Too Clever By Half

Do not fuss over finding the perfect blogger web address. Chances are, it is taken.

Get over it and start blogging.

You can still title your blog whatever you want. Your name and your blogger url don't have to match.

When I renamed this blog, I discovered that toocleverbyhalf.blogspot.com was taken. Same for 2cleverbyhalf, cleverbyhalf, tooclever, and 2clever.

To add insult to injury, most of those blogs were blank—or nonexistent!

I just kept going until I found something free. Total time elapsed: five minutes.

Just starting out?

I think it is a good practice to start your blog as private while you test things, experiment, and grapple with the subject matter of your blog.

You will feel freer to try new things and make changes, both to content and design, if you know you are the only reader.

Update: This report is obsolete. Online stuff changes from time to time, and for this topic a revision would be impractical.

Read more about archived posts, if you like.

If you chose Full-feed (or Jump Break) publishing, have pasted the javascript code into a static post, and applied any special formatting (which is optional), then you are done.

Congratulations! I hope you are pleased.

It's always a good idea to proofread your feed to identify any typos or unanticipated formatting that may have been introduced by the pipe or this process.

Update: These instructions for a clickable list of blog posts no longer work. But you can create such a list pretty easily now.

How would you like to list links to all your blog posts in chronological order?

A list that automatically grows as you post new stuff to your blog?

Update: This report is obsolete. Online stuff changes from time to time, and for this topic a revision would be impractical.

Read more about archived posts, if you like.

English-language syntax is tricky, and the Short pipe does a number of little tricky things to compensate. Even so, the generic replacement rules sometimes run into an exception that screws things up.

For instance, my pipe was evaluating the text string "U.S." as a place that needed a line break after the first period.

Why? The Short Feed pipe evaluates any period followed by letter with no intervening space as the end of a paragraph, in need of some line returns. (The Full pipe does not do this.)

I could have edited the post where I originally wrote "U.S." to be simply "US," but that would have been incorrect usage and I am fussy about that sort of thing. So I wrote an exception into the pipe.

I will show you what I did so that you can write simple exceptions too. (For example, you might write about time and say "11:30 A.M.") As a first step, you must go to your pipe and click Edit.

Update: This report is obsolete. Online stuff changes from time to time, and for this topic a revision would be impractical.

Read more about archived posts, if you like.

For Short feeds only.

I built the Short pipe for this hack to work on blog feeds that have been limited to the first 255 characters or so. It assumes no more than nine paragraphs or so.

That should be plenty if you set your feed options to "short."

Update: This report is obsolete. Online stuff changes from time to time, and for this topic a revision would be impractical.

Read more about archived posts, if you like.

If you are still getting run-together paragraphs and have the Short feed, there are two possible causes. (If yours is Full, or if you are just building a list of blog-post titles, you are done! Go here.)