

One naive attitude, about publishing a Blogger blog, involves adding features to one's blog - and the observation that every Blogger feature or modification is not uniformly available, with entry level instructions. We see the complaints, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , too frequently. I can't get this feature to work! Why is Blogger so complicated? and I have no idea what I need to do. Please guide me, in simple language - as if I were 6 years old! Both attitudes show lack of understanding about technical projects in general - and Blogger features, and modifications, in particular.

We see occasional reports in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about the "Next Blog" link in the navbar, and undesirable behaviour. Long ago, "Next Blog" was used to link to the most recently published blogs, to encourage blog publishing, using the now dead "Recently Updated Blogs" database . Since multiple Blogger blogs are published each second, this gave a pseudo random effect to "Next Blog". Blog owners disliked the pseudo random effect. Some wanted to view blogs only published in their language, others wanted blogs geographically similar - and some demanded relevant subjects. The pseudo random effect was abused by spammers, who would setup spam blog farms , then publish each spam blog repeatedly, to attract victims. "Next Blog" hacking was a popular spammer technique.

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.

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.

We're seeing a few reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , from owners of blogs which publish in languages that don't use Roman characters, about problems publishing static pages in their blogs. Supposedly, with the affected blogs containing multiple static pages, the pages are all being published with the same URL.

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.

After several anxious weeks of uncertainty, many people who publish blogs that use non Roman characters are happy to see that the Transliteration feature has been restored to availability. From the Classic Blogger GUI, Settings - Basic - Global Settings, we see a full array of supported languages. Alternatively, from the New Blogger GUI, the menu is at Settings - "Language and formatting".

Owners of Asian language blogs have been recently asking, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken Why can't I publish in Hindi (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, ...) any more? (Update 2011/07/20): The Transliteration feature has been returned to availability .

This week, many unhappy blog owners report inability to login to Blogger, and access their dashboards. In some cases, they are seeing the well known "404 Not Found" error. For a few folks, this error comes from an odd habit - which used to be supported by Blogger - but no more.