The Real Blogger Status

People reporting a problem with blog access / performance, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , will be frequently advised to diagnose their problems using affinity / differential testing . Some diagnostic advice starts with simple instructions to " clear cache, cookies, and sessions ". Some people, alternately, advise "use a different browser" - and test as a reader. These different strategies, seemingly redundant, will frequently lead to different results.

Recently, we've been seeing a few reports, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , suggesting more problems with Post Editor, in Draft mode. I keep getting an error, when editing my posts. An error occurred while trying to save or publish your post. Please try again. I am editing Draft posts, some of which are fairly large. This blog owner is discussing yet another facet of the Post Editor feature, AutoSave.

Occasionally, we see the query, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? How do I change these captions? / Add this feature? / Remove specific components of this feature? Conversely, we see in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken Why does this new Blogger feature not work in my blog? These questions, in many cases, may be related. We can see the connection, when we look closer at how the changes are applied.

Look at the Audience display, in Stats. How many different entries do you see, in "Pageviews by Browser" and "Pageviews by Operating System"? Stats lists are limited to 10 entries, each. Do you ever wonder if those lists, like the other Stats lists, should be longer? How do we ever hope to observe our blogs, and see what they look like, for our many different readers? One of the challenges of publishing a Blogger blog is developing a blog that looks good, on every reader's browser and computer . The number of combinations of operating system times browser brand times browser version - any of which can create a display oddity, when viewing any blog or website - is staggering.

Occasionally, we see confused queries from bloggers I setup my blog, and it looks OK in Preview. When I look at it online, it looks like crap. Help! or Nothing displays right, using Preview mode. When I look at the blog later in my browser, it looks better, but it is missing details. And there are examples of bloggers who confuse Preview mode with reality. Does this look like this post? When the post is published, it is added to the blog with the template code providing formatting. Under post editor, the template isn't part of the display. See the type face in the picture? In Preview mode, all of the text displays in Times Roman, the Blogger default font. I hate seraph fonts, but in Preview mode, without the template, that's what I'll see for the text. See the way the text wraps around the photo, where it shouldn't? One critical difference (for me), between Preview mode and reality, is Preview mode doesn't observe "<br clear=left />...

Periodically, we see an anxious query I just got an email from a friend Your blog looks like crap. What do I do now? Help! Oh yes, I think I tweaked the template a couple weeks ago. So if you made the change to the template "a couple weeks ago", why did you wait until today , to find out from your friend that you have a problem? Blogger Blogs are easy to work on. As easy as they are to work on, though, they still demand respect, and responsible practices are still relevant. If you make changes, test your changes using different browsers. Any time that you make a change to the blog, or even when you post a new article, check out the change, preferably using multiple browsers. When you test, you need to see the blog as your readers may see it - so prepare to logout and login a few times, to view changes then make adjustments. If you have a second browser or computer , this would be an excellent way to use one - to stay logged in on one browser, and make changes m...

Recently, Blogger added an exciting feature set to Blogger - Blogger In Draft . New features are tested, by us, on a blog by blog basis, when we intentionally decide that our blog can be safely subjected to the stress of BID. Blogger In Draft provides interesting new components in Blogger, but at a cost. Two costs, actually. Functionality. As each component included in BID is simplified, it will lose features. Stability. Components in BID have been known to damage blogs. I won't apply BID to any of my established blogs. As each new component is added to BID, Blogger will improve functionality and stability, based upon feedback. People testing new Blogger features, released as part of BID, need to be experienced Bloggers, who know how Blogger blogs work, and how to diagnose problems. This qualification probably won't be found with those who write into this forum How do I do this? Anybody reading this is, of course, entitled to ignore my advice, and jump in head first. A...

OK, you've got a kick ass web site. It's attractive, has good content, and it's nicely organised. Then you get email from your friend Dude, your web site is crap. How did this happen? You think it looks great. Frequently, this happens when you design and test your blog for one browser, and your friend uses another. Firefox and Internet Explorer, which use differing code and display standards, are famous for this problem.

My Blog Is Missing! Oh no! Generally, this refers to a deleted or hijacked / stolen blog. Other times, part of the blog is there, and the other part is not. This may be similar to the corrupted template problem , except part of the blog is clearly there, and looks just fine. WTF? In the latter case, neither the content nor the sidebar is actually missing. One or the other has simply slipped to the bottom of the page. Of course, it never occurs to somebody to scroll to the bottom in search of the missing content or sidebar. Why should it? It's called a sidebar because it's a BAR (column) that sits at the top of the page, beSIDE the column with the content (Posts). D'Ohh.