The Real Blogger Status

Some blog owners, who publish multiple blogs with different subjects, may decide that some subjects would be better discussed in a different blog. With various posts published in one blog, the owner may decide that those posts should be published in a different blog, to continue discussion. The question now is how to move posts, from one blog to another? The dashboard "Export / Import" feature, which is now labeled "Import & back up" , lets us copy pages and posts from one blog to another. Just copying all pages and posts, though, will create problems with duplicated content.

One of the most useful skills, when maintaining and publishing a blog, is backing up the content. As you publish a blog, it's a very good idea to periodically backup the content - comments, pages, and posts. Sometimes, backed up content may save you hours of anguish.

There are three possible dashboard wizards, used to recover a blog with a corrupt template aka "500 Internal Server Error". The Template Designer page. The Template page. The Template Editor ("Edit HTML") page. With most blogs, one of the three can eventually be used, to install a clean, new template - and recover a blog that's offline because of the broken template. Some blogs, unfortunately, cannot be recovered this way.

Viewing comments, on some popular blogs, one may get the idea that not as many comments are being published, as are immediately visible. With a large comment complement, comments are paginated - with some comments hidden behind a link, captioned "Load more". The "Load more" link is JavaScript based - and there is a problem. The "Load more" link does not always work, on all blogs.

Not all blog owners understand the connection between page / post import, and spam limitation. We see the occasional question, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about page / post import, and daily publishing limits. Why I can not import content, to my blogs? Note that "Automatically publish" is selected , in the blog discussed here.

Blog owners who need to export blog content are reporting confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . I'm trying to export my blog, but when I click "Settings > Other", there is no "Export" option! Not all blog owners realise that the "Export" wizard is now "Back up". Changes in functionality may perplex blog owners, too.

Every month in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , we see another blog owner, trying to import and publish. Why is it taking so dang long? I started yesterday - it's just spinning, and getting nowhere! This blog owner is not having a good time, importing posts.

Some blog owners have found out, to their dismay, that the blog feeds contain details about them, that they supposedly blocked from their blogs. Blog owners, who are trying to publish blogs anonymously , have to work hard, to stay anonymous .

The ability to copy comments and posts into a blog - and even between blogs - is a useful option in Blogger. Some blog owners take the "Export Blog" / "Import Blog" wizards too casually. Most computer owners enjoy multitasking - and multitasking, between various online activities which involve your personal involvement, can increase productivity. The process of importing comments and posts, into a Blogger blog, does not involve your personal involvement - and does not work well during multitasking. Multitasking will actually slow the import process down - and what might take mere minutes can take hours, or days.

The option provided some time ago, to the embedded comment form, to allow "threaded" comments , is becoming quite popular. Unfortunately, the "Reply" link does not always work. Blog owners and readers alike complain. I click on "Reply", and nothing happens! This problem appears to have accelerated recently, possibly resulting from the hasty rollout of the new anonymous comments CAPTCHA - but there are other less obvious possibilities , too.

We see periodic signs of confusion, about publishing a blog to a dynamic template, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . My blog seems to load - but it just sits there, spinning gears! or The dashboard Template wizard tells me that dynamic templates are not available, for my blog!! These are two blog owners who are not aware of the requirements of the dynamic templates - and who can't figure out why they see the Spinner of Death when loading the blog. Most people know that private blogs cannot be published to a dynamic template - but not everybody realises that this is not an arbitrary or capricious restriction.

Not all blog owners realise the importance of the blog feed, and of its effect upon search engine access to their blogs. For blogs which are published as Public, Blogger provides the option to publish a blog feed - and within that option, what size feed to publish. Full Until Jump Break Short None Custom When a blog is indexed using the sitemap - and not using the main page , or links from other blogs and websites - the proper feed type will have a major effect on blog indexing. Selecting anything other than "Full" will limit the amount of blog content - and prevent the search engines from indexing the complete blog posts. (Update 2014/11): This may not be the case, with all blogs using dedicated sitemaps, automatically generated - instead of feed based sitemaps.

Occasionally, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , we see the naive query How do I merge my two blogs, using Export / Import? When given the simple advice Use the "Export blog" and "Import blog" wizards, both in the dashboard Settings - Other menu. the immediate response is I don't have that menu item! This person has, most likely, lost control of the Blogger account. In order to avoid encouraging scraping of blog contents, both the Export and Import wizards are only available to blog administrators. Not everybody wishing to use "Export blog" has blog ownership, however.

We're seeing a few reports, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , about BlogLovin, and their inability to accept feeds from Blogger blogs. My feed on Bloglovin is not updating correctly, so I emailed BlogLovin Support. They responded, and said it was because my RSS feed isn't working correctly. When diagnosed, we frequently see a working posts feed, redirected through FeedBurner. It appears that BlogLovin is not able to properly accept some (or all) FeedBurner redirected feeds. The most obvious solution here would be to setup BlogLovin properly, to use a non redirected feed , so they get the native Blogger posts feed.

The world of Blogger blogs contains a lot of confusing terminology. Some Blogger features don't even have names. Some names, which I use, are terms which I made up on my own, years ago - simply because Blogger did not provide a name, at that time. One term, which Blogger did give us, still causes confusion. The term " Post Feed Redirect " seems to describe an option, in Blogger, to redirect the post feed to a different URL.

One of the most mysterious settings, in our blogs, is the ability to redirect references to the blog feed . Some people use the "Post Feed Redirect" setting improperly. When this is done, the problems created can be easily solved, by clearing the setting. Go to the dashboard menu Settings - Other - Site feed. Look at the entry for "Post Feed Redirect URL". If that option is incorrectly set, click on "Remove". Click on "Save settings". You're done.

We see signs of naivete, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , from blog owners concerned with malware / spam deletions, and with other unexplained disasters in Blogger. How do I backup my blog, to protect the contents against unfair spam deletions? Not many concerned blog owners realise the first principle of backups, known by any experienced network administrator. Never plan a backup, without first planning the restore. How you backup your blog depends upon several details. What problem do you expect, to require a backup? How do you plan to recover, from a problem?

One of the neatest - and easiest - techniques, to make your blog available to a larger audience, uses a replica of the blog posts - the blog newsfeed. Most blogs, when new, have the feed activated by default. Oddly enough, some blogs - even published publicly - do not publish a newsfeed. Some blog owners, wondering why their blogs are not being indexed by the search engines, are perplexed. Why isn't my blog publishing a feed? If you want full visibility, activate the blog newsfeeds.

One of the benefits of custom domain publishing, for a properly setup domain, is that the BlogSpot URL is automatically redirected to the domain. Not all blog owners realise that the BlogSpot to domain URL redirect includes the blog feed - once the Transition period ends, and the blog is republished to the domain. Some blog owners think that the Post Feed Redirect setting needs to be used when re publishing their blog to a custom domain . This is not true, however. Use of the custom domain redirect, plus the post feed redirect, can only result in one of two problems. A feed redirect loop. A feed URL that points to invalid content. In neither case will any newsfeed client, such as a Dynamic Template, Google Reader, Reading List, or any third party feed service, find a feed that can be used.

As the New Blogger GUI (2011 Improvements) continues to gain support, there are still features missing, being identified occasionally. One interesting group of blog owners, who seem to feel overlooked, includes people who publish podcasts - and who use the Link field in their posts. How do I link my PodCasts, using the New GUI? This setting is not apparent, in the New GUI menus and wizards.