WordPress Wednesday

There’s a blogging meme I often see on other blogs called Wordless Wednesday. Knowing me as you all do, you’ll easily guess that wordy Perpetua doesn’t do wordless very well. However, I can’t resist borrowing and twisting the title to express my utter frustration at trying to comment on the WordPress blogs I follow. For the last two days it's been a case of sometimes I can, but mostly I can’t, and it’s been driving me up the wall.

A quick ferret around in the depths of the WordPress help forums has cast some light on the subject. Apparently one or more of the servers which carry communication between users with certain UK internet service providers and WordPress have been falling down on the job, resulting in much gnashing of teeth around these islands. Normal service appears to have been resumed, but I won’t hold my breath just yet. I’m glad it isn’t only Blogger that has off days.

When life is stressful, there’s one sure-fire way to relax and here it is…..

Image via Google

I give up!

Not only did DH and I wake up to this view of the hills across the valley (in mid-May!) but when I logged on I was greeted with a positive blizzard of spam, not all of which had been caught by Blogger's spam filter. Sigh….   I won’t ban anonymous comments, otherwise several people I care about couldn't comment, and I don’t want to put on comment moderation, as I know some of you like to talk among yourselves when I’m not there. J

The ray of light in this gloomy situation is that the latest version of word verification is very much easier to decipher, so that even I can usually do it first time. This means that I can switch it on without feeling too guilty, until the spammers give up and go away. The sound you hear is Perpetua swallowing her principles and admitting herself beaten – for the moment…..

Grrrrr!

As those who know me in the flesh would tell you, now that I’m happily retired and no longer trying to do three things at once, I’m usually reasonably  laid-back and good at taking life as it comes.  Of course I get angry about the big things, like injustice and corruption and the mess we’re making of our wonderful planet, but I don’t often get irritated by the little things nowadays.

However, as the past month has gone on, I’ve become more and more irritated by one particular little thing and that is spam. Not email spam, as our ISP does a wonderful job of filtering that, but blog spam - those annoying pseudo-comments that have recently been cluttering up my blog.

In the past Blogger’s spam filter has worked well and I've been able to carry on happily without the dreaded word verification I find so hard to decipher and without needing to use comment moderation. However this new wave of spam seems to be much more sophisticated and able to fool Blogger’s filtering system, with the result that I’m having to clear spam messages from my blog on a very regular basis.

Being a stubborn old biddy, I still refuse to put word verification on my blog, but I have reluctantly switched on comment moderation for all posts more than 10 days old. I also make sure that all comments are emailed to me, not just the moderated ones, so that I can go to my dashboard and mark them as spam, rather than simply deleting them from the comments section of my blog.

This, I gather, is known as training the spam filter and it’s not the way I would choose to spend my time. Knitting socks is much more fun and DH and I have warm feet at the end of it, but a spamless blog is also a worthwhile objective , so I will do what it takes to achieve it. That won’t stop me grinding my teeth with annoyance just a little, as I do my bit to frustrate the spammers. Let’s hope my dentist doesn’t notice......

Postscript

In her comment Annie at knitsofacto gave two excellent tips which I think deserve to be more easily found by those engaged in the battle against spam:

1.       Never leave the spam comments on a post. Just having links in place on a legitimate site gives the spammers legitimacy.  

2.      A quick scan of those comments the spam filter does pick up is all that's then necessary before deleting them. If you just look at the end of the comments, phrases like 'my site' are a dead giveaway that you're looking at spam.

 Image via Google

  

A fix, a fix, my kingdom for a fix!

STOP PRESS


The fix below is no longer necessary as the Quick Edit tools have been restored as of the beginning of April.


As I’m going to church this evening for a change, I've just spent much of the morning ploughing through the deeply user-unfriendly new version of the Blogger Help forums. But it was worth it, as I've found a fix for the new country-redirect system, which I bemoaned yesterday.

