Google Followers

In case anyone using Google Blogger was wondering why their followers total has fallen today...

...it's probably not because your readers are deserting you. There's been a change as a result of something to do with Google, Twitter and information disclosure that has caused Google to set the status of all followed blogs to "Anonymous". Once everyone has changed their followed blog status entries back to "Public", the links will be restored and follower numbers will rise back to previous levels. Well, that's the theory.

This Post was written by Trig from Aidan Brooks: Trainee Chef.

This Post was written by Joanna from Joanna's Food


Can anyone tell me how to disable comments in an individual post in blogger? I don't want to disable all comments, just on one or two archive posts that attract staggering amounts of inappropriate diet-related advertising type comments ....

Thanks
Joanna

Post a Comment Not Working

As of today, comments are not working on my blog. I looked through known issues on Blogger and didn't find anything listed. I also didn't find any answers after searching help. Any ideas of what's wrong? Thanks for any help!


This Post was written by lisa from lisaiscooking

Food Blog S'cool Template

I decided to give FBS an official new-style blogger template.
A few good things have come out of this:
1) The list of members has replaced the member blog links. This means I don't have to update links by hand and that the list will always be current and actually only include people who did actual sign up (the previous links included people who asked to be signed up but never actually got around to completing the sign up process which was difficult for me to track).
2) I can add blogger widgets like the poll I am currently testing out.
3) Adding labels should work properly now - so please add relevant labels whenever you post.
4) The Google Search is working properly now it would seem - so no need for me to archive past posts into a library.

On the downside:
1) I can't get the recent comments widget to work. I'll keep trying.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts/opinions/comments/etc regarding these changes, bearing in mind FBS is something I would prefer mainly looks after itself rather than needs a great deal of babysitting from me.


This Post was written by Sam from Becks and Posh

Blogger Glitch -- Envelope Icon -- Fixed -- See Below

Is anyone else having trouble with the blogger email post link icon?

I have all the settings clicked for the envelope icon (used to enable readers to email your post to others) to appear on my post line (next to info on comments, the little edit pencil, etc.) but it disappeared a few days ago.

Nothing on blogger known issues, or its own support. A lot of threads in the support group about other recent sufferers but their suggested fixes didn't work or were well beyond my comfort and/or expertise levels.

If you have had this experience and have some insight or if you are a lot more tech savvy than me and have a suggestion, I'd love to know your thoughts.

I've emailed Blogger but who knows when I'll hear back. Luckily, it's nothing that really impacts it's functionality.

Thanks for any input.

Update: 1.24.08 -- After much twiddling, attempting fixes in html, etc., and still no emails back from Blogger, I did what someone in the Blogger Help Group recommended as a last resort fix -- in layouts I clicked restore widgets to default settings. Worked like a charm. Luckily I had no customized widgets so there were no complications. If you have this problem with the email or even the quick edit icon, give it a try, however if you've customized widgets you may want to save that code somewhere so you can put it back in afterwards.

Based on my explorations the problem came from Blogger switching to a gif it hosts for the envelope icon. For some reason some blogs had issues with the transition.



This Post was written by Faith from Blog Appetit

Not All Posts Shown in Label Filter

Anyone knows how to show all posts or have a 'older posts' link to see more posts once we click on filter to see posts of a particular label?

E.G. when i click on my label "What's Cooking", it only shows 20 posts, but there are actually more posts under this label, same goes for every other labels. I am using blogger.

Any help? Thanks in advance!

This Post was written by rokh from Tham Jiak

Has Anyone Else Noticed This???? Custom Headers Now Easier in Blogger

I was playing around with a test template yesterday and noticed that Blogger users with the "new" style Blogger page element layouts can upload custom headers very much like any other image. (no need to have your photo or graphic hosted elsewhere) No fuss, no muss, just be sure you've got the size and cropping you want.

Go to customize your template, page elements, then your header and then edit. A "configure header" box will pop up with the customizing option.

I think it's a fairly new feature and don't recall seeing anything here at FBS on it. Of course, it could be real old news and something I just missed, but in case it is not, I wanted to share.

Faith from Blog Appetit (which still features its regular old rounders4 uncustom header)

PS: Blogger is doing that thing with showing every draft it auto-saved. If you've posted recently to FBS you may want to delete your unneeded drafts from the posts page.

Switching from Blogger to Wordpress?

So, I started my blog on Blogger a few months ago and I think it's growing steadily. I think that I eventually want to move to my own domain name and publish on Wordpress, rather than using the blogger website and having the ".blogspot.com" address. So, a few questions:

1. Am I right that in the long run, I'll do better with my own domain and wordpress rather than using blogger? i.e., am I just putting off the inevitable if I continue to use the blogger platform for a few months? I am decent at understanding/writing html, so I've been able to customize the blogger site to some extent, but I want to be able to have separate pages for a recipe index, blogroll, etc!

