The Real Blogger Status

The "Forgot?" blog control recovery wizard is sensitive to team blogs - and to the access level owned by the existing members in the team blogs. If the team has only one administrator, that one administrator cannot delete or demote himself , using the dashboard Permissions wizard. If the one administrator deletes his Blogger / Google account, on the other hand, a team blog is left with no administrator. You can't have a blog for long, without an administrator. So when a team blog member requests recovery, "Forgot?" checks the team blog members - and if no administrator is found, sends recovery email to all of the authors .

Occasionally, we have a would be blog owner, becoming confused about blog access, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . I can look at the dashboard Posts page - but there are no posts listed. or I can't access the Template Designer (edit the template, add users to the blog, ... ). or maybe Why is Settings so small? These are bloggers who are confused over a blog where they are an Author , or have no access - as opposed to a blog where they are an Administrator . Along with knowing how to identify yourself , knowing what access you have to a given blog can be a key detail, when you are dealing with identity confusion - such as inadvertently created duplicate accounts , or possibly duplicated blogs .

We see questions of naivete, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about blog ownership recovery. I accidentally deleted my administrative access. How do I get my access back? There is only one legal answer. Have another administrator restore your access. But this story does not end well. The other administrator is on long term vacation! I really need to have my access back!! There is no easy answer here .

Recently, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , we've seen signs that Blogger considers Google+ Comments and privately published blogs mutually exclusive options. How do I enable Google+ Comments? and, alternately I am trying to change our blog to private - but no options come up under "Permissions" - "Blog Readers". There is no "Edit" link. These blog owners are discovering that, though one of the earlier publicised features of Google+ was the ability to distribute a substitute private blog posts feed , a private blog comments feed won't be offered.

Not all Blogger blog owners know that the ability to comment is a privilege which they control. Like the ability to publish and read posts , it is also a responsibility which they need to control, carefully. Any blog owner who wishes to publish a blog, and not be subject to frequent deletion of the blog, as a suspected malware or spam host, needs to understand the responsibilities, and the risks.

Almost daily, we see a confused query in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken I lost ownership access to my blog. Can Blogger restore my access? Not every blog owner realises that the Permissions wizard has a safeguard, ensuring that every blog will always have at least one administrator. Anybody who is the former owner is now a member of a team blog - and at least one other team member is an administrator.

The process of transferring control of a blog , from one Blogger account to another, involves 4 distinct steps, using 2 different Blogger accounts, alternately. If you do any step out of sequence, or if you fail to properly keep the 2 Blogger accounts separate, you end up with a blog successfully controlled by neither account. There are 3 ways to keep the two Blogger accounts separate - and the easiest yet most reliable is to use two separate browsers.

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.

Occasionally, we see the plaintive query I just changed my blog so only my friends should be able to read the posts. My visitor log shows unknown visitors though. What is going on - has someone hacked my blog? and there we see a question from someone who doesn't know about search engine cache. If you make your blog private , the search engines won't index your newer posts, but what's already indexed will stay in cache. And if someone sees a search page entry, and clicks on it, they'll get (among other things) "View Cached Content", and they'll read the cached posts. The search engines won't care that you made the blog private. This will be similar to a deleted blog - you can delete, or make the blog private, and what's in cache will stay in cache. And you'll keep getting readers, to the cached posts. When you make your blog private, the "robots.txt" file is updated. Here's a copy of the file for this blog, "blogging.nit...

Occasionally, you see bloggers becoming confused about what access they have to their blog. I can look at the Edit Posts menu, but there are no posts listed. or I can't access the Template Designer (edit the template, add users to the blog, ...). These are bloggers who are confused over a blog where they are an Administrator, vs a blog where they are an Author. Let's look at my dashboard , and at a pair of blogs which we see there. Here's my dashboard. Among the many entries, you'll see one blog listed where I am an Author, and a second where I am an Administrator. Let's first look at a blog where I am an Author. Let's look at "Edit Posts". I'm an Author in this blog, and I haven't created any posts. There are plenty of posts in the blog, just none that I've created. I have no access to any posts that I haven't created. Let's look at "Settings". I'm an Author in this blog, so all of the Settings that I...

We see the occasional query How do I have a single post, and only let my closest friends view it? or How do I keep people from commenting on some posts? or even How do I make a linklist / poll / whatever visible to a select few? and the answer is - you can't. If your blog is open to everybody, all portions of that blog are open to everybody. Unlike WordPress (which has a few limitations too, just not this one), you can't set permissions in just a portion of that blog . But, you can make portions of another blog visible to a selected audience. Make a separate blog, with permissions that suit your need . Put the restricted content into the second blog. Include or link the second blog to your current blog. Blogs are free. Setup another, with the restrictions that you need. And another, and another. >> Top

The ability to view blogs, and web sites, and only view those that have been recently updated, is a useful feature that NewsFeeds provide. Some people take NewsFeeds for granted, and every so often you see an anxious query Why can't my readers use a newsreader to read my blog, when I make the blog private? This is as if newsfeeds are just another content protocol.

OK, Blogger has apparently given us the ability to transfer blogs between accounts. But is it safe? I'll find out. I take one of my less valuable blogs, Miscellaneous Musings , as my guinea pig. The blog has but one administrator. There's no "Remove" link, and "Admin" isn't clickable. I invited my second account, as a blog member. Note that you can invite anybody, GMail or any other email address. The invitee can use any existing Google account, or setup a new Google account, at his convenience. Any new account can be based on a GMail address, or any other email address. The invitee should take care to make that account, and email address, safe and secure . I accepted from the second account. Note that only the second account has any clickable links. Both accounts are now administrators. Either account can be removed ("Remove" is clickable), or made Guest ("Admin" is clickable). I clicked on the "Remove" link from m...

Weren't we told, some time ago, that the owner of a blog can't be removed from its Permissions? One of those accounts should not have a "Remove" link, nor a clickable "admin" link. I'm not testing this here though. I like this blog. But, I can test it on another blog . Is this another change made in silence ? >> Top

If you've had your computer for a while, and been Blogging for a few years, you've probably felt the anguish expressed by many , recently. That is not my problem. I can get there, I know how to follow the directions, but it will not let me enable the pop - up window to add lists, links etc. The only advise I can see is about having an extra "2" in your URL - I don't, and advise on people who have added extra java script to their template. I just choose a template from the blogger site, and haven't added anything to it, so I don't think that is the problem. Many times, when something stops working in our blog, the problem is traced back to a change that Blogger just made - to their server, to the script that runs on our computers, to the cookie structure that is stored on our computers, and generally to all 3 of those in combination. All 3 of those factors work together, and many many times, the only real solution to a problem is to clear cache and cookies...