The Real Blogger Status

If you're accustomed to leaving anonymous comments on other folks blogs, selecting "Other" for Identity, and entering your Name and URL, you'll have to change your procedure - that option is now gone. In its place, you may find (at the option of the blog owner) a selection to use OpenID comment authentication . If you have an account for LiveJournal, WordPress, or many other blogging platforms, you'll be able to comment transparently. Without an OpenID account, you'll only be able to use "Anonymous" (again, at the option of the blog owner). And leaving a BackLink, in the URL field, is now a thing of the past. This may make comments a bit more secure, but a lot more unfriendly. Not everybody who reads your blog will have an OpenID account. Those who don't will be unable to leave anything better than an anonymous comment, and that if you enable anonymous accounts. Try it out - you may as well get used to it. Click on Google - Blogger In Draft ...

When you work with a custom domain, and endure / work around the frustration of DNS setup , and later the monolithic error "Another blog ..." , you occasionally may see another error. After you finally manage to redirect your blog "myblog.blogspot.com" to "www.mycustomdomain.com", and possibly after you add Google Apps to your custom domain, you or your readers will try to load the blog, and see Not Found Error 404 or its equivalent in another browser Live Search Were you looking for: My Custom Domain? When that happens, there's just one way to recover, and that involves repeating the previous setup. If you haven't done so already, and if you're able to do so, check and correct your DNS setup . If you just removed or edited a DNS entry, examine the TTL value of the entry that you removed or edited. To improve your chances of getting through this without seeing "Another blog ...", do nothing during the TTL period, while you wait, to ...

Ever since I followed the pack, and experimented with making myself a 3 column template (and discovered how deceptively easy that was), I've been considering making a 3 column stretch template. I have enjoyed my 2 column stretch template so much, that I sort of suspected that a 3 column stretch template wouldn't be a great stretch (pun intended) of effort.

In a Layouts template, the ability to add and delete page elements (gadgets) is one of the neatest tasks in maintaining your blog. Sometimes, a page element added can't be deleted later. You can edit a page element either from the blog itself (if you have enabled Quick Edit), or from the Page Elements wizard . When you edit an element, it should have a button to "Remove Page Element". The button isn't always there - and this generally happens when the gadget is locked.

Since the Google Custom Domain product was made available to eager bloggers, there has been a well known limitation - the inability to get both "www.mydomain.com" and "mydomain.com" to redirect to the same Blog*Spot blog. I've been writing about this limitation since March 2007, a couple months after Custom Domains was launched. That limitation was resolved in October, 2007 . But the ability to make "mydomain.com" == "www.mydomain.com" brought more uncertainty. Not all DNS Hosts support "CNAME" referral, of both the primary domain ("mydomain.com") and a subdomain ("www.mydomain.com"). Yet that referral is essential to the success of custom domain use. When you setup your domain, the domain setup wizard (provided by your DNS host) should provide you with two lists - "A" and "CNAME". All direct references ("Hosts") go into the "A" list, and all others ("Aliases...

One of the challenges in setting up a blog, successfully published using a Google Custom Domain, involves getting DNS Hosting. You have to have a DNS server pointing your domain to "ghs.google.com", and so many bloggers don't get this detail. I have written already about the confusion in Blogger documentation Remember: you only need to get the domain name; you don't have to pay extra for hosting service. Today, as I explored the possibility of publishing The Real Blogger Status to a Custom Domain, I found more misleading documentation. Domains are registered through a Google partner and cost $10 (USD) for one year. I went to Settings - Publishing, and selected "Switch to: • Custom Domain ". We are immediately offered registration through "a Google partner". No mention here of DNS hosting, or of any additional fees . Selecting "Switch to advanced settings", we get the familiar setup. Here's the well known advice "... you don...

In a Blogger template, the dashboard Layout wizard is one of the neatest features for accessorising your blog. The wizard is very versatile, and resilient. But sometimes, you won't be able to add or reposition a gadget (previously called a "page element"), where you want to.