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| 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.
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.
USE THE POST EDITOR FOR FORMATTING
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| 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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| Photo: Frantisek Krejci/Pixabay |
Only one of them is called "following."
These methods are not the same, though they accomplish similar things.
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| 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.
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| Image: Pixabay |
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| Image: Pixabay |
The move leaves users of Blogger with no clear choice for how to continue to offer a subscribe option to readers, though many third-party solutions exist.
The "subscribe by email" gadget will also stop working that time.
At the moment, though I hope things will change, do not add images into your posts by dragging them from your device or from another web page.
This method kind of works and looks okay, but there are side effects that are not immediately obvious.
Insert images from the edit toolbar instead.
Feeds are the open-source alternative to subscribe-by-email and to following.
Here's how they work.
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| Max Pixel photo |
Google provides a Followers widget where anyone with a Blogger account can sign up as a follower. The widget also shows who your public followers are.
However, there are other widgets, and other ways to follow.
Update: Google is canceling this service effective in July.
"Subscribe by Email" is also the name of a sidebar gadget in Blogger that will present this option to your readers.
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| Let's be fair. |
Google could have done so much better when it revisited the "back end" of Blogger—the tools we bloggers use to create blogs and posts.
I've been critical (and, I hope, helpful) on this blog.
But to be fair, I'd like to put the criticism aside and remind everyone of things that are new and improved. Of benefits from the change.
PAIN FROM BLOGGER'S COMMUNICATION PROBLEM
Third-party tracking cookies (tiny files that your browser downloads from just about everybody, unless you block them) are facing legitimate concerns about privacy.
Apple started blocking these trackers in its Safari browser by default in the spring of 2020, and now others, including Google, have come around.
That's good—but also a problem for Blogger. We felt the pain for five days in January.
A PROBLEM YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOU HAD
Want to delete a comment you left on someone else's blog?
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| Photo: Auaan, cc by-sa 4.0 |
It just got more difficult.
Blog comments are affected by the same issue that recently disabled the quick-edit tools.
A workaround "fixed" that issue. It also has the effect of fixing comments.
The removal of the quick-edit tools has made Blogger harder to use.
Here's how to get them back, at least for now.
Update: Google has reversed course on this—at least for the present.
AND IT'S MY FAULT
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| Sam Beebe/Ecotrust (CC BY-SA 3.0) |
These are little icons—a pencil, or a wrench crossed over a screwdriver—that
linked directly from a post or widget to its respective editing window. Very
handy!
So, why did this happen? And, can anything be done about it?
The answer to why is this.
It is my fault.
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| Creative Commons attribution below |
The new Blogger user interface is a boon to hand surgeons everywhere.
Why: All the extra clicks, distributed over hundreds of thousands of users, must surely translate into more cases of carpal tunnel syndrome.
The title of this blog post is
