The Real Blogger Status

Many people who publish blogs also have FaceBook pages - and one of the easiest ways to get traffic, to the blog, is to share the blog to a FaceBook page. Some people want money for publishing their blogs. AdSense is a very popular way to earn from publishing. AdSense produces the best results, with lots of readers to read the blog, click on the ads, and buy the products and services advertised. FaceBook, and similar social network sharing services, is not the best choice for advertising a blog that uses AdSense ads.

Not every blog owner understands the effect of a Blogger URL change, in FaceBook - and the resulting popularity of the blog . I am planning on changing my blog name and redirecting my blogger blog to a custom domain. Why would that affect my Facebook followers? A Blogger URL change won't affect your FaceBook Followers directly. Your existing Followers can continue to Follow your blog, under the BlogSpot URL - and under the custom domain URL - as it is Liked, and shared, in FaceBook. The Likes count affects the possibility of a share, of a post in your blog, to attract new Followers.

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+.

We see new blog owners ask the obvious question, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . How do I help people Follow my blog? There are several tools for community building , or Following - and different people will make different choices, which to use. The choices depend upon the community that any blog serves - and the purposes for following .

I've been seeing the Pinterest "Pin It" hover icons, in various blogs, for a few weeks. Today I decided to try adding an icon to this blog. I spent more time reading the instructions, then installing the icon.

If you have a malicious or misbehaving gadget in your blog, one of the easiest blog cleanups is removal of a malicious HTML gadget . Unfortunately, this does not work, for every gadget on every blog. Depending upon how a gadget is installed, malicious code may, or may not, be visible - and if visible, may, or may not, be easily removable.

A few folks have asked me about my social media toolbar, that I added a couple months ago. It took very little work, to develop and install this gadget. I just went to the AddThis website , registered, selected the options, and got the code. Then, I added one more HTML gadget, to my blogs.

One challenging question, that we see from time to time in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , is about one of the neatest Blogger social networking features, Following. How do I find blogs to Follow? And that is a simple question, with not such a simple answer. What came first - the chicken, or the egg?

If there is anything more obnoxious than the FaceBook "Like my blog!" popup window , it's a FaceBook "Like my blog!" window, preceded by a generic popup window. It's possible that a blog which starts with two popup windows, one followed by a second, represents a blog owner who honestly wants people to enjoy her (his) blog. Even so, a blog that starts out this way is going to present a security analysis challenge, at best. Seeing the growing popularity of the FaceBook popup (among blog owners, anyway), it's possible that the security scanning processes will, eventually, find a way to bypass the FaceBook code, and continue scanning. This may avoid some spurious malware classifications - if FaceBook developers can find a way to certify a genuine FaceBook popup.

Among blog accessories that are not going to get you good reputation, I can't think of very many more obnoxious than the FaceBook "Like my blog, before you read it!" demand. Currently popular with some WordPress blogs, this is yet another blog accessory that will eventually get the blog deleted, as a possible malware host . Useful Blogger blog readers look for blogs with informative, interesting, and unique content. Hiding a blog behind a "Like my blog!" demand, to help you boost FaceBook popularity before the blog can be read, will not get you useful readers.

Many people who publish Blogger blogs also publish to FaceBook. Some have their own Wall, others post to friends Walls. We see occasional questions, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , about the desire to combine the two products. How do I publish posts from my Wall to my blog? and How do I link my blog to my Wall? Like any combination of Blogger and non Blogger content, there are techniques to combine a Blogger blog, and a non Blogger website. Some techniques don't work - and others may work, but won't be good for the blog.

Some blog owners, who also have activity in Twitter, would like to display their Twitter feed on their blog. This is not at all difficult. Twitter will custom build you an HTML gadget, using a wizard in their website.

