The Real Blogger Status

Some Blogger blog owners, as they develop a post, use Preview mode to periodically observe what the post looks like. A few owners are confused about the privacy of a post, as it is Previewed. Some think that the temporary nature of the Preview window makes the content, as Previewed, intentionally unavailable for viewing by their readers. Fortunately, the links - even though they may be clickable by the readers, lead nowhere.

Blogger has long promised us that our blogs will be ours, forever , and that we are free to publish our blogs in privacy , if we so desire. Based on those promises, not all Blogger blog owners have made the right decisions, in retaining access to their Blogger / Google accounts . Many problem reports. from frustrated owners, are seen, daily, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . My email address changed some time ago, and now, I can't login to Blogger and update my blog! Last year, Blogger made several changes to their account recovery policies and procedures , which made this subject, for many blog owners, a critical and painful issue. Now, Google is making an organised effort to reduce the pain, by improving their account recovery tool .

One of the most frustrating problems with Blogger accounts involves the conflicting goals of anonymity and security. We are allowed to publish a Blogger blog in complete anonymity. Blogger acknowledges and supports that need . Anonymity comes at a price . Should you succeed in intentionally becoming completely anonymous, then forget the account name or password, there will be no way for Blogger to help you to recover access to your Blogger account. Every week, we get reports from people who can't access their blogs because they changed their email address without proper planning , or they don't know which account owns a given blog . And some time ago, we dealt with a small flood of reports from people whose Blogger accounts - and blogs - had been stolen, using some devious hacking techniques .

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.

Two questions we see, seemingly unrelated, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , relate to anonymity, and to search engine indexing. Why is my blog not listed by Google? You'd think that Blogger and Google would work together! Every non Blogger blog that I have is automatically indexed - why not Blogger blogs??!! and Why is my private blog indexed in Google? I don't want strangers reading my blog, certainly not from finding it listed in Google!! Both are valid concerns - and nether will ever be answered, unilaterally. We are permitted to publish our blogs, anonymously . Major world events - such as the Iranian revolution in the first decade of 2000 - legendarily were enabled by use of anonymous Internet resources, such as Blogger blogs. However, true anonymity is extremely difficult to guarantee - and simply won't happen without a lot of planning , starting before we " Create a blog ". On the other hand, most people who publish a Blogger blog want...