The Real Blogger Status

The Internet is diverse and large - and the Internet directory system, aka the DNS Infrastructure, supports the diversity and size. When we setup a new domain, the registrar frequently advises us to wait patiently, before continuing. Congrats on your new domain! Now, we suggest that you wait 24 - 48 hours for the new domain to propagate, before trying to publish to the domain. When we update a domain - and add or delete a single DNS address - we won't always get advice about waiting, from the registrar.

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.

One of the features of custom domains, when purchased using " Buy a domain ", was the Transition period. Transition was Blogger, allowing that even with Blogger / Google controlling the domain authoritative servers (which they did, indirectly, by using eNom / GoDaddy as the registrars), and the initial DNS address setup (offered for GoDaddy purchased domains ), the stability of custom domains only starts with the domain authoritative servers, and the Root Name servers . Custom domain published blogs, to be consistently stable, can only rely on the DNS addresses being available on the local DNS servers, on a worldwide basis, 48 to 72 hours after the DNS addresses are added. This built in latency period has nothing to do with how custom domains are designed - and it's an issue over which Blogger and Google have no control.

One of the stranger confusions, seen occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , refers to the posts feed, from our blog, displayed on other people's blogs. I just published a new blog post - but it does not show up on my friends blogs. Is there a problem, with my feed? When we investigate, the blog feed shows no problem. We display the feed in the browser, and compare with the blog main page - and everything on the main page is in the feed. It just does not show up on our friends feed gadgets. So, what's the problem here? Were we imagining a problem? No, it's not imagination.

We've been advising people about the complications involved in recovering disabled GMail / Google accounts , for a few months. Recently, we've been seeing a new complication, in this scenario. I tried logging in to GMail, and it says that my account has been disabled. So I tried verifying by sending codes to my mobile phone - I managed to log in, and it now redirects into my dashboard. Unfortunately, it now tells me The blog has been removed. So, I have my Blogger / GMail account back - but no blog! Apparently, there is a delay, between reinstatement of the Blogger / GMail account, and recovery of any owned blog(s), deleted when the account is disabled.

We've known for a while that private blogs have limitations, such as latency. If you originally publish your blog as public, and later make it private, cached copies of the blog will be all over the Internet, for anybody to read, after it's supposedly private . This week, we see another, possibly more serious limitation . Why was my coworker able to read my very private, personal, password protected blog yesterday? I had it set to "Blog Author Only" and yet she found it and was able to read the whole thing. It has never, ever been public. I started it last September and set the permissions to "blog author only" at the start for all posts. I have never invited anyone else to read it...and have never, ever logged into it at work.

Many problems which are reported by bloggers have simple resolution procedures. Clear cache in the browser, and restart the browser. Some problems are slightly more complex. Clear both cache and cookies, and restart the browser. and, at the center of each procedure, we see Clear cache. Cache, or local storage of Internet content , is at the center of many problems with blogs and web sites. If a copy of your blog is in a cache somewhere, the computers that access the cached copy will continue to display that copy, until told to get a fresh copy. If you just updated your blog, folks accessing the cached copy won't see your changes. One way to ensure that you see fresh copies of everything is to clear cache, which forces fresh retrieval of everything. For all of its simplicity, clearing cache isn't a universal solution, and neither is it consistently productive - even for problems which are generally known to respond to clearing of cache.

Many blog owners are unclear about how their blogs are indexed by the search engines. We occasionally see the confused query Visitors are coming in to my blog through the Google search engine. They don't stay though, the reason being that Google doesn't take them to the post they found - and which is obviously the one relevant to their search - but to the home page of the blog. Why does this happen? The search engines are like your readers - with your posts published on the main page, they will index the post content, from the main page.

Besides knowing your visitors, an important part of maintaining your blog includes knowing how your visitors found your blog . And that involves monitoring the inlinks to your blog . Inlinks can be either dynamic (search engine result page hits), or static (bookmarks, blogrolls, feeds, linklists, and text based links in other peoples blogs and web sites). Dynamic inlinks are important, because that's how people find our blogs initially (though after the random access from " Next Blog ", which now is irrelevant to posting volume ). Static inlinks, on the other hand, are truly exciting. Each static inlink represents a real person out there in The Web, who thought enough of our contribution (at some time) that they will say to their readers Hey! Here's a blog like mine, with more content that you may want to read! When you see static inlinks, you know that your blog is truly a part of the Web, not just the Internet (and no, the two aren't the same!). To help us ...

When you were young, did you ever play with a dandelion ? I have - they are (in some places) easy to find, and free fun to be had (don't let your parents see you though). Did you ever blow on one, watch the pieces fly thru the air, then run around and try to pick the pieces up? That's your blog, all over the net. The only way to kill dandelions is while they are young, yellow, and solid. When dandelions get old, white, and airy, just touching one will make it blow into pieces. The pieces go everywhere, and next year, you'll have more dandelions everywhere. That's when your parents will have to deal with the problem.

One of the least understood details about Google Custom Domains is the need to wait, when setting up, or when making changes to, the DNS addressing for the domain. This is important, before publishing the blog within Blogger, or telling our readers about our new non-BlogSpot blog. Daily, we see anxious queries I just used the " Buy a Domain For My Blog " wizard, and paid for my domain with my credit card. The credit card company confirmed the charge. But I see that it's " In Transition"?? or You told me how to fix my DNS problem, and I did just what you told me. But I don't see my changes when I Dig the addresses for my domain. I know that I made the changes! What is going on here? Why do I have to wait, unpredictably?

DNS, which is the backbone of Google Custom Domain publishing , is a distributed directory of all Internet hosts - like the Google servers where your domain is published. We say that DNS is a "distributed" service, because the data provided to you, by DNS, resides not in one, or two, but millions of servers - all over the Internet, and owned by many different companies and individuals. When you setup a new domain, using a DNS Management utility provided by your domain registrar or another DNS host, you can add the DNS entry when convenient to you. Some DNS management utilities will provide advice Please wait 12 to 24 hours before trying to use your new URL. or a similar message, simply because the DNS information that you enter, through the utility to your DNS server, has to be distributed to the other DNS servers , all over the Internet.