The Real Blogger Status

As both custom domain publishing, and social sharing networks, become normal with many blogs, we see anguish when blog owners change the URLs of their blogs, without planning for the effects of the change . What happened to my Likes? This blog owner - and many others - do not realise that FaceBook counts Likes, based on the URL, not the blog. FaceBook Likes, and Google+ +1s, are counted by URL - and are not controlled by DNS redirection, or simple name changes. If you rename your blog, you get a new URL with a new popularity counter , in FaceBook and Google+.

Knowing how to read, and follow, sitemap entries is a useful skill in diagnosing many Blogger problems. The Blogger generated sitemaps, which apply to each blog, index both pages and posts. This blog, like every other blog, has two sitemaps, automatically generated . " sitemap.xml " (posts) roughly duplicates the "Archives" gadget - but has advantages, over the gadget. " sitemap-pages.xml " (static pages) is not redundant, to any Blogger accessory.

We see an occasional suggestion, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , about archive convenience. Some blog owners, presumably ones who do not publish so often, would like to archive posts on a yearly basis. It would be great, if you would add the option of "Yearly" under the Archive gadget "Archive Frequency". This blog owner may not know why posts are archived on a weekly or monthly schedule.

Not all blog owners can successfully add a conditional display of a template object, to their blog. Some owners carefully copy the conditional code that I provide , add it to their blogs - and it does not work (for them). In some cases, it may work, for me, when I check their work. Conditional code, that involves people in countries subject to the country specific domain redirect, won't always be comparing against "blogspot.com". People in the UK may see their blog as "blogspot.co.uk", for instance.

One of the more interesting details about Blogger is the way Page / Post Editor generates URLs. Long ago, I wrote my post Blogging - The Directory and URL Structure . Blogging - The Directory and URL Structure http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2009/08/blogging-directory-and-url-structure.html See the differences, between the title, and the URL? This difference bothers some blog owners, who want the Title and URL to match, word for word.

Along with consistently using Jump Break, properly sizing and wording of important post sections can make the blog pages neater, and easier to read. You see my opening paragraph, above. Sizing and wording of important post sections, such as the opening paragraph, helps make the main page layout more consistent - and gives a slightly more professional look to the blog. And, a cleaner and more consistent page layout, to complement a carefully structured blog , encourages readers to read more of the blog.

We see the occasional query, about name changes, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . I just got married, and now I have a new email address, and a new name. How do I change my Blogger identity? And the usual advice was You can change youe email address, and / or change the display name (not the account name) - and you can transfer control of the blog to a new Blogger account, which bears your new name. But old posts will remain, with your old name. And there, we would have one more disappointed blog owner. But that does not have to be the final answer.

As you develop your blog, you may observe that some of the post titles don't encourage viewer attention. Since the post URLs are derived from the post titles, renaming a post involves some planning. The post URL should match the post title. If you change the post URL, all of the existing links to that post will break. So, what to do? This makes renaming a post into a major project. Or, do you think your readers enjoy seeing Sorry, that page does not exist. Even with the blog using a custom "404" page , this isn't going to cut it - if you want your readers (not to mention the search engines) to feel loved. But if you plan, and practice, you can rename a post in a minute or so - and possibly half that time, the post actually may be "404".

When you rename a blog, the most that you can do, to keep the old URL useful, is to setup a stub post , with a clickable link to the new URL. Yo! The blog is now at xxxxxxx.blogspot.com!! Blogger forbids gateway blogs, and similar blog to blog redirections . When you rename a post, you can setup a custom redirect - and automatically redirect your readers to the post, under its new URL. You should take advantage of this option, if you change a post URL.

Many, many years ago, I was called to court, to provide testimony in a case that involved a co worker, during a weekend in question. As part of my testimony, I provided a code listing ("compilation" log), with date and time printed on each page of the listing. The testimony also required presenting of the printed "system console" log, to substantiate my testimony. I endured several hours of intense grilling, by attorneys for both sides, who examined virtually every hour of my day, to verify that the co-worker and I had been physically "at work" on that day. The code listing was but a small part of my testimony. Even then, both the judge and both attorneys were very aware of the possibility that the code listing date / time stamp could not constitute legal evidence, without careful "chain of custody" backup. Anybody knows that a computer can be easily restarted, with the system clock reset, and made to produce a "code listing" / ...