2. Am I better making the switch now, when my blog is still new, rather than when it's been around for a while and I'll be disrupting a larger number of readers (hopefully!)?

3. Am I going to lose readers if I make the switch, or is it pretty seamless?


This Post was written by Katy from sugarlaw.

Blogger Formatting

Hi Ev'body...

I am super frustrated at Blogger and hoping one of ya'll can help me out.

Every post I have written lately has been automatically formatting as double or triple spaced.

When I write a phrase, then hit "enter" ONCE it naturally goes to the next line, but when I look at the HTML the word "div" appears in brackets at least twice before and twice after every word.

I end up going back and manually deleting the "div", which is taking ages and getting me all grumpy.

Does anyone know if I somehow set this up to happen in formatting? Can I UNDO that? What are my options.

Thanks so much all!

Rachael


This Post was written by Rachael from Fresh Approach

Warning about Blogger AUTOSAVE!

Just want to let everyone who uses BLOGGER to be sure to save your work ELSEWHERE - do not rely on the "new and improved" autosave function.

Apparently, there is a "known issue" with it eating up work, rather than saving it. I just lost hours of work. Don't let this happen to you! * fingers crossed* it will be on the server and refreshe when I sign back in.

I also had trouble with Blogger not recognizing my name/pwd. Perhaps these are only coincidently coincident.


This Post was written by Jacquline from Leather District Gourmet (yes, it was lots of progress I'd made on my "Teach a Man to Fish" round-up! Wahhh!)

(Blogger) How to Add More Tag?

I've noticed a few Blogger blogs recently have started using the "more" tag (you know, when you can "click here to continue reading"). I've been waiting anxiously for this feature to become available with Blogger ... how do you do it? Help!


This Post was written by Cate from Sweetnicks

[Blogger] A few geeky questions on blogging

Hi Blogger experts out there,

I have not dealt with templates, CSS and HTML for close to two years now and I’m just starting to delve into this as I’m giving my bog a major facelift.

Here are some of the obstacles I’m running into. I hope someone could give me a pointer or two.
1. How do I eliminate the space/gap between the header and the content body of my blog right now?

2. If I continue using the old template in Blogger, would I still be able to use the new sidebar features such as categorizing my previous posts by tags, inverted archives with the latest dates on top etc. If this is possible, how do I go about doing it? Any existing examples or resources that I can check out?

3. Lastly, should there be any reason I should switch to the new template even though I’m happy with the old one right now?

Merci mille fois guys!

This Post was written by *kel from Green Olive Tree

Blogger Draft Posts

Looking at the full list of posts on FBS this morning, I see a significant number of repeated drafts prior to final posts by several contributors. Although these drafts don't show to external readers, they will cause Sam an administrative problem if they are allowed to build up like this.

As far as I can see the problem originates from a change made recently by Blogger and does not affect users on other hosts. In response to complaints from users who neglected to save their own work and subsequently lost it, the change means that Blogger now auto-saves draft text as you type it. Unfortunately, certain changes (and I'm not sure exactly which) result in the system creating multiple drafts. I generated one from this post by delaying before writing a post header.

It would be a good idea if everyone on Blogger checks their recent posts and deletes unwanted drafts. Otherwise Sam will be drowned with admin work. I'll leave mine on display for a few days to illustrate the problem.

This Post was written by Trig from Aidan Brooks: Trainee Chef.

Image Source Links Won't Work

Does anybody have photo links in their blogger sidebar using photos you've uploaded through blogger?

This is my problem:

I have several photos/images in the sidebar on my blog, Farmgirl Fare, that link to various other sites. The top three jpeg images in the current sidebar were all uploaded last year by me through Picasa's Hello (which no longer works).

I would upload the image, save it as a blog post on a separate non-public blogger blog that I have, open the post, click on the image to enlarge it, and use that url in the "img src" part of the link.

I now upload my photos directly through blogger. I want to use fresh images for some of my sidebar links, but the img src links won't work. The image urls themselves do work, however.

I have no idea why this would be.

I don't know if this will help, but here is an example of an image link (taken from my Farmgirl Fare template) currently in my sidebar that does work: (I had to remove some of the <>, plus the end part with /a> because otherwise it put the actual image link in this post; I also split up the code here)

a href="http://inmykitchengarden.com" target="_blank">

img src="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/275/6184/
1024/thumbnail%20chard%20sprouts%20cropped.jpg"/>

Today I replaced this part of the code:
http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/275/
6184/1024/thumbnail%20chard%20sprouts%20cropped.jpg

with this:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_h2EzbV4lTjA/
RjopKPxmZ_I/AAAAAAAAALk/
XFaTELh6v80/s1600-h/lettuce+imkg+with+border.JPG

All I got in the template preview and on the actual blog was a red x-ed out square where the image should be.

Okay, duh. I forgot about View Source. If you open it up on my Farmgirl Fare and go about 3/4 of the way down, you can see two other attempts I made a few months ago to add new photo links at the top of the sidebar. The same thing happened as today, but I just left them there with that ! code thing so they wouldn't show up.

