Leave a comment on a Blogger blog from your Google account (that is, not anonymously), and you can be notified if someone replies to you.
That can lead to interesting exchanges, while enriching the blog.
But it has gotten harder to choose the "Google Account" option when commenting.
It's a case of some outdated technology in Blogger bumping up against modern privacy concerns.
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| SOURCE: ICON LIBRARY |
A reader asks,
Is there any easy way to tell if any other account has made a post [on a blog]?
The question has special urgency in light of Google's plan to start deleting inactive Google accounts, beginning in December of 2023.
If there are old accounts on your blog, and Google deletes them, the images they've uploaded will be deleted too.
What does it mean to you, and how can you protect your blog?
The actual requirements are simple. Just publishing blog posts keeps the account active.
But there's a nasty surprise for some blogs.
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| photo: Lighttruth (CC BY-NC 2.0) |
The old jump break offers hidden benefits to all Blogger blogs.
Before Blogger introduced the jump break in 2009, blog themes displayed entire posts stacked on top of each other.
The break allowed blogs to make a main page of posts truncated with "read more" links to each post on separate post pages. (It still does that, for older blog themes.)
Today, the most modern blog themes truncate posts automatically. But the jump can help even these blogs in ways not anticipated in 2009.
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| image: mohamed hassan |
(You can also do the same thing for all your posts, labeled or not.)
"Dynamic" means the list revises itself automatically whenever you add or subtract a label from a post.
New here?
Maybe you know exactly where you are going with your new blog. If so, don't let me slow you down.
For my part, when I was getting started, I was uncertain about the right way to do things.
I'm writing this for newcomers, though old hands may find a few tidbits of interest too.
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| Photo: Hopefulromntic21 (CC BY-SA 4.0) |
At the end of the setup process for a new blog, you'll find yourself at your blog's dashboard: the private back end of the blog where you can write, edit, format, and run your blog.
To get your blog started, you can click the New Post button at top right on your dashboard.
It's not a bad idea to try this out. You can always edit or delete a practice post later.
But one dashboard section that deserves your early attention is the Settings page, full of controls and options.
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| Adapted from Steve Jurvetson (CC BY 2.0) |
Attentive reader Peggy K wishes for a way to make such complex blog searches as "all my posts about Twitter that are NOT about Elon Musk."
(My hypothetical example, not hers.)
Seek no further.
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| Photo: Jason Mrachina (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) |
Blogger is a database that lets you shuffle and filter posts in different ways.
Today we take that to the next level, with logical OR searches on labels A or B (posts with any of the labels).
Today we take that to the next level, with logical AND and OR searches on labels.
That is, making a single page of all posts with (1) labels A and B, or (2) A or B.
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| photo: yung chang |
Increasingly over the past two years, bloggers in the help community say they can't
These problems (often) have the same cause: Blogger's outdated dependence on tracking cookies.
Google stashes the images you upload into your blog in the Album Archive, their online home that is separate from Google Photos.
Now, Google has written a new back end for those images, available today at www.blogger.com/mediamanager.
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| photo: aaron burden |
Are you new in town? Welcome!
In this guide for newcomers, the ➧ symbol indicates my personal recommendations for success.
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| Image: geralt |
Not only is a blog a kind of database, but a defining characteristic of a blog is having database superpowers.
Namely, the ability to filter posts in different ways.
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.
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?