Most physical threats used to require physical proximity, to be seriously considered by the authorities. Before the Internet became a reality, if you were to report a crime which involved a physical threat to you or some one whom you knew, chances are that you would be reporting a friend or relative - or at least a neighbour or somebody geographically close to you. Now that the Internet is part of our daily lives, many Blogger blog owners, readers, and comment publishers - all of who use the Internet for various networking activities - have no idea of the possible international challenges involved in their activities. With the Internet involved, these dangers can come from somebody in another city, state, or country, who is a complete stranger to the potential victim.

As we add social networking accessories and gadgets to our blogs, we need to appreciate the nature of the connections, which we are adding. Some Blogger blog owners fail to understand the relationships between the different Internet services, such as Blogger / Google, FaceBook, and Twitter. Why do I have to solve a CAPTCHA when I post on my Wall? and Why does my "Share to FaceBook" wizard not let me include a snippet or thumbnail from my blog? These are typical questions, seen recently in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . The people, asking these questions, probably do not understand that services like FaceBook are not part of Blogger or of Google.

Today, we're seeing a significant number of reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , from worried blog owners My blog reloads in peoples browsers, and causes high pageview counts! and My blog crashes my readers browsers when loading!! When a resource monitor is run while the reported blogs load, you can watch memory usage increase rampantly, as the main page of the blog, in question, loads.

Blogger wants bloggers to participate in social networking. They have encouraged this, for a long time, using the "Email Post Links" icon. Recently, they improved on the latter option, with a small set of buttons for sharing posts in the most popular social networking platforms. Now, our readers can have the option to easily share our posts using Email, Blog This!, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. The new "Share Blog" Buttons are a part of the post template. Just like every other post template component, they are selected using the " Blog Posts " gadget in " Page Elements ". Blogs with older templates may not have the required post template code, to make this option work. If you use "Blog Posts", enable the Share Buttons, and still don't see the new buttons on your blog, reset the post template . Remember to backup the template , before and after making this change. >> Top

Every week, we see the anguish How do I get user xxxxx blocked from commenting on my blog? because many people enjoy FaceBook and Twitter, where there is no spam, and no unwanted comments. They think that Blogger comments should be controlled , as social networking like FaceBook and Twitter are controlled. With FaceBook, each person controls their own Wall, and their own neighbourhood. With Twitter, each person decides exactly who they wish to Follow, and sees tweets from only those folks that they follow. Neither FaceBook or Twitter encourages you to open up your neighbourhood to the world; both allow you to establish each contact, one by one, at your discretion. With Blogger commenting, you are encouraged to allow anybody - or anybody with a required level of authentication - to comment on your blog. This encourages freedom of speech, and extends your neighbourhood far beyond the walls that you setup with FaceBook and Twitter. Some commenters, and other readers of your blogs...

We've been discussing the status of the Profile View counter for several weeks now. Recently, we've been seeing queries in Blogger Help Group about the counter, that make it look like the blogs have equal or lesser status than the profile, to some bloggers. My profile views are not updating. Can I add a SiteMeter counter to my blogger profile even if I don't own a blog? and here we have to note that you can't add a SiteMeter, or any other visitor counter, to your profile, period. You add a counter to your blog . If you don't have a blog, you set one up. With Social Networking platforms, like FaceBook, MySpace, and Orkut, you start with a profile, and add accessories like blogs to the profile. Your profile is what people view first, when they follow the link on your friends page. Your blog, if you have one, is an accessory to your profile. Blogger isn't a social networking platform - it's a blogging platform. With Blogger, if you have a single Blo...

Look carefully at the bottom of this post - and other posts in this blog. Right below "Topics", do you see "Share This Post!"? The "Share This Post!" section is what we call Social Networking. It lets your readers - hopefully those who have social networking memberships - bookmark your posts in the social networking services. In my blogs, we currently have De.licio.us, Digg, FaceBook, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Twitter. If one of your readers has a membership in one of those services, and wishes to share your post with other members, he / she has only to click on the icon, or the adjacent text link, and the selected service will bookmark the post (subject to the normal site bookmarking procedure, which varies by service).