The blogroll: it lives! On a page!

So I've finally reinstated The Engine Room's blogroll. You can access it using via the navigation bar at the top of the blog.

The blogroll is just the same as before, except that I've removed a few blogs that are in disuse. I have a lot of new discoveries to add to the blogroll, but that will have to wait for another day. I'd also like to display it in a more interesting way - again, that will have to wait.

Anyway, the blogroll lives on a 'page' rather than a post entry - I'm very glad that Blogger has finally added this feature. If you want to know more, see Blogger Buzz: Creating Pages in Blogger.

I've also added a little widget at the top of the sidebar on the right so you can easily find me elsewhere on the Internet.

2000A post may have at most labels.

Two things have annoyed me recently.

Firstly, the discovery that Blogger blogs can only have a maximum of 2,000 tags (or 'labels', if you prefer).

Secondly, the error message that Blogger gives you when you exceed that number:



"2000A post may have at most labels." Very clear.

So my blog was loading slowly: blame FeedBurner

Anyone visiting this blog in the past couple of days will have noticed it loading incredibly slowly. Everything's back to normal now, but I thought I'd just explain what the problem was and how I fixed it.

(I realise this won't be of interest to most of The Engine Room's regular readers; I'm just hoping I can help one or two other bloggers out there.)

I use FeedBurner to manage the blog's feed. As a result of Google buying FeedBurner way back in 2007, all FeedBurner users have recently had to move their feed from a feeds.feedburner.com address to a new feeds2.feedburner.com address.

For me, this happened without incident and I thought no more of it. Google promised that anyone going to the old address would be automatically redirected to the new one, and for a few months this was the case.

Then last week, I noticed that the blog was loading incredibly slowly - at least 10 seconds per post. The feed itself seemed fine, and FeedBurner's FeedBulletin reported no problems.

After trying lots of measures such as pinging FeedBurner, resynching the feed and even changing the blog template, all to no avail, I finally discovered that my old FeedBurner feed address was no longer working. Could this be connected?

In short, yes. I was using FeedBurner's FeedFlare service to add functionality to my feed - it's what puts the links such as 'Share on Facebook' at the bottom of each post. The FeedFlare html code I'd added to my blog template ages back was referencing my old FeedBurner feed, not the new one, and so as soon as the old feed address stopped working, it brought my whole blog grinding to a halt.

The solution was simple: log back into FeedBurner, get the new FeedFlare html code, and place this in the blog template instead of the old code. I just wish I hadn't had to work it out for myself. And for anyone out there suffering the same problem: it isn't enough just to disable FeedFlare. You have to change the code in your template.

I don't know whether the old feed address is permanently dead, and if so, whether it has cost me any subscribers, but I do know that the Google/Blogger/FeedBurner technical support is rubbish. You can't email anyone for an answer: instead, you have to post a message on the relevant help group and hope for the best. Bah.

• The Engine Room's new, working feed

Blogger error: 'Try going back and re-trying'

This Blogger error message made me smile (click to see a larger version):



In essence: 'What you want to do has already been done, so try going back and re-trying...'

And I suppose it highlights the difference between 'try' meaning 'test in order to see if it is suitable, effective or pleasant' ("try going back one page in your browser") and 'try' meaning 'make an attempt or effort to do something' ("and re-trying"). At least that was how I read it; I can understand if your reading is different.

Both definitions of 'try' came from my Concise OED, 10th Edition, by the way.

Monday roundup: inline comments, chicken foetus

Too many bits and bobs to wait for a Friday roundup, so here's a Monday roundup instead.

• I've just enabled inline comments on this blog, so you'll no longer be taken to a non-blog page when you comment on one of the posts. Please let me know if it causes you any problems. I found it a bit fiddly to implement, so if you want the same functionality on your Blogger blog, I strongly recommend the Blogger Buster guide to inline comments.

• A good British spoof news website I've only just come across is The Daily Mash. Current lead story: 'Hamilton wins world car pointing championship'.

• One recent story that isn't a Daily Mash spoof but sounds like it should be concerns a chicken foetus found in a Liverpool alleyway. "Stop grieving, it's only a chicken," the Metropolitan Police tells the people of Liverpool in what could be the quote of the year. Thanks for this one, Harry.

• Another great story, this time from the Valleys (sorry! Just teasing!), concerns mistranslated bilingual road signs. Again: thanks, Harry.

Knol: 'How to get into publishing'

I was going to write a Friday roundup but really I only have one thing to tell you about.

Recently my father asked me to give some advice to an acquaintance of his who was interested in getting into publishing. So I wrote her a long email (probably too long) detailing how I started in magazine publishing and what I thought were some key points to bear in mind.

For the previous few weeks I'd been meaning to play around with Blogger's new "web authoring tool", called Knol, but hadn't been able to decide on a theme for my first knol (a knol supposedly being "an authoritative article on a single topic").

Then it struck me: why not turn the email I'd written into a knol on how to get into publishing? So I did.

How to get into publishing

I hope it's helpful to a few people. If you feel so inclined, please do rate the knol and leave comments. But be kind: it's my first attempt. And no sniggering at the photo of me, either.

Line breaks and Blogger

Hmm. Spotted something odd with Blogger.

If you leave one blank line after a blockquote in a Blogger post (ie two line breaks), that one blank line isn't displayed when you 'Show Original Post' in the Comments section for that post. In other words, the bottom (but not the top) of the blockquote butts up against the rest of the copy, as this picture shows:



However if you leave two blank lines after a blockquote (three line breaks), the 'Show Original Post' option shows one blank line between the blockquote and the rest of the copy, and everything is dandy. Admittedly, you now have two blank lines under the pullquote in the post itself, but that isn't as confusing as having no blank lines at all in 'Show Original Post'.

The same holds true for a [Photo].

Is this just my blog/template/setup? And is it worth going back and adding an extra line break to all my posts?