Monday, March 4, 2024

And the winner is: PageList

Athletic woman deadlifting a heavy weigh in a competition
michael b / flicker

The PageList sidebar widget, and the older LinkList widget, each creates a list of links.

PageList, which Blogger calls "Pages" on its list of widgets, has one clear advantage.

LinkList won't automatically reformat as a horizontal list in the Responsive blog themes. PageList will.

tabbed navigational widget is generally a very good thing to provide for your readers.

Some find PageList challenging to set up. The user interface is poor, so I've written a PageList guide.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Making sense of the PageList widget

Drawing of an impossible geometric figure

If you are having trouble setting up the PageList widget (also called just Pages) on your blog, you are not alone.

Here's help.

Friday, February 16, 2024

Hosting Audio on Drive

You can upload images to Blogger, and video too (though you might be better off using YouTube).

Realistic painting of a dog with head cocked at the mouth of an old-fashioned victrola
francis barraud

But there is no provision in Blogger for hosting audio.

You can still host audio files at Drive, though it recently got harder to do. I've got a solution that formats a valid embed from Drive as a basic audio player:

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Fixing Drive hosting for 2024

If you used Live Writer or other third-party app to publish blog posts, you do not need me to tell you that the images in your posts have disappeared.

A box of bandaids
franck injapan

That may be the worst consequence of a recent restriction at Google Drive, but anyone who used Drive to embed anything on any web page probably needs to adapt to the new reality.

Here are some options for doing that.

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

The perils of third-party tools

harsh penalties for those who stray from the map

old map of the ancient world
GARBIS MINASIAN / CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED

A change at Google Drive has bolluxed images inserted into Blogger using tools like Live Writer.

The images no longer display on Blogger. Indeed, the change affected pretty much any use of Drive to host media for any websites. Check your embeds.

A (somewhat) similar problem afflicted the users of an app called BlogTouch last year.

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

To my subscribers

Mail pieces on a clothes line

Happy new year!

Last spring I started offering subscribe-by-email for this blog—email notifications of new posts.

Unfortunately the service I chose for that is closing up shop this February.

(Who do they think they are, ending stuff like that? Google?)

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

Blogger comments and engagement

A menu that says "Select Profile: Google Account, Anonymous, Name/url"

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.