The Real Blogger Status

Too many blog owners start a blog, then post in AdSense Help Forum: Blogger, YouTube, Partner sites , or maybe in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , a bit of naivete. What is required, to be eligible for AdSense? And someone who has to ask is probably wasting time asking.

Occasionally, we have a would be blog owner, becoming confused about blog access, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . I can look at the dashboard Posts page - but there are no posts listed. or I can't access the Template Designer (edit the template, add users to the blog, ... ). or maybe Why is Settings so small? These are bloggers who are confused over a blog where they are an Author , or have no access - as opposed to a blog where they are an Administrator . Along with knowing how to identify yourself , knowing what access you have to a given blog can be a key detail, when you are dealing with identity confusion - such as inadvertently created duplicate accounts , or possibly duplicated blogs .

With Google Domains registered custom domains becoming more normal, we are seeing one odd attention to detail, expressed as confusion in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . My website uses "ghs.google.com" - am I supposed to use "ghs.googlehosted.com", instead? It's good to be attentive to detail, particularly with custom domain publishing . This is one detail that may not require immediate attention, however.

We see a few spam blogs, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , that are classified for having scraped content . Some nervous blog owners, who routinely copy content as part of their blog posts, want to know if their blogs are vulnerable to "scraped content" spam classifications . I suspect that there are several issues to consider, regarding use of copied content in your blog .

Too many blog owners start their first blog - and the first step is to drop into the nearest online publishing forum - such as Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , and ask the question of the typical marketing expert. I want to start a blog. What should I write about, to make the most money? And there is where many spam blogs start. People who are making money, are busy making money. They do not hang out in forums, waiting for you to ask how to make money, so they can tell you how to make money - probably, some of the money that they want to be making.

We see occasional signs of naivete, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , about custom domain publishing. Can I publish to a custom domain - and still use the Blogger dashboard? and Can I publish to a custom domain - and keep my comments and posts? and Can I publish to a custom domain - and avoid TOS restrictions? Some blog owners seem to see custom domain publishing as more than it actually is.

Not all blog owners realise how unique Blogger Stats is, in its design. Some owners may idly suggest that Stats can easily be replaced by any third party visitor activity log / meter. Why bother to use Stats? Since Blogger Stats shows referrer spam, it's pretty useless - just use SiteMeter, StatCounter - or Google Analytics. They have no idea why Stats was designed as it is, nor what information Stats provides, that no competing product can possibly provide.

We see periodic evidence of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , about deletion of our blogs. I deleted my blog last year - can I get it back? and I deleted my blog last month - when will I be able to use it with my new Blogger account? and I deleted my blog, but it's still visible, on the Internet! Not everybody is fully able to understand the "90 day" deletion policy.

When we read our blog, or somebody else's blog, we use a BlogSpot or domain URL, to identify the blog. Anytime we report a problem with our blogs, the most important question to answer, when we ask for help in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , is What's the BlogSpot and / or domain URL? When we login to Blogger, and look at our dashboard, there's an equally essential detail involved here. That unique detail is called the "ProfileID" / "ProfileURL".

The new Blogger commenting system has been out for several weeks now , and as some blog owners are becoming accustomed to it, it appears that others are occasionally confused. We see recent reports in BHF: Something Is Broken I am moderating comments, yet I find some comments being published without my input. and I deleted the comments, and now I can't get them back! and All of the comments to my blog are going straight to Spam. These reports may be from folks who are not observing what queue they are looking at, or what the buttons do, in the Comments wizard.

In every game of poker, there comes the time to call ("show the cards"). So today, we see a question, which I've seen a few times, reechoed recently I am planning to switch my Blogger blog to a custom domain. But before doing that I would like to know all the benefits and drawbacks of switching to a custom domain name.

Do you see the Followers gadget in the sidebar here? See the "Sign in" link at the top of the gadget (if you're not signed in to Following), or the "Invite your friends" link at the bottom of the gadget (if you are signed in to Following)? Move your mouse over either link, and watch the browser status bar (generally, the lower left of the browser window border). When you move the mouse pointer over a normal link, you should see the URL of the link. In this case, you see javascript:void(0); A lot of blog owners don't understand the reason for this, and think that the blog is broken, or maybe hacked. I can't publish any posts on my blog, or moderate any comments. At the bottom of the page I get an "Errors on page" message, and if I hover over certain areas of my dashboard, I get the "javascript:void(0);" message.

We see the plea for help, periodically I need the URL of my blog, so I can give it to my friends. Help! Who's buried in Grant's Tomb, after all? No Chuck, be polite. OK, OK. The title of this blog is "The Real Blogger Status", and the title of this post is "What's The URL Of My Blog?".

Blogger blogs are so versatile, and so easy to develop , that some folks don't see the forest for the trees. Every week we see the anxious query Can I write a blog, and sell stuff? or Can I write a blog, and make up stuff? or Can I include ads in my blog? or even Can I include ads from outside Google in my blog? Well, there are quite a few things that are forbidden by law, or forbidden by Blogger or by Google , that will get your blog cancelled. Most of the forbidden items are common sense - or so it seems to me.

This is The Real Blogger Status - and you are looking at the blog itself . What you see is a lot easier for you to digest, than for computers to do so. There's another copy of your blog, though, that's designed for computers to digest, so the information can be passed to other places, maybe as part of another web site or blog , or to a reader who is subscribed to your blog, using a newsreader . The other copy is called the site feed . The site feed contains each individual post, rewritten in XML. XML is a structured data language , making it easier for computer programs to read and process the contents. The site feed contains only the posts - nothing from the template. If the nature of your blog requires access to a gadget in the sidebar, your readers will need to visit the blog directly.