The Real Blogger Status

Very few registrars allow multiple "CNAME" addresses, for a single DNS host. When I diagnose DNS address problems, I generally recommend Add the addresses highlighted in green . Remove the addresses highlighted in red . I find that it helps to have the old address visible, while the new address is being composed. This does not always produce the desired result, unfortunately.

I recently updated an old post, to add a link to a newly published post - and experienced panic. Adding a link to an old post, Deleted / Locked Blogs Have Several Causes , I discovered an oddity which caused extreme heartburn for several hours. Maybe you have experienced this, also. Editing my post, and adding a simple single sentence, with embedded link, at the end of the post, I refreshed the display (always test your changes - no matter how minor!), and watched as the paragraphing scrambled itself.

The recently redesigned Pages gadget and wizard has been with us for just over 3 months. We are occasionally seeing some confusion from people who can't add a dynamic page link to their blog - even when they manage to find the redesigned Pages gadget. I added a dynamic page, linking from "mymainblog.blogspot.com" to "mysecondblog.blogspot.com". Imagine my dismay, when the new page link goes to "mymainblog.blogspot.com/mysecondblog.blogspot.com", instead of to my actual target "mysecondblog.blogspot.com"! Here is a blog owner who is not aware of the unforgiving syntax of the "New Page › Web Address" wizard, and the "Web address (URL)" entry.

In 2012, Blogger gave us a suite of useful utilities to control how the search engines see our blogs . This feature suite includes the ability to redirect one URL in our blog to another URL in our blog . The "Custom Redirects" feature is easy to use - but like many Blogger features, not immediately so. Neither its possibilities, nor its limitations, are obvious to everybody.

One of the neatest ways to theme decorate a website is by adding a relevant font. There are music fonts, which look good on musical websites. And classical fonts which look good on classical and literary websites. And everybody knows "technological / computer style" fonts, which can decorate computer / Internet relevant websites. You can change the font for your blog, using the Template Designer "Advanced" submenu , which will let you choose from a dozen or so commonly installed fonts. Special fonts work best for specialised websites, where the majority of the readers are expected to have installed the fonts in question on their computers. Fonts are essentially code, which transforms numbers and letters coded in ASCII, in your blog, into pixels on the computer screens used by your readers. There are thousands of different fonts, available all over the Internet - and not one computer will have all fonts installed.

A Layouts template, the template in a New Blogger blog, when published to Blog*Spot (or to a Google Custom Domain) is written in XML, not HTML. A lot of HTML based tweaks won't work in New Blogger. If you force HTML into your template, you may end up with one of the new, cryptic error codes bX-lgwej This says that your post template contains invalid HTML . Are you seeing this error? If so, don't despair. Revert the template back to Classic , so your readers can access the blog. Build a test version of the blog , and work on a New Blogger template, while your readers are accessing the production blog. Take your HTML based template tweaks, that made your Classic blogs unique, and add them as HTML / JavaScript page elements. Test everything, carefully, in all available browsers . When you have a New Blogger template for your blog, looking as you like it, Save the template to a known location. Migrate your production blog to a New Blogger template again. Restore the saved templ...

A table is a great way to organise content in your blog. With related data positioned above or next to each other, and still allowed to flow from line to line, as a display coded in HTML is designed to do, you can show the various relationships easier. But use tables carefully - they are syntactically sensitive. The problem is easy to show, by example. Here's a very simple table - 1 row, 2 cells. Make this line Appear above this line And make this line Appear just above this line <span style="text-align:center;"><table align="center" border=1><tr><td><table align="center" border=1 cellpadding="20"><tr><td>Make this line<br>Appear above this line</td></tr></table></td><tr><td>And make this line<br>Appear just above this line</td></tr></table></td></tr></table></span> Add gratuitous line breaks, which makes it ea...

Displaying code for complex objects - multimedia (audio / video) , and also photographs (thumbnail / full-size) - takes a lot of browser window space. Generally, more than a single line of text is required. Some browsers can't make line breaks on their own, and if I display a single, unbroken line of code, the code will run off the end of the post column, through the sidebar, into the background margin of the blog, and off the end of the screen. This creates two problems. It makes the code hard to read, with some code not at all visible. With some browsers, it can even cause the post column, or the sidebar column, to end up at the bottom of the page . No good for anybody, that. Whenever I display such code in my blogs, I take care to insert lots of extra line breaks. Adding line breaks makes the code easier to read, which is good. But it creates another problem. If you copy the code from the browser window, you'll copy a lot of extra line breaks, and the code won't al...

In my tutorials that instruct you how to make your blog friendly to search engines in general, and to the Google spider specifically, the meta tag is a key element. The meta tags are very versatile code that should be located immediately following the blog title, in the blog header. You'll be using the Template Editor to view, and to modify, this code. As always, if you intend to make changes to the code, backup the template before and after making changes.