The trouble with blogger is...
For those paranoid with blogger changes… this is.. just the beginning, so hang in there!
A couple of months ago, blogger, was into a lot of R & D. Well, we the bloggers were not informed. My blog was of course one of the first to be affected, nah, not because I’m popular, but because they decided to start off with the most populated country of bloggers… So, if it worked with us, it had to work elsewhere in the world. Or rather if they got the biggest chunk to work, their backlog wouldn’t be much. I’m not being biased. If you have friends or acquaintances working with blogger, they will explain. The concept is pretty cool actually. Work hasn’t finished yet, so there are a lot of technical issues.
Well I faced multiple technical issues during the whole blogger testing period. And for someone with working programming / scripting knowledge, this can be a real pain…in the (wherever)!
If you don’t already know, “Google / Blogger has started redirecting domains to country specific servers,” which means that if you are a visitor from Australia viewing this blog your will be re-directed to “olivyaz.blogspot.com.au” Similarly for Canada its “olivyaz.blogspot.ca” for Mexico its “olivyaz.blogspot.mx” ……and so on. Your blog is always available for .com This move by Google / Blogger is to get the blog to load faster from your country hosted server. As in .au, .ca, .hk, .in, .mx, .nz, .uk, and so on.
I discovered this somewhere in December 2011, since mine was the only country it was redirecting to and from. During that time, I was to unable to post comments on any blogger sites. It was a nightmare that last for a few days till I figured the problem. (Yes the comment issue has been fixed now, thankfully)
Next the GFC gadget disappeared. It took me a couple of minutes to change the main account setting with additions to com.au, .ca, .uk, .nz, .mx, .in, blah blah, and get the GFC widget back on track. Then somewhere in mid- Feb 2012 the GFC gadget disappeared again. After racking my brain a bit I got a script to work, bypassing the recounts / refresh times (it’s technical lingo) I brought back the widget.
Apparently Google had sent out a universal message which said “We're retiring Friend Connect on March 1, 2012. Find out how you can keep in touch with your community.” So, at the stroke of midnight 00:00 March 1, 2012, the GFC went away permanently. The techies at Google / Blogger are really smart, and I love them for their skills. This is what they had to say regarding the issue, “As previously announced, we are retiring Google Friend Connect for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012. We encourage you to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on your site. When you bring your community of followers to Google+, you can use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch.” As for me I got rid of the damn widget, no sweat.
Well I know that I definitely belong to blogger, but I guess their definition of a “Non-blogger” means, anyone altering the scripting / mapping language (techie lingo), which obviously I do. Breaking the rules again…hmmmm. Anyways, I’ve faced the storm and I brought the ship in. So this post is dedicated to all those waking up to find things, gadgets, icons missing from their blogs.
For all those bloggers whose blogs have been redirecting, you will notice the “wrench icons gadget”
for editing the post, and the delete button next to comments have disappeared.That’s gonna take some time for Google / Blogger to fix.
In order to get the “quick edit button”back for now, you can try this, put ncr at end of your blog address, suppose the blog is olivyaz.blogspot.com but it redirects to blogspot.ca when accessed from Canada, with the ncr it should look like this olivyaz.blogspot.com/ncr and it will redirect to the .com version. For post url the thing is still the same olivyaz.blogspot.com/ncr/dummy-post.html. (This works for me!)
I know it’s a lot of ranting for a Sweet Sunday morning, but just trying to save the rest of you from cussing on a Glorious Sunday Morning!!
For those paranoid with blogger changes… this is.. just the beginning, so hang in there!
A couple of months ago, blogger, was into a lot of R & D. Well, we the bloggers were not informed. My blog was of course one of the first to be affected, nah, not because I’m popular, but because they decided to start off with the most populated country of bloggers… So, if it worked with us, it had to work elsewhere in the world. Or rather if they got the biggest chunk to work, their backlog wouldn’t be much. I’m not being biased. If you have friends or acquaintances working with blogger, they will explain. The concept is pretty cool actually. Work hasn’t finished yet, so there are a lot of technical issues.
