The case of the missing pencil

Google started messing around with Blogger's very useful quick-edit tools in early 2021, but today there is a new issue affecting some users.

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These tools are little icons of pencils, visible only to the signed-in blog owners, that link a published post directly to its edit page.

Very handy for making quick revisions, and other work.

Recently, some who had managed to retain this feature through the chaos of the past year and a half report that these pencils have vanished.

Here is how to get them back.

Recovering blog access

Photo: Roy Harryman

What if you cannot sign in to your blogging account? 

Once, all you needed to manage your blog was your user ID (usually an email address) and your password.

Today, this may not be enough.

If you've been away from your blog for a few years, or are signing in from a new device, you will almost certainly be greeted with additional challenges from Google.

Subscribe-by-email may really have ended

OR MAYBE NOT

The subscribe-by-email feature that had been integrated into Blogger since 2011 may finally be ending, nine months after Google told us it would a year ago.

There were still some instances of subscriber emails going out last week, however.

Names restored to Blogger images

SOME GOOD NEWS, FOR ONCE

Your image gets a name

Blogger has added filenames to the urls for images that are uploaded into the blog or imported from Google Photos.

This should resolve a number of problems that bloggers have reported about how these images are (and aren't) showing up in blogs.

Blogger images: problems mount

Jef Poskanzer, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A recent back-end change for hosting Blogger images was supposed to be nearly invisible to us bloggers, and not any sort of big deal.

Instead, six months into the transition, there are clear issues that Google has not addressed.

Some may never be fixed.

Photos in Blogger changing under the hood

Photo: Justinite

Place an image in Blogger and, lately, it is not always clear what will happen.

There have been a lot of issues recently in the help community about images. That's often a sign that the Blogger developers are tinkering.

This week we are seeing evidence of a change in the wiring.

Grownups only

Hello, young bloggers, go back up your blogs.

Like smoking, drinking, and electing leaders who are warming the planet to the boiling point, blogging is about to become an adults-only activity.

That is to say,

After September 1, students designated as under 18 in K-12 Edu domains will lose access to the Blogger service.