The Real Blogger Status

We all know that spam is an ever present problem. In our blogs, our email, and online forums, you can't go anywhere without seeing advertisements for something - frequently placed there by criminals, who aren't paying the owner of the host web site anything. Blogger, one of the largest content hosting services in the world, is not immune to this pestilence. So Blogger is trying to do something about the problem. One of the things that they are doing is, supposedly, making it harder for the spammers to publish blogs. The Settings - Publishing wizard, which lets you change the URL of your blog - to another BlogSpot URL, or to a non-BlogSpot URL - is now subject to the word puzzle aka CAPTCHA . For every change made. Re publishing your blog - whether the an external server using FTP, or to a Google server and a custom domain - is subject to stress. Every blogger using custom domain ("Another blog is already hosted at this address", "404 Server Not Found"...

This month, many bloggers are finding that their problems with FTP Publishing aren't all caused by Blogger. Many host server support teams, in an effort to protect their servers, are using IP filters in their firewalls. If you want to publish your blog to their server, the IP address of the sending computer has to be added , to a pass filter, in the firewall. All server support staff aren't aware of this issue, and recently we hear the repeated complaint I asked my server support team about my problem , and they said that they don't have a problem - so Blogger has to be the cause of the problem. What is Blogger doing about my problem? Many times, the diagnosis from the server support team is coming from their first level support staff. My observation has been that, frequently, the first priority of the first level support staff is to ensure that they have no problem, and to inform the customer that they have to go elsewhere (ie to Blogger Support) for relief of their pr...

If you have a server that is used to host web sites, you need to protect the server, and the web sites, from malicious access. One of the easiest ways to protect the server is to deny update access to computers with unknown IP addresses. As long as your clients publish from computers with known IP addresses, and those computers are never used by people with malicious intent, this is a good strategy. If you're publishing your Blogger blog by FTP to a remote host server, and the host server protects itself by an IP filter, the filter has to allow access to any computers used by Blogger for FTP transfer. A list of IP addresses is provided in Blogger Help: Can I use Blogger if my server is restricted by IP address or behind a firewall? . The IPs provided are: 74.125.66.132 74.125.112.132 It's not clear whether those 2 addresses completely replace the previously defined addresses: 66.102.15.83 216.34.7.186 64.233.166.192-207 64.233.178.192-207 During the past couple weeks, severa...

With all of the predefined page elements that Layouts Blogger provides, that fulfill maybe 90% of the need for you to edit the template, there will be the 10% that they don't provide. Services provided by third parties - like guest books , or news feeds , or even visitor meters - won't be provided by Blogger, to everybody's liking. In some cases, Blogger / Google will provide one version of a given service - like Blogger Comments, Blogger Feeds, and Google Analytics - but their versions aren't the most popular in many cases. And some blog owners will develop their own simple applets, like the Cumulus / Google Translation Bar . Bloggers are like any people in any walk of life - they all want something different - better - or new.

Recently, I wrote about Following, and two reasons why it's only available (currently) for bloggers that use the various dialects of English . You'd think that it should be available, immediately, to anybody with a blog that's properly presented in the language of their choice. And that would by preference be the possibility, but reality says not. Today, we see one example why "not" is going to be seen more than "can", as more and more non English bloggers start to envy those of us who have Following. Jane, in Hong Kong, has a blog that (until recently) had a bilingual title Reddie's Page | 鸿屋 This was fine, for the blog, and it was good for her readers - some who prefer to read English, and others to read Chinese. But, she had no Followers for the blog, even though the Following gadget was properly installed. Whenever someone clicked on the link from the Following gadget in her blog Follow this blog (try it!!), instead of the popup window Follow...

IP Networking is how your computer, and millions of other computers worldwide, connect to Blogger and to Blog*Spot, and millions of still more computers. The Internet is based upon IP (" Internet Protocol ") Networking. IP Networking, which uses packet switching technology, was legendarily designed for a military / political need - to survive imminent military action during the United States / Soviet Union Cold War , in the mid 1900s. I'm envisioning a legendary, top secret, conversation: Military Strategist #1: Let's put computers on all of our military bases, and let's connect all of our computers with each other. Colonel Frimmis in Richmond can work better with Colonel Frammis in Dallas, with their computers directly connected. Military Strategist #2: And what happens when the Russians find out? They'll sneak over here, cut the network cable between Dallas and Richmond, and we'll be in deep you know what. The Alpha project will fall behind schedul...

Those of us who have been enjoying following the development of the Blogger Following global community may have observed the Blogger Buzz announcement of September 11 . Now it's available to all users in English. Since not everybody that uses Blogger speaks English (nor is English even the most common language of the world population), this doesn't quite indicate a global release of the product. And those of you who do speak English may want to check your language settings , and make sure that your Blog and Profile languages are set to English. Hopefully, you'd already know that, but maybe not everybody has this as a priority. So what happens if your Blog or Profile Language is set to something other than "English"? If you try to add the Following gadget to one of your blogs, you might observe the advice (in French, for instance) Ce gadget est experimental. Il n'est pas encore disponible sur tous les blogs. the keyword here being experimental. See Roberto...