Well I faced multiple technical issues during the whole blogger testing period. And for someone with working programming / scripting knowledge, this can be a real pain…in the (wherever)!
If you don’t already know, “Google / Blogger has started redirecting domains to country specific servers,” which means that if you are a visitor from Australia viewing this blog your will be re-directed to “olivyaz.blogspot.com.au” Similarly for Canada its “olivyaz.blogspot.ca” for Mexico its “olivyaz.blogspot.mx” ……and so on. Your blog is always available for .com This move by Google / Blogger is to get the blog to load faster from your country hosted server. As in .au, .ca, .hk, .in, .mx, .nz, .uk, and so on.
I discovered this somewhere in December 2011, since mine was the only country it was redirecting to and from. During that time, I was to unable to post comments on any blogger sites. It was a nightmare that last for a few days till I figured the problem. (Yes the comment issue has been fixed now, thankfully)
Next the GFC gadget disappeared. It took me a couple of minutes to change the main account setting with additions to com.au, .ca, .uk, .nz, .mx, .in, blah blah, and get the GFC widget back on track. Then somewhere in mid- Feb 2012 the GFC gadget disappeared again. After racking my brain a bit I got a script to work, bypassing the recounts / refresh times (it’s technical lingo) I brought back the widget.
Apparently Google had sent out a universal message which said “We're retiring Friend Connect on March 1, 2012. Find out how you can keep in touch with your community.” So, at the stroke of midnight 00:00 March 1, 2012, the GFC went away permanently. The techies at Google / Blogger are really smart, and I love them for their skills. This is what they had to say regarding the issue, “As previously announced, we are retiring Google Friend Connect for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012. We encourage you to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on your site. When you bring your community of followers to Google+, you can use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch.” As for me I got rid of the damn widget, no sweat.
Well I know that I definitely belong to blogger, but I guess their definition of a “Non-blogger” means, anyone altering the scripting / mapping language (techie lingo), which obviously I do. Breaking the rules again…hmmmm. Anyways, I’ve faced the storm and I brought the ship in. So this post is dedicated to all those waking up to find things, gadgets, icons missing from their blogs.
For all those bloggers whose blogs have been redirecting, you will notice the “wrench icons gadget”
for editing the post, and the delete button next to comments have disappeared.That’s gonna take some time for Google / Blogger to fix.In order to get the “quick edit button”
back for now, you can try this, put ncr at end of your blog address, suppose the blog is olivyaz.blogspot.com but it redirects to blogspot.ca when accessed from Canada, with the ncr it should look like this olivyaz.blogspot.com/ncr and it will redirect to the .com version. For post url the thing is still the same olivyaz.blogspot.com/ncr/dummy-post.html. (This works for me!)I know it’s a lot of ranting for a Sweet Sunday morning, but just trying to save the rest of you from cussing on a Glorious Sunday Morning!!
Their version of the story is that they did it so blogs could load faster. They really did it so that they could black out blogs from an entire region at the request of a government. It's bad...It's censorship. There's already code out to redirect you back to blogspot.com.
ReplyDeleteDavid I get your point. In the past six months there have been major changes with blogger. As you know blogger is purely Google’s product, so they are trying their very best to run it on similar terms with Google (search engine). At least for now, the code won’t be necessary for redirecting the blog because “ncr” does the trick. The “no country redirect” (ncr) will temporarily prevent Blogger from redirecting blog readers / authors to the local versions of the blog.
DeleteI know the redirection to “country-specific domain” for faster loading wasn't the sole reason, but for censorship as well. They have been very specific in stating that, they “remove content that violates local law,” and they do so “only for the country-specific domain.” As of now I know of the one country that just cannot access Google / Blogger.
With the whole redirecting thing… there is a huge lapse here, because crawlers are finding the data on multiple domains… e.g. .ca, .it, .nz… something that needs immediate fixing!!!! Suppose there are 100 different country domains eg, olivyaz.blogspot.com.au, olivyaz.blogspot.it,.. .nz, .hk ... imagine the search engine throwing up the same data for 100+ domains... Nightmare!!!
And also blogger has been dropping random blogs that have been inactive for a period of six months or more.