Too Clever By Half

It's super easy to steal work that does not belong to you. I think you know that you should not do that.

Photo: See number eight. ¶

Ask the owner for permission. If you do not know who the owner is, and there's no public license, don't use it.

It sounds like a cool hack: draft your post in your favorite app, photos and all, then paste that into the Blogger editor. ¶ 

Grab that thing you're quoting from the web and paste into the post. ¶ 

The good news is that this will usually work (with some quirks), but you need to take extra steps to protect your blog from junk code.

Have you seen this blog? ¶ 

Deleting an account might delete the blog or blogs it owns—but it might not. ¶ 

And deleting the account might have other effects on a blog, too.

A CATALOG OF DISCONTENTS ¶ 

So why do the Responsive blog themes, introduce by Google in 2017, continue to give me pause nine years later? ¶ 

Don't get me wrong: the fact that these are responsive means they provide a superior user experience on mobile. That is huge. ¶ 

Most web traffic today comes from phones, and a responsive theme makes your work easier to read, find, and navigate from there. ¶ 

Nonetheless, there are tradeoffs.

Google introduced three new features to Blogger this year.

• In July, Google introduced a new system for backing up our blogs. 
• As the year ends, we're randomly seeing two "beta" features that use machine intelligence to add hyperlinks from your posts to related Google searches.

The changes shared one thing in common: the absence of direct communication or explanation from Google about the new features. Bad Google!

The above links will take you to my unofficial guide to these new features.

Spoiler: Yes, Google can delete your blog. ¶ 

But someone else could have deleted it, if it is missing. Including you, by accident (or otherwise). ¶ 

It's easy to tell if Google is the culprit. Google will tell you, if you've let it.