Problems posting a comment in Blogger?

This Post was written by Heather from The Culinary Chase (www.theculinarychase.bogspot.com)

Has anyone been experiencing issues with not being able to leave a comment in Blogger websites? I had a couple of people email me personally saying they couldn't.

Cheers,
Heather Chase

Eat Stuff

Here you go http://eatstuff.blogspot.com/

Food Blog S'cool is no longer operational

Food Blog S'cool is no longer operational

Please use these forums instead:

Food Blog Alliance
Food Blog Forum

Thanks you so much for the support over the years.

Sam Breach

Column Alignment

As a seriously low-tech blogger (I understood ye olde HTML, but CSS has me totally baffled), I'm enjoying the new customizable design feature for templates, however am completely and utterly stuck on one thing. How the devil do I change the alignment of the features/widgets on my sidebar? I want them all to be center-aligned but every one of them is left-aligned and I have searched the source code for any hint of alignment information without success.

Help! It's such a little thing but I find the left-alignment of my columns so jarring - it really breaks up the flow of the page.

FYI I'm using the 'Simple' template with wide main body and a double left-hand column.

This Post was written by Fahara from Souperior

Dodgers swept out of Boston in 2-0 loss - latimes.com

Dodgers swept out of Boston in 2-0 loss - latimes.com

Replace this line of text with the main body of your postThis Post was written by MYNAME from BLOGNAME

Dodgers swept out of Boston in 2-0 loss - latimes.com

Dodgers swept out of Boston in 2-0 loss - latimes.com

Replace this line of text with the main body of your postThis Post was written by MYNAME from BLOGNAME

The Well-Seasoned Cook: Announcing - My Legume Love Affair 23

The Well-Seasoned Cook: Announcing - My Legume Love Affair 23

http://rasoiguru.blogspot.com/2008/05/dal-makhani.html

Dal Makhani by Manjula Kumar

PSA: A Recipe Site is stealing content

Thanks to a Google alert, I just discovered that A Recipe Site is lifting my posts, word for word, including photographs. I'm sure I'm not the only food blogger being ripped off, so I'm writing here to suggest you click through and look for your own work. If you find anything, here's the contact info per Register.com:

Administrative Contact:
Searsville Land Company
tom lodato (tlodato@aol.com)
+1.6502076063
Fax: +1.6503650673
846 Portola Road suite J
Portola Valley, CA 94028
US

This Post was written by Debbie from Words to Eat By.

Spam Prevention

Is there a way to limit spam without using word verification or comment moderation in Blogger blogs?

I recently had to suspend anonymous comments on my blog to deal with this.

A group of us have started a group blog and we don't want to limit interaction with our readers nor use either the word verification or comment moderation. Thanks!

This Post was written by Sra from When My Soup Came Alive.

Are ads worth it?

Hi all,
I am pondering whether or not to begin running ads on my blog and hope some of you who run ads on your blogs could weigh in with your own experiences.

I'm interested in whether it's profitable (and if the revenue they bring in really offsets the downsides like the space you lose and the fact that the ads tend to be a bit distracting no matter how appropriate they are to your topic), and which service you use?

Thanks so much!

-Eve from The Garden of Eating
http://www.gardenofeatingblog.com

Help Haiti

We’ve all seen the scenes of chaos and destruction in Haiti right now, but long after the news crews and camera men have packed up their gear and moved onto the next big story, Haiti will still need help to rebuild their infrastructure and feed their people.

Blog Away Hunger is challenging all bloggers to consider donating their January ad revenue to the Word Food Program's Haiti earthquake relief efforts. If you want to participate, or you want to help the bloggers that are, click here to see how you can help.

This Post was written by Marc from Blog Away Hunger

Anyone Heard of CookEatShare?

Hi all,

I was recently contacted by someone at CookEatShare and just wanted to see if anyone here had any experience with the or any opinions. They seem like a decent enough site, but I'm not sure how I feel about having my site stuck in a frame.

Thanks!


This Post was written by Dawn from Dawn's Recipes

Recommend a small camera, please!

Hi all. I've got a Canon PowerShot A640 and frankly, I'm a little tired of it. It's bulky (annoying to carry around) and the flash, no matter how I adjust it, is much too harsh. Can't use the flash for food shots at all, which makes after-dark photography a challenge. Soooo, I'm looking for something new. Small, hopefully small enough for a pocket. Good for food. Useful flash. Not terribly expensive (would under $150 be too much to hope for?)

Suggest away, please!

This Post was written by Debbie from Words to Eat By

Comment Moderation Acting Up

Hi folks, till today, I was having trouble publishing/rejecting one particular comment. I get a message saying "Error performing your request" - bx-405yxs. That was spam. It's still in my comments folder.

Now I'm having trouble publishing a friendly comment. The screen just goes back to comment moderation, I don't get any error message.

How do I set this right?

This Post was written by Sra from When My Soup Came Alive

Luddite Question

Hi,

I'm having trouble attaching a video to a blogger post. It just says "uploading video for hours," but nothing happens. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Emily


This Post was written by Emily Stone from Chocolate in Context.

