15 Year Mission

Blogger is easy and free. You get what you pay for.

Back in the mid-1990s I started blogging before the word "blog" existed. In 2005 I started several blogs using Google's Blogger platform. I've never wanted much more than an easy-to-use online diary and Blogger provides that for free. Using the Blogger service became a major part of my 15-year-long mission to explore strange new platforms for online collaboration. One of my first imaginary collaborators was Nora Yetman.

the pointy hair blog

When I first used the Blogger platform, things were rather rocky. Like other evolving software systems, Blogger has had its share of bugs and glitches, so during the past decade, I've explored other options for blogging including Wordpress and Tumblr. My main problem when using any of these free blogging services arises from the fact that I have been a user of Macintosh computers ever since Apple began trying to accommodate the desire of humans to have a friendly user interface for their computing devices. I've been spoiled by occasionally having used software that was sensibly designed and nicely documented. When I find myself struggling to use poorly designed software that does not provide good documentation of its features then I begin to despair. My thoughts become clouded with dreams: I start to fantasize that maybe I can stop using this miserable POS software and go find a better blogging service.

It is easy to get started using the Blogger platform.

Metablogging
One of the "features" of the Blogger service is that since 2005 "the Blogger team" has had their own blog with "The latest tips and news from the Blogger team".

Sometimes I allow myself to imagine exactly what constitutes the "Blogger team", but that quickly leads to fear that the Blogger service will shut down tomorrow. Maybe the Blogger service will be the next to go down the drain after Google is done destroying their Google+ service. Currently, the latest blog post at the Blogger blog is about how the demise of Google+ will impact users of the Blogger service:

ABOVE: the latest blog post at the Blogger blog (in early March of 2019).

Google+ link

Central Hub
If you click on the "Google on G+" link from the Blogger blog, you go to the following Google+ page:

ABOVE: screenshot showing the "central hub" for Blogger news!

Blogger Help

Amazingly, the "central hub" (shown in the image above) for Blogger was last updated two years ago. I suppose that was about the time when Google decided that their Google+ service was going to be terminated and they probably told their employees to stop posting to Google+. Even with the demise of Google+ imminent, the interwebs are still cluttered with links that say "Join Google+". I seriously wonder if there are any Google employees who actually use Google's services.

Help

Google helps those who help themselves.

All tech companies struggle to provide support to their users. My mind boggles when I think of the millions of people who have started blogs on the Blogger platform and then needed some technical support. For the Blogger service, Google has always tried to make it possible for Blogger users to help each other, hence, the dreaded words: "support forum" and "help community".

Example

The current Blogger user interface for creating a new blog post is shown below. There is a tool bar with a row of buttons such as the button for making bold text. Mousing over the icons on the tool bar will provide the name of each button (shown below, mousing over the "insert jump break" button):

ABOVE: screenshot of the Blogger user interface while drafting a new blog post. This image shows the mouse-over text for the "insert jump break" button on the tool bar.

the "help" button

Imagine
Imagine that a new Blogger user sees the "insert jump break" button on the tool bar and wants to know what a jump break is. While a user is composing a new blog post, there is no "help" button available inside the Blogger user interface. Where is the "help" button? As shown in the image below, when a Blogger user first enters into the "design" mode, "help" is the last button down at the bottom of the page:

ABOVE: the Blogger user interface, in the "design" mode.

Blogger help results

Bugland
First, notice that there is a bug at the top of the screen (image, above). Upon entering into the "design" mode, the "Theme" tab is automatically activated (shown above), but at the top of the screen it shows "All Posts" as the current page title. The Blogger user interface has always had these kinds of annoying glitches. Just move on.

Blogger "help" for "jump break"

If a user clicks on the "help" button, they are given access to a search tool. The image shown to the left illustrates search results for "jump break". Clicking on the first search result ("Jump break") leads to the Blogger help forum content that is shown in the image to the right. I don't use "jump breaks" in my blog posts, but I have an good idea what they are used for. I doubt if Diana Studer's help forum post would be useful for a new Blogger user who wants to learn what a jump break is and why they might want one in their first blog post.

As far as I can tell, even though "insert jump break" is one of the 25 core tools provided to users for making Blogger blog posts, there is no help page called "jump break". There is a help page for "Create, edit, or delete a post" which does not show the word "jump" unless you first click on a drop-down button that says "Add a Read More link". While reading the instructions for how to create and edit a blog page, an experienced blogger might know to use the drop-down link that is called "Add a Read More link", but a new user probably would not associate the mysterious term "jump link" with the term "Read More link".

