Blogger / Blog*Spot Blues

I'm guessing that you probably heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanied todays unscheduled Blogger meltdown.

If you check out the Blogger help forum it was full of very annoyed bloggers who were unable to access their blogs or administration areas.

Now, things like this can (and do) happen on any system, and shouting at the people trying to fix it does not help resolve things. One thing that I feel would have helped would have been an official announcement made sooner and in a visible place, such as on the front page of the Blogger dashboard. This would have prevented the firestorm of complaints that followed.

Blogger is a free service (and a good one too) so let's not blow a couple of hours of downtime out of proportion, and give the good folks at Google a chance to resolve things properly.

Blogger Tip #1: Hiding pages from the archive

Sometimes it can be useful to have a page on the blog but not necessarily listed amongst your blog archives.

A good example of this would be a links page. If you look to the left of our site, under the picture of yours truly you'll see a link titled "Blogs of Interest". This links through to this page:

http://half-a-page.blogspot.com/1970/01/links.html

As you can see from the date part of the page it claims to have been written in 1970. But if you look at the sidebar you'll see no posts older than September 2007, which was when this blog was started.

So how do you achieve this? Simple. Whilst creating the post, click on "Post Options" and set the "Post date and time" to some time in 1970. Presumably blogger recognises that posts this early are impossible and so doesn't show them in the archive list, but does allow you to view the pages if you link directly to them.