Too Clever By Half

Forgetting the password to an old Blogger blog (really, to its Google account) is not necessarily a big deal. Google's account-recovery tool can email you a reset.

Things get sticky, though, if you no longer have access to the email address associated with the account.

Not all is lost, however. Here is how I regained access to an old account of mine.

“No, Madam,” my friend said peremptorily. “Your problem has nothing to do with your template. Rather, it’s the code of your last post but two that is deforming the layout of your blog page.”

The great detective had risen from his chair before the fire when our visitors entered the sitting room at 221B Baker Street. Only one who knew Sherlock Holmes as I did would see the ennui masked by his correct demeanor.

“But Mr. Holmes, it can’t be. I never add code to my posts.”

“Nonetheless, Madam. Your husband’s problem, on the other hand, lies with the curious way he has inserted his photographs into his blog.”

The internet is a great medium for photos. Blogging visually creates posts with greater impact and sticking power.

BEATRICE MURCH PHOTO

Uploading a photo to Blogger will create at least two, and sometimes three, separate copies.

Should you keep track of them? And how?

Here's how I do it.

John Kratz photo

Your blog lives "in the cloud." Its contents are distributed.

Blogger's servers assemble the different page elements from various locations.

You can blog photos hosted online anywhere--at Flickr or Photobucket or even on your own web server.

However, if you upload a photo directly to your blog, Blogger stashes it in a linked Picasaweb account. (Update: Picasaweb has been replaced by the Album Archive, which is now the media manager, but for the purpose of this post the same principles apply.)

In the early days of the Internet people added metadata (data about data) to web pages to tell automated search-engine robots what was there.

Invisible to humans, this was a kind of table of contents for these automated web crawlers, who in turn report to the search engines. A whole science of search-engine optimization evolved to get search engines to notice content and rank it highly.

Today the robots have grown smarter. They read the web very much the way that we do. Metadata is all-but obsolete. Instead, to tell search engines about your web page, the best strategies involve clear organization and descriptive headings.

Blogger's slow transition to a new user interface (for bloggers, that is) has produced many bugs and problems.

One experienced blogger recently described the "White Screen of Death," in which the new Blogger engine sometimes hangs while trying to load the dashboard.

Update: Please view "Automated lists by topic," a more-recent post, for clearer instructions about how to build lists of posts that grow as you publish new posts.

Edits I've made in response to changing technology have rendered the below report more difficult to follow.

Online stuff changes from time to time, and for this topic my revisions have proved awkward.

Read more about archived posts, if you like.

If you use labels to characterize your posts (and you should, it is a very handy way to organize your blog), you probably know how each label groups those posts together by category on separate label-search pages.

But wait, there's more.

You can list all of the posts with the same label in your sidebar, sorted alphabetically if you like, or in chronological order, oldest first.

For instance: All your recipes. Your 2010 trip to Italy. Your beer reviews. Whatever.