Long ago, a renamed blog post would automatically receive a new URL, to match a change in date or title . Blog owners would happily rename posts - and see a new URL, with no problem. Those blog owners who monitored search engine activity, however, later became concerned by the "404"s, shown in the search engine activity logs, in Webmaster Tools - or from various test searches.

Sometimes, we see odd confusion in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . I deleted my blog - can somebody help me restore it? I worked so many days writing it! or alternately I am trying to write a new blog, but it says my url has already been taken (by me). If the first owner is kind enough to include the URL of the deleted "blog", we may use our favourite online diagnostic tool - and discover that the blog is still online, and not deleted! In the second case, we may find a new blog, with one post. Investigating further, we discover that the problem here involves terminology. This article that I am writing, "Blogger Terminology - Blogs Vs Posts", is a post, which is part of my blog, "The REAL Blogger Status" (which right now is actually The ONLY Blogger Status - but that is another tale ). The terminology here is pedantic, to us - but it's very real, to the blog owner who has just deleted an important post. Or to the owner who has publi...

Occasionally, we see a naive question, which requests a value comparison between pages (static pages), and posts (dynamic pages). What are the advantages of using a page, instead of a post? That question, worded in that vague way, cannot be answered. The various differences between pages and posts can provide advantages, or disadvantages . To evaluate a page or a post as an advantage, one must know the specific needs of the blog in question.

Not all blog owners know what pages are - nor how they differ from posts. We see confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? . How do I publish a post, which always appears on the home page? or How do I publish a post, which never appears on the home page? or How do I publish multiple posts on a page? Long ago, we used workarounds, like publishing a post, using a future or past date . The workarounds would create a post which would always, or never, appear on the home page - but there were always side effects, from using either technique.

We've been advising anxious blog owners, for some time, how to recover deleted pages and posts. The easiest solution, in the long run, is to recover the PageID / PostID , and re publish the deleted page / post. Unfortunately, all deleted pages and posts can't be edited and re published . With new posts, un indexed by the search engines, you won't be able to find the post in cache - and you'll never determine the PostID. This will be a frequent problem with deleted pages - as static pages generally won't get indexed by the search engines - nor will they ever be included in the blog posts feed. In some cases, even when you know the PageID or PostID, the page editor / post editor may simply reject your attempt to re edit - and give you another bX code. Even so, all is not lost. You may have to rebuild the page or post - but you can generally keep the URL, of the deleted page or post, operational. Just plan the rebuilding process.

From time to time, we see evidence of anxiety, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . Why do my posts have hashtag suffixes? and from some, more anxiety How do I know what hashtags to add, when referencing my posts? These blog owners don't understand the purposes of the suffixes.

Blog owners have been deleting their pages and posts, then changing their minds later, since Blogger started providing the ability to delete pages and posts. We've been advising anxious blog owners, for some time, how to recover deleted pages and posts. The easiest solution, in the long run, is to recover the PageID / PostID , and re publish the deleted page / post. When the deleted page or post cannot be re published, the next option is to re build the page / post, possibly using feed cache. Using this technique, you'll have to reformat the post content, as feed content is formatted relatively simply. When you publish the post, it will publish as a new post, with a new URL - so any external references to the missing post URL will still be broken. Thanks to the recently offered Custom Redirects option, though, we can make this latter choice slightly less undesirable.

Long ago, Blogger blog owners would publish a blog as part of an existing website. With the website published as "www.mydomain.com", they would create a website subdirectory "www.mydomain.com/myblog", and publish the blog there. The option to publish a blog as "www.mydomain.com/myblog" required an externally maintained domain / website - and the Blogger feature "FTP Publishing". In 2010, Blogger, with many man hours spent fixing a constant stream of problems, retired "FTP Publishing" , in favour of "Custom Domain Publishing".

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.

A blog, by tradition, is an online journal. We write the posts, and when we enable post titles, we choose the post titles. When we enable post pages and post titles, the URLs of the posts are a function of the dates, and the titles, of the posts. We can choose the titles of the posts, but the Blogger post editor chooses the URLs. This is a key component in the Blogger Infrastructure . The static page editor ("Edit Pages") uses the same engine as the Post Editor, and Static Pages (aka "Pages") use a similar basic URL structure.