The "help" that is provided under "Add a Read More link" mentions "jump link" but does not explain what a jump link is (see the image below):

....they call this "help"

Question
What do you call a user "help" system that is not very helpful? Answer: state of the art for Google and many other mega corporations. I'm dismayed when software companies have billions and billions of dollars to squander, but they can't adequately document their products and services for their users.😲

Blogger on social media

Google Sites
I have no memory of how I first became aware of Google Sites. However, I once created a Google-hosted site (Exodemic) for an experiment in collaborative fiction writing. It is either because of the existence of that site or my Blogger blogs that I started getting emails about Google's Search Console after the roll-out of a new version of the Console in 2018.

Google has been trying to promote "mobile friendly" websites, so I've received emails from Search Console touting Google's on-going efforts to fit web pages onto smart phone screens. I suppose I should be interested in the challenges that arise from presenting webpages on small screens, but if a "smart" phone manufacturer can't give users the tools needed to easily zoom and scroll through webpages then I say: "don't buy that crappy phone".

Goggle: it all comes down to $$$$$$

Recently, Google finally figured out that both the "Exodemic" website and one of my Blogger blogs (this one) are both my "properties". Why making this match took 10 years is a mystery. Another mystery is why all of my other Blogger blogs were not similarly identified and added to the list of my "properties" that is maintained by Search Console. I went ahead and told Search Console about all of my other Blogger blogs including the wikifiction blog.

Soon after connecting the wikifiction blog to Google's Search Console system, I got a warning from Search Console saying that their web crawler bot had been "blocked by robots.txt" at the wikifiction blog.

ABOVE:  warning from Search Console.

The search tool at the top
of the wikifiction blog.

I'd never previously concerned myself with the robots.txt file that Blogger provides by default to Blogger blogs. In that file is "Disallow: /search".

Blogger search URLs

Google bots

Blogger has a tool that allows users to enter a search term and then the tool returns a list of all the blog posts that contain the search term. For example, entering "Google" into the search tool returns these results... https://wikifiction.blogspot.com/search?q=Google

By default, Blogger has a robots.txt file that prevents web crawlers from indexing those artificial search URLs (they are not the real blog content). Google's Search Console does not seem to know this. I recommend that the folks at Search Console learn more about this issue and fix their email alerts system so as not to warn Blogger users that their blog's robots.txt file is doing what Google wants it to do. Google is like a giant flailing octopus and each tentacle (service) has no idea what the other services are doing.
🐙

ABOVE:  buttons linked to the pages of the wikifiction blog. Page example: About this blog.

The URLs for the 800+ blog posts for the wikifiction
blog are on six subpages of the sitemap.

Blogger Pages Not Indexed
For several years Blogger has been trying to shift blogs towards using https rather than just http for URLs such as https://wikifiction.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml
When I first took the opportunity to look at the sitemaps for my blogs, I saw none of the pages such as https://wikifiction.blogspot.com/p/about-wiki-fiction-blog.html listed as been available for indexing by Google's web crawler. I went ahead and tried to use Google's Search Console to add "https://wikifiction.blogspot.com/p/about-wiki-fiction-blog.html" to their list of indexed pages.

ABOVE:   says that the blog page at http://wikifiction.blogspot.com/p/about-wiki-fiction-blog.html is "not on Google".

Google's Search Console also informed me that http://wikifiction.blogspot.com/p/about-wiki-fiction-blog.html is the "canonical" page, but it also is not "in the index" (see the image, above). I submitted http://wikifiction.blogspot.com/p/about-wiki-fiction-blog.html to Google's Search Console for indexing and after a few days it had been added to the index. However, other pages in the /p space of my blog were still not indexed. I find it astonishing that Google would not automatically index every Blogger blog page that users create.

I was relieved to discover that some pages for another blog (example......  http://exodemic.blogspot.com/p/glossary.html) had been automatically indexed:

ABOVE:  is on Google

Apparently Blogger blog pages can be crawled by Google's bot and not be indexed. Other pages can be indexed but they do not appear in the sitemap. None of this makes sense to me.

Twitter
Blogger has had a twitter account since 2009, but a while back they made it "private". My advice: don't hold your breath waiting for it to return.

Bottom Line

Search Description

I'm comfortable using Blogger websites as a convenient diary. For most of my blog posts, I make many hypertext links to older blog posts about my Exodemic Fictional Universe. Usually Google's search engine can find my old blog pages when I search for them, but not always.

Google search returns a WordPress blog page first.

Over the years, I got into the habit of crafting a "Search Description" for each blog post. For many years, Google search would show those search descriptions in search results. They recently stopped doing that; I suppose almost no Blogger bloggers bother to make search descriptions and don't care. Woe to those bloggers who do care. Such heavy-handed decisions by Google come with the "free" price tag attached to Blogger.

Next: video teaser for The Dead Widower Society

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