Blogger tips

Today I helped Eric set up his Booktown radio show's blog using Blogger; he was using Netscape on a Mac, and while it worked ok there was a hitch, namely the "Post" and "PostAndPublish" buttons were invisibly "offscreen" to the right, and in order to see them he needed to type in a long line of text (which could be just all spaces) that caused the frame to scroll itself leftwards. So if you're doing things on Mac and/or with Netscape and you can't see these buttons you may need to do likewise.

Also you might not be able to use Blogger if you've set your security settings to be more stringent than the defaults (disabled cookies maybe?)--if so, you won't ever get to the "edit your blog" page, it'll just keep redirecting you to log on (without saying why). If this happens, reset your security settings to default then try again.

And if you've turned off image loading, you won't see the tabs. you will feel that something is missing; you will be right.(ed.)

And don't start your post with curly brackets, which I think was my original sin. Special characters in general can be dangerous. (I am in a position to know, having written code that barfed on them myself)

If you publish your post but it doesn't show up on your webpage, click on the "Options" button on "Edit this Post" and see if it's posting to the future. Sometimes it decides to do this, for no reason that I can see.

BTW (which BTW stands for "by the way") putting up a weblog costs you nothing if you stay with normal blogger (ie not Blogger Pro) and you host it on blogspot.com--there'll be an ad on the page but as you can see it's tasteful, or for $15 you can make the ad go away. So we are not talking a big (or any) investment of money here. Just time...