Two Answers, A Questions, A Request, and An Apology

Lord knows I am no kind of blogging guru. I know enough to get around, meaning, I only mess with HTML if I have to.

But I figured out two things about Blogger recently that I thought were worth sharing.

Answer 1) Like lots of people, I am periodically plagued with comment spam. Word verification helps, but it's so annoying that I usually leave it off. Recently, the comment spam has all been landing on old posts - which, happily, is easy to remedy. Find your Blogger Dashboard and then go to Settings > Comments > Comment moderation - and enable comment moderation on older posts. Blogger's default is 14 days, but you can set the time frame to longer or shorter. Then, if a spammer tries to comment on an old post, it won't appear, and you can easily delete it from your Blogger dashboard.

Answer 2) I finally got sick of the blogroll that ate my sidebar, a blogroll that was pulling from Bloglines even though I stopped using Bloglines as a reader. It was out of date and out of control. But I'd been reluctant to use the Google Reader widget because it was, to me anyway, ugly and I didn't know how to make it match my template. I figured it out! I started by selecting a handful of feeds and tagging them "Blogs You Should Read" - tagging them let me select a subset of the whole damned list of feeds, and creates a folder with the tag name. Then, in Reader, click on Settings > Reader Settings (towards the upper right of the window). From Settings, click onto Folders and Tags.


Make sure that the folder is marked "Public", and then click the link that says "Add a blogroll to your site". That'll take you to a pop-up window where you can configure the sidebar widget. Leave the title box EMPTY and set the color scheme to NONE. Copy the generated HTML and go back to your Blogger Layout page. Add an HTML widget and paste in the HTML that you just copied out of Reader. If you want a title, add one here. That way, the title and list in your new blogroll widget will pick up the styling that applies to the rest of your blog. Matchy matchy joy!

Question) Sitemeter lets me see a lot of information on a per visit basis - like Domain Name, IP Address, Country, City, Time of Visit, Visit Length, Page Views, Referring URL, Visit Entry Page, etc. Is there a way to get that kind of detail out of Google Analytics? Because if there is, I can't figure it out.

Request) Please enable your email in your Blogger profile. Click on your profile and make sure it's linked to your blog and your email. You can have a separate email exclusively for blog stuff, if you'd like. If you don't have a real blog, you can set up a "blog" without any content so that you have a profile with an email. This also goes for people with other than Blogger blogs - you can have a Blogger profile that links to your Wordpress/SquareSpace/TypePad blog - or even to your Etsy shop. But the email is key - it's what lets me reply to your comment, which I dearly love to do.

Apology) Blogger seems to be comment challenged of late. I can't comment most of the time, at least from the (cough) PC in the (cough) office. So, I may well have been reading and not commenting, but the not commenting isn't my fault. And I still love you.