Plug the holes in Blogger's widgets

USE THE POST EDITOR FOR FORMATTING

Former formatting tools

Inexplicably, Google has rolled out new widget dialogs lacking basic functionality.

These dialogs are the versions you get when you create or edit a widget from the Layout page of the Blogger dashboard.

Another shoe drops, crippling widgets and disrupting flow

This week Google is removing the quick-edit tools from sidebar widgets in a way that cannot be reversed.

The removal is rolling out as I publish this report.

The only remaining option to edit these widgets uses the dumbed-down versions that are available from the Layout page of the Blogger dashboard.

The move suggests that the days of some other Blogger features that remain may be numbered.

Tame Your Snippet

Some bloggers (and I am one of them) are not too happy with the snippitization of their posts by the most recent crop of themes from Blogger.

Older themes (like this one) render the entire post on the home page or end at your jump break.

But the new responsive themes suck up the first few sentences, strip them of all formatting, hyperlinks, and paragraph breaks, and add a "read more" link that goes to the post's post page, automatically.

Neverending Blogger.com changes

Those busy beavers at Blogger never rest! And, one is tempted to add, unfortunately.

This week's change involves the batch controls, with special implications for managing labels.

Flow: blogging in the creative zone

If you blog regularly enough that your tools become an extension of your mind, you may experience flow

the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. (Wikipedia)

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who invented the term, says flow is characterized by a sense of timeless absorption. 

So, what happens when the tools break?

Three Ways to Follow Your Blog

Photo: Frantisek Krejci/Pixabay

By default, your blog has three different ways to tell readers when you publish a new blog post.

Only one of them is called "following."

These methods are not the same, though they accomplish similar things.

In search of subscribe-by-email

EDOARDO TOMMASINI

The impending demise of Feedburner's subscribe-by-email service (July 2021) has many of us weighing our options.

The service is a valuable way to connect with regular readers. Its loss will further erode what is left of Blogger's frayed social layer.