What is up with "Blogger"?
Posted: November 9, 2011 Filed under: blogs 6 Comments
Is anyone else finding that Blogger (and especially Blogger Dashboard) has been acting more screwy than ever lately?
I like the updated blogger interface, but the ‘manage blogs’ function is missing on the updated blogger dashboard (or they have hidden it pretty well) so I am still using the old blogger dashboard.
I’m subscribed to a lot of different blogs and find Blogger Dashboard is usually the easiest way to review the latest postings and pick what I want to read. About a week ago I clicked on a link to a blog called ‘Matrixsynth” that had a youtube clip about a cheap keyboard being used to produce some sound effects and I added ‘Matrixsynth’ to ‘blogs I am following.’ I soon discovered that ‘Matrixsynth’ was a lot more info about synths than I wanted — the author sometimes posts a dozen links a day to different you tube and sound clips of obscure synthesizers. To a non-synth guy like me, this is too much and the ‘Matrixsynth’ postings are crowding out the other posts, so I unsubscribed.
But sometimes when I return to Blogger, the ‘Matrixsynth’ posts are back. I’ve unsubscribed two or three times. Sometimes I reload the page and they dissapear, and when I click on the ‘blogs I am following,’ Matrixsynth does not appear in the list (although the Matrixsynth posts appear and disappear at random in the list of new posts). Sometime Blogger gives me some sort of screwy error code and it tells me to look up this code in the help posts, but the help post search never returns any results and, when I try to create a new topic, I get told to try again later.
I’ve been doing the ‘two blogs’ experiment for a while… I’m starting to think I might shut down this blog and move everything to the http://stefanpoag.com/ blog.
I think if you follow a blog as opposed to subscribe to its feed, you have to go to the blog and “unfollow” instead of unsubscribe. (At which point, the blogger posts about how people are abandoning him and he doesn't know what he's doing wrong…)
However you do it, the Follow function has always been screwy.
I would recommend checking out Google Reader rather than the Blogger dashboard to actually read blog content. The “follow” function is cool for showing your support for a blog, but Google Reader is much more efficient for actually consuming content (in my experience). And it works for anything with an RSS feed.
Re: two blogs: I suspect pretty much all of your followers/readers are subscribed to both blogs anyways, since both seem to be pretty art and gaming focused.
You're not alone. It went screwy on me a couple months back.
Talysman: thanks for the tip. I've been wanting to delete out a few blogs from my list and can't seem to do it.
Please don't move to WordPress man. I tolerate Blogger because WP is worse. I have watched bloggers just disappear into it, it has a 'Myspace' approach to page design and layout (3 screens wide with tiny print and it doesn't scale at all, things like that) and it doesn't play nice with anything from Google. I have lost so many blogs from the Eternal Keep because of WP. I don't want to lose yours too. Btw…I built Eternal Keep to be my 'news reader' and it turned out to be something everyone could use in the community. This blog has been there since day 1.
I had that same 'hard to remove stain' effect with The Tao of DnD. It took 5 or 6 tries concerted between Reader and Blogger to make it stay gone.