Another type of comment spam

I'm glad I chose to put my blog on comment moderation - now it appears that companies are paying people to pretend to be bloggers. The post read something like "That recipe looks really good, I'm in a rut as to types of pasta dishes to fix in addition to my go to pasta recipes." The italicized words "go to pasta recipes" was a link - to a Disney Family recipe page. The name of the person leaving the comment was also a link, but to a person who doesn't even have a blog but registered with Blogger so she could post as if she did. If I hadn't clicked on her name, I wouldn't have seen that. My guess is that she is paid by Disney to put their links on people's blogs.


This Post was written by Cyndi from Cookin' With Cyndi

upgrading wordpress to latest version - a cautionary tale

Having put it off long enough, I have just upgraded my wordpress installation from the legacy 2.0.11 (which was stable and officially supported until very recently) to 2.8.4. What prompted this? The following on the wordpress website:

Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm [...] makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts. [...] Upgrading is a known quantity of work [...] Fixing a hacked blog, on the other hand, is quite hard. Upgrading is taking your vitamins; fixing a hack is open heart surgery. (This is true of cost, as well.)

2.8.4, the current version of WordPress, is immune to this worm. (So was the release before this one.) If you've been thinking about upgrading but haven't gotten around to it yet, now would be a really good time.

- excerpt from http://wordpress.org/development/2009/09/keep-wordpress-secure/

I did the upgrade to 2.8.4 in one fell swoop by following the steps in the wordpress codex. There appeared to be only a few glitches that were relatively quickly ironed out and everything seemed to be running fine.

Until I noticed several stray Âs in some of the older posts. And ûs instead of üs, és instead of és, âs instead of âs, etc. etc. It turns out that I SHOULD have disregarded the detailed instructions and googled to find others' recommendations about upgrading the Legacy Wordpress. Thank goodness for backups!! (Please read more about my wordpress upgrade woes. )

When you are upgrading your older version of wordpress (don't put it off!!), take a look Pixelita Designs; they put together a handy (if only I'd seen it!!) step by step guide:

1. Backup your database! If you have the WP Backup plugin, just use that to capture the latest MySQL dump. Otherwise, go through your web host's control panel and PHPAdmin to export the *.sql file to your hard drive.

[...]

4. Chart your upgrade path. Since you are upgrading from 2.0.11, you should upgrade incrementally, like this: 2.0.11 > 2.1 > 2.2 > 2.3 > 2.5 > 2.6 > 2.7 > [2.8.4]
5. Make sure you have downloaded and unzipped to folders all of the WP versions you'll need to complete your upgrade. You can find them in the download archive.
6. Using your favorite FTP program, upload WordPress, starting with 2.1, from the folder you downloaded and unzipped. DO NOT UPLOAD any .htaccess or wp-config.php files from any of the distros! You will want to retain your own versions of .htaccess and wp-config.php already on your server.
7. Once the first new version is uploaded, point your browser to the /wp-admin folder and upgrade.php. For example, if your WordPress install is at www.yourserver.com, you would go to: http://www.yourserver.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php.
8. Proceed to upgrade the database when prompted.
9. Repeat steps 6, 7, and 8 above (uploading the incremental versions, invoking upgrade.php and updating the database) until you've upgraded all the way to [the most recent] WordPress

- excerpt from http://blog.pixelita.com/78/upgrading-your-legacy-wordpress-site/

Obviously, if you are upgrading from Wordpress 2.2, you would upgrade 2.2 > 2.3 > 2.5 > 2.6 > 2.7 > 2.8.4 And please remember to start with making a full backup of your wordpress!!

Also, while you are doing the upgrade, you can upload a temporary index file to your wordpress folder. Make a page that looks like your site and put something like "server currently undergoing maintenance - please come back later" on the page. Save it as index.html and upload it to your wordpress folder. Once the upgrade is done, you can remove that temporary index file and get back to blogging.

All wordpress releases are here: http://wordpress.org/download/release-archive/

Hope this helps.


This post was written by Elizabeth from blog from OUR kitchen

Screen Capture

Can someone explain to me in words of not many syllables how to take a screen capture of a web page and reproduce it in Blogger?

Thanks and pardon my ignorance please!


This Post was written by Ian from The Yorkshire Foodie (formerly Yorkshire Deli)

Trouble with Sidebars

I desperately need help. I seem to be having certain issues with my blog design. My homepage seems to be displaying everything as it should - sidebars are there, post footers with labels social bookmarking icon etc. all there. Now if one clicks through into any of the posts or into "recipes", "about" etc. you will see that the sidebars and the post footers have disappeared. I have no idea why? Yesterday everything was fine and I have not been fiddling around with the template/code. Today it seems to have gone crazy on me.

Can any tech savvy person help me resolve this issue if they can find the glitch? Please.


This Post was written by Meeta from What's For Lunch, Honey?

Calendar Widget

I got rid of a lot of junk in my side bar with my most recent redesign. But I'm thinking one thing I'd like to add would be a calendar widget so I could post local food events. It would NOT be a calendar of blog posts.

I've tried playing with the Google calendar but when I attempt to embed it, it doesn't work very well when it's in a very small format (less than 300 pixels wide).

Can anyone recommend a better calendar widget to use in a sidebar on a Blogger blog?

This Post was written by Amy from Cooking with Amy