Beating Blogger

Back at the beginning of November, I and many other bloggers started to experience huge difficulty in following new blogs or ceasing to follow others. The problem featured largely in Blogger’s Help Forum for weeks, and a fix was repeatedly promised, but doesn't yet appear to have materialised. 

Until shortly before Christmas this was my situation too, until I accidentally stumbled upon a solution to the problem of followed blogs failing to appear in Google Reader. My fix doesn’t cure the problem of your list of Blogs I’m Following being inaccurate, both on your dashboard or in your profile, but it does mean that ALL the blogs you follow, including newly added ones, will reliably appear whenever you go into Google Reader to view new posts.

This is what you do.

For each blog which you have started to follow since the beginning of November when the problem first arose, you need to repeat the following three steps:

1.       Go to the blog concerned, and in Google Friend Connect, stop following the blog.

2.       Then start to follow it again by clicking “Join this Site” in Google Friend Connect.  (Don’t even think of using the Follow option at the top of the page. It just doesn’t work properly any more.)

3.       Now – and this is the vital step, which I hadn’t noticed before, but which makes all the difference – when you get the pop-up which tells you:

Congratulations, AAAA

You are now following BBBB

click the little box below, labelled Done.

It’s such a small box that it’s very easy to overlook, and even when you see it, if you’re like me you may think it’s a statement, rather than something requiring action.

However, I now know from experience that if you click on this little box every time you begin to follow a new blog, you will always, and I do mean always, get its new posts appearing in Google Reader, even when, as often happens, they don’t show up in your list of Blogs I’m Following.

In your list of subscriptions on the left of the page in Google Reader you will find that your followed blogs will now be divided into two sections, with the blogs you followed before the problem arose appearing at the top, and a second list of more recently followed blogs underneath. A bit of a nuisance, but I can promise you that they won’t disappear from there and you won’t miss any more new posts from your favourite blogs.

Image by digitalart