One forum contributor said that the fix only lasts for as long as we have our browser open and that we would have to do it again every time the browser was re-opened, but that isn't proving true for me at the moment. In fact I have even closed down my computer and rebooted it and the fix is still working, though of course, this being Blogger, there is no guarantee that it will continue to do so indefinitely.

Still, even a temporary fix is better than no fix at all, so what you have to do is this:

Open your blog, then edit its address in your browser address bar. Delete the .co.uk or .fr or whatever it may be, then after the word blogspot add .com/ncr and hit your return key. This takes your blog address back to blogspot.com and Hey Presto! all the Quick Edit tools are back. J

Given that we all have different circles of followers, can I please strongly urge you either to do a post on this yourselves or to point people in the direction of this post, so as to spread the word as widely as possible. I’m more than happy for you to copy as much of yesterday’s post and this one as you need in order to do so, as there is no point in everyone reinventing the wheel. Fingers crossed that it continues to work….

Image via Wylio

I don’t believe it!

Only the irascible Victor Meldrew’s catchphrase, as uttered by the inimitable Richard Wilson, can sum up my incredulous frustration at Blogger’s latest spanner in the works. Or rather lack of spanner, as I’ve just noticed that the invaluable little wrench symbol, which allows me to edit all the gadgets in my sidebar from my front page, has disappeared without trace, as has the Quick Edit pencil icon below each post and the Delete button next to comments.

This is the unintended and profoundly annoying side-effect of yet another change to Blogger, or rather to the blogspot URL where our blogs are hosted. Google is gradually changing the suffix of our blog addresses from the ubiquitous .com to co.uk for us Britons, .ca for all Canadian blogs, .au for Australia and so on.  The reason for this is given here.

I read some of the howls of anguish in the Blogger Help forum from the countries where the change has already happened, as they saw all their quick editing tools disappear at a stroke, and I pitied them. Now it’s Britain’s turn and I’m feeling seriously sorry for myself.

Sadly I have no advice to give, no quick fix or workround to share. All I can do is to reassure my affected blogfriends that it’s not their fault and share their frustration at now having to go behind the scenes every time they want to tweak anything, however small. When Google will eventually sort out this new bug is anyone's guess, but given the number of recent problems, I'm not hopeful that it will be soon.

I need a drink – a large one……

Bother Blogger!

Sometimes it feels as if all I’ve been doing lately is grumble about Blogger and the changes that are being made to it. I’m not averse to change, truly I’m not, but only change for the better. Change for change’s sake, purely to get a new look without any improvement in function, just makes me cross.

The latest little gem in the ongoing Blogger revamp came earlier this week, when the full-page and pop-up comment formats were changed without warning to the glossy (and barely legible) new Google look, all acres of white space and small, cramped, pale, difficult-to-read text, ornamented with tasteful orange highlights. What do you mean, don’t I like it?

I could have lived, albeit grudgingly, with the new look if it hadn’t brought with it the loss of two invaluable functions – the ability to subscribe to receive later comments by email and, in the full-page format, the ability to collapse comments. Without these, the full-page format, which I’ve always had, became worse than useless and I had no option but to change to the embedded format.

This has proved to be an unexpectedly positive move and I’m really enjoying the ability to reply directly to each comment, rather than having my response appear sometimes several comments below the one I’m replying to. It gives a much stronger feeling of commenting as conversation and is one of the functions I’ve always admired and envied in WordPress blogs.

That bonus apart, I’m left with the time-consuming annoyance of having to go back to many of the blogs I comment on, in order to find and read the author’s response to my comment. I will do it, because I appreciate replies and don’t want to miss them, but I would so much rather be reading and writing new posts. Fingers crossed that the Google engineers will make it a priority to fix this, but I’m not holding my breath….

Word verification woes and a word of warning

Most of you reading this have probably noticed that Blogger has recently changed its word verification method. Until this change, if word verification was switched on, people wishing to leave a comment on a blog post had to copy a nonsense word into a box before publishing their comment.  This is to prevent automatic spam and deter human spammers, which is definitely A Good Thing.

