02 Oct 2012

Changes and Issues with Blogger

This change has been well planned as the New Edit HTML Editor ( which came under the most fire from the users ) is now pretty stable and allows editing at par with the old one. This force upgrade also came in wake of the one-UI-all-across-policy of Google so that every Google Product has a kind of uniformity.

If you are Old Interface fan like me then there are still some glimpse left of it here and there. Like when Uploading Images in the HTML mode of the Post Editor. After you press the Upload buttons , the confirmation screen has Old Interface styles (Screenshot below)

2. Extra Control over Link Structure
The ability to change the Link Structure has been around for a couple of months in the Draft Blogger interface but it has been rolled out in the Main interface as well. So now you can easily reword your links and they no longer depend on your post headings alone.

A more advanced version of this feature would be ability to omit the year and month from the structure as well. But none the less its a step in the right direction

3. Mobile Custom Redirect Issue
This issue was experienced while using a mobile device (This requires that your User Agent is a mobile device like a Android , iPhone , Symbian or any other similar device). Also you must have a Custom Redirect setup to test this. When a user clicks on a custom Redirect URL , they are redirected to the Custom 404 Error Page. This happens because to serve the mobile version of your blog , Blogger attaches a query parameter ( ?m=1 ) which gets directly appended with the custom redirect and  Blogger thinks of its as a URL itself

For example check this URL - http://www.stylifyyourblog.com/contact?m=1 ( I have a redirect in place which redirects /contact to /p/contact.html )


4. Comment Avatar Image and JS File Size and Issue
With the advent of the New Threaded Commenting System in Blogger , it became clear that Blogger comments were second to none when comparing them with third party services like Disqus or IntenseDebate . But while observing some things in the threaded comment system closely , I came across some shocking facts.

Firstly the Avatar Image size of users who had integrated their account with Google+ was of the order of 512X512 px . This led to a lot waste in the bandwidth from Blogger side as well as it slowed down the loading of pages. In extreme cases a single image was wasting 200KB+ . I filed a request with the Blogger Dev Group and got a positive response but no action has been taken till yet. You can see the thread here

Secondly the size of the JS file included inline as well as externally to make to Threaded Comment system work is a whooping 390KB+ as compared to the 15KB file that was included for the old comment system. After discovering this fact I am seriously considering to shift to a third party comment system which are way lighter.


5. Naked Domain Redirect Issue
In the past 2-3 days there was been a widespread issue across Blogger where the non-www version of the Blog has stopped redirecting to the www version of the blog . Blogger team has released a step to step guide to solve this issue . You can check it here

Stay tuned as I will be resuming my daily posting of helpful tutorials and tips

If you have experienced any other change or issues while using Blogger , feel free to share them in the comments

Til next time,
Prayag Verma at 20:03