Thursday, April 23, 2009

Thirst for knowledge

Some things about Blogger that we haven’t worked out and want to know. Kind souls in the (sparse) audience will please put up their hands before they answer, volunteers will pass you the cordless mikes.
Does anybody else have this problem about Blogger rejecting formatted Word documents? I copy, paste, hit publish – then there’s an error message and about 5000 characters of code in the box before the real post starts. How do I get around this? It’s a pain highlighting and deleting every time.
The other thing – I shut off my blog for a while, made it by-invitation-only (and invited no-one - to the few blessed souls who actually asked for invites, I love you all and you can rest assured there was No Discrimination). SiteMeter showed zero hits. Fine.
But now, there’s this blog I read on Bloglines. And there was something I wanted to comment on, I clicked on the title link, and I get this message that I’m not invited. How does that sync with what happened on my blog? Because SiteMeter shows visits from feed-readers and there were none while my blog was fenced off. Or does SiteMeter only work for Google Reader? Will some wise soul please explain?

10 comments:

Vivek Kumar said...

The first one is easy: M$ Word has its own formatting code. All kinds of "span" and "style" tags would be visible in the box. I don't think there is any way to get around this. Try Wordpad though. It might just work (don't have Windows on my machine, so can't guarantee). Else, it is back to using notepad and then formatting it after pasting stuff on blogger.

No idea about the second one. Will have to think about it.

Phantasmagoria said...

I would tell you but then you never invited me to read your blog. So I won't.

So there!

Neeraj Banerji said...

I couldn't click through to your blog from Google Reader when you had it closed off. I also didn't see any updates on Reader until recently, when 4-5 of them came through at once.

Milo Minderbinder said...

Well... when you made your blog "by-invitation-only"- its a matter of "Homeland Security"...
meanwhile when you want to and cant read someone else`s blog and get blocked -its "Samprodaayeek shoktir chokranto"...eta ki bombagorer rajar aieeen ?

As my cousin from Google often tells me, most of the their products are evolving and dynamic and bugs are fixed on the go...ur problem might get settled or get more random...its all Maya.

??! said...

Huh, I didn't even realise you'd gone private. I just thought you weren't posting. This is what happens of relying only on feedreaders, and not checking actual blogsites.

About the first...if you format in Word, it will put in all the html tags. You should try first putting it into Frontpage (or its like), copying the html code, then pasting the whole thing on Blogger. That should help.

tami said...

I know all the answers and who knows, maybe much more. :P Too bad, you did not invite me.

Space Bar said...

first of all, let me tell you that in the absence of an email to complain to, i just sulked while you were gone.

second: yes, you don't get updated in feedreaders if the blog's invited only; no idea why that blog went from visible to invited-only in the space of a few seconds. maybe the change happened right then?

finally: these days I type in posts directly because of this stupid copy/paste problem.

there had better be lots of posts in payment for all this free advice you're getting.

huh.

J. Alfred Prufrock said...

Vivek, I'm too used to Word. But how come Blogger didn't have this problem earlier?
Have to mail you off-list - reading Colin Thubron's "Siberia" and would love to get your feedback.

Ph, you're all heart.

Richie, good you de-lurk once in a while. Met your parents last month after ages.

Klutz, you're very helpful. Concentrate on planning for the 30th (this month's AND the next)

J.A.P.

J. Alfred Prufrock said...

??! (get a NAME!), never used Frontpage. Will check it out. And I hate feedreaders, they dry up the comments section.

Tami, you never even read my blog earlier. Now go listen to some Billy Joel ("Vienna waits for you ...")

Space Bar, one comment, one post. There's quite a few in the backlog, so 'op to it!

J.A.P.

mystic rose said...

Sitemeter does not record google reader(or bloglines or blogrolling), the only way that link shows up on your sitemeter is when a subscriber actually visits your blog via google reader. Unless you change the feed settings of your blog, google reader(and other such services) still catch your posts, but obviously one wouldnt be able to access your blog in their browser.