Now word verification presents us with two oddly distorted words to copy, so oddly distorted that many people, including me, have great difficulty deciphering them. Thankfully Blogger has removed the contrast bit behind one of the words, making them slightly easier to read, but I still often find myself having to click at least 2 or 3 times before I get a couple of words I can read well enough to type.

Interestingly, the new system has a very laudable aim besides that of preventing spam. The words presented to us come from books and newspapers which are being scanned to digitise them and thus make them available online. Many of these are old and have non-standard typefaces and the digitisation process has problems verifying whether individual words have been correctly scanned. By using these scanned images for word verification in blogs, the reCAPTCHA system makes use of millions of blogs to help verify these dubious spellings and move the project forward.

Unfortunately, for many people the sheer difficulty of deciphering the words is beginning to deter them from commenting on blogs, thus adversely affecting one of the most popular aspects of blogging. The Blogger Help forum is full of posts complaining about the new system and asking how to turn it off. This is where my word of warning comes in.

For those still using the old Blogger dashboard to write their posts, turning off word verification is easy. However the new dashboard does NOT offer the option of turning off word verification and to do so involves going back to the old one temporarily. Before very long, whether we like it or not, Google will be switching us all over permanently to the new dashboard, and unless they add the option to control word verification, it will no longer be possible to turn word verification on and off.

This means that if you want to be able to switch off word verification in order to make it easier for people to comment, you shouldn’t leave it too long to do so, or you may lose the option.

If, like me, you still use the old dashboard (and in my case I will only use the new one when finally forced to do so) all you have to do is to click on the Settings tab, choose Comments and scroll down to Show word verification for comments.  Click on No, save your settings and word verification will disappear. 

You will almost certainly start to get a bit of spam after this, but Blogger’s spam filter is very good and since I turned off word verification a few weeks ago, no spam has made it onto my blog.

If you have changed to the new dashboard, but haven’t made it your default, you can get back to the old dashboard by clicking on the cogwheel in the top right-hand corner and choosing Old Blogger interface. If you have made it your default you will have to untick Make Blogger draft my default before you can choose to go back to the old dashboard and follow the instructions for switching off.

Part of me feels bad about grumbling about the new word verification system, especially with its positive side-effect, but like a lot of bloggers I’m not getting any younger and neither is my eyesight, and life is just too short to waste it squinting at unreadable words. Sorry, reCaptcha. L

  

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 

A quick word of advice

This is meant as a temporary post and I'll probably remove it before long. Since the beginning of the month I (and, I think, many others) have had enormous difficulty following new blogs or pruning my list of blogs followed.  There is obviously a great big new bug in Blogger's following software and it's had me gnashing my teeth in frustration, as blogs and new posts flicker randomly in and out of my list of blogs followed and Google Reader itself. 

The only way round it as far as I can see is manually to add new blogs followed to my blogroll, thus totally bypassing Google Friend Connect and Google Reader until Blogger finds the problem and fixes it.  I have a shrewd suspicion it is connected with the ongoing major revision of Blogger and its integration with Google+.  However, that's Google's affair.  Mine is to go on being able to follow the interesting new blogs I've recently discovered and to offer my newly discovered workround to those suffering similar frustration. At least this way I can reliably see when a blog is updated and avoid missing posts.

Oo-er!

This afternoon I was merrily checking on a couple of the blogs I follow when I noticed that instead of the usual cheery thumbnail image of yours truly next to each of my past comments, there is now a scarily threatening black and white exclamation mark! No, it isn’t a leftover from Halloween, as I first thought. A quick glance at the Blogger help forum shows that other bloggers have recently been reporting problems with photos disappearing from their blogs and being similarly replaced.

In my case I think it may stem from an unwary deletion last week of a duplicate of my profile photo in the Picasa web album where all my blog pictures are stored. There is still a copy there and I’ve even reloaded it, but Blogger is obviously extremely picky and won’t accept any substitution retrospectively. Thankfully the real me has now reappeared alongside new comments, but where older ones are concerned, I'm afraid it seems you will all have to learn to live with the unappealing images with which Blogger has chosen to highlight my carelessness. J