Super Tech Fun Pak

A COLLECTION OF CODE-BASED HACKS

I avoid giving advice, or solutions, that involve code.

Yet here are some code-based tricks that I use.

Paragraph vs Normal spacing

Google gave us a perplexing, nay, maddening issue about the spaces between paragraphs when it introduced the latest iteration of Blogger in 2020.

Blogger provides a drop-down menu of paragraph styles that are mostly self explanatory, eg Heading, Subheading, and so forth.

But there are two choices for regular body text, Paragraph and Normal.

What are these for, and what should you use?

Undelete deleted posts

HALLELUJAH

New this past month: Undelete. For posts and pages.

I do not apologize for feeling giddy about this.

Never delete a Blogger profile

A built-in email subscription service for Blogger would be cool. Image handling could be a whole lot better.

We really need some basic versioning for draft blog posts. Hey, how about making those super-handy quick-edit tools available for everybody? How about undo?

With these very real needs, it is with mixed feelings that I greet the most recent new feature from Blogger: deleting your Blogger profile.

Which you should never do.

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.

   ✎   

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.