Any idea what is going on? If you have image links in your blogger sidebar but didn't upload/save the images on blogger, where did you put them?

I use Windows XP, IE 6, and the new blogger. I'm also an html beginner and get confused by technical talk pretty easily. Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Posted by farmgirl from Farmgirl Fare

[Blogger] Comments Feeds for FTP Blogs

I just thought I'd post this for anyone who uses Blogger on a remotely-hosted blog. I finally managed to get a comment feed enabled yesterday after having selected "Full" for the Comments feed months ago. It didn't work until yesterday, when I got the bright idea to change the No button by "Show Comments in Pop-up Window" to a YES. Once that was changed, my comments feed miraculously was published.

I'm not sure if this is an issue for blogspot blogs, but it definitely made the difference for me. I couldn't find this problem addressed anywhere else.

Just in case, I'll back up a little and set this out step by step:

1) Go to Settings, Comments, and select Yes by "Show Comments in Pop-up Window."

2) Go to Site Feed, and if you haven't already, choose Advanced Mode (or whatever isn't Basic Mode).

3) Choose Full by Blog Comment Feed.

4) Republish your blog.

5) Your comment feed will be at http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/YOURBLOGID#/comments/default . You will need to replace YOURBLOGID# with your blog's ID, which you can find in the URL anytime you are in the Dashboard. (You can also get it by looking at the comments on your blog and checking the URL in page info.)

Once you have the link to your comments feed, you can go to Feedburner and burn your new feed. Post a link to it in your side-bar or email it to all the readers who have been begging you for a comments feed!

This Post was written by SusanV from Fat-Free Vegan Kitchen

[Layout] Banner Positions

Hi everyone.

I've been wanting to add a second sidebar to my layout for a long time now. I finally managed to do this by widening the entire content wrapper and inserting the second sidebar. My issue at the moment is with the banner and how it is displayed on different browsers and on different sized screens.

After widening the entire content wrapper I needed to get the banner to fit across the page too. However I was having trouble with this as each browser (Safari, Firefox, IE) rendered it differently. So I made the banner shorter and got it to look good in IE.

If you look at my test in IE:

http://test-wflh.blogspot.com/

You will see it looks OK (this time I worked to make it look good on IE first as I always have trouble with this gem of a browser). So, guess what? When viewed in Safari or Firefox the banner does not render itself properly. If I move it more to the right so that it looks good in Firefox/Safari then on IE it is pushed off the screen.

Is there a way to get the banner to render itself correctly on all three? Ideally I'd like to have my to fit aligned to the borders of the content wrapper for the browsers and also for different sized screens. Is there a certain piece of code for this?

Thanks in advance!


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

Redesign

When I was in retail there was a rule of thumb that every three to five years a store should be completely redesigned. Regular customers tend to get into a rut and although a store's merchandise mix is constantly evolving and it's appearance is constantly being tweaked, many of those changes go unnoticed. A redesign forces customers to look around again and see the store with fresh eyes. As a store manager (at Pier 1 Imports) I went through two redesigns and saw sales jump significantly after each event.

Thinking the same thing applies to Web sites, I started thinking about revamping Seriously Good last fall (the old design had been in place since July of 2005). I've just completed the redesign and I'm interested in any comments, observations, or suggestions.

Thanks.

This Post was written by Kevin from Seriously Good

Blogger Publishing Spam Lock

My blog publishing rights were blocked by Blogger. I attempted to write a new post and was greeted by a message that my blog was locked because it contained a lot of links and that is suspicious to their robots as a spam site. I replied to their link where they then responded that since I replied that indicated I was a "real" human and not a spammer. However, it would take approximately 2 days for someone from blogger to verify the authenticity of my site.

I do have the priviledge from Blogger of being able to write draft posts but the below message is listed on my edit post page.

Your blog is locked
Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

We received your unlock request on March 4, 2007. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

Just an FYI to those of you using Blogger.

This Post was written by Sylvie from Soul Fusion Kitchen

New Blogger for Scaredy Cats?

If you'd like to read how a cautious Blogger non-expert switched over to New Blogger and some tips and tricks (including some helpful websites) for other non-tech types to do the same, please read my post here.

I had some special problems with my Rounders4 template, so if you use that layout, you might want to pop over and take a look.

Feed your need to, well, um, feed

I just thought I would share this resource with those of you who are interested in understanding more about RSS feeds, feedreaders, FeedBurner, subscribers, how feeds are tracked at FeedBurner, and why those subscriber numbers fluctuate (is it REALLY a measure of the popularity of your blog, should it matter to you?)

Its an older article but has some good stuff in it.

"A Peek Inside TechCrunch's 100k Subscriber Milestone" at "Burning Questions" at FeedBurner.


This Post was written by Nika from Nika's Culinaria