Following - The Implications

As we all join the global community of Blogger Following, we should bear in mind the old adage

You are judged by who your friends are.

In the case of Following

You are judged by what blogs you follow.

If bloggers can see you, they can see what blogs you Follow. And, they can see who Follows those blogs. Did I hear someone mention "Nineteen Eighty-Four"?

So, it bears thinking that you might want to resist the temptation to Follow the kinky lifestyle or blatant abuse blogs, if you hope for a lot of friends at your church to Follow your blog. Similarly, folks who Follow kinky lifestyle or blatant abuse blogs might present a problem, if a lot of that type choose to Follow your blog. Remember, Following provides 2 way links, between the Followed and the Followers. Does anyone remember "Six Degrees Of Separation", a few years ago?


This blog should probably be hidden, using the Edit User Profile wizard "Select blogs to display" link. It's private, so the public has no need to know about it.


My Humble Opinion, anyway.

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(Update 2010/05): In a little over 18 months, a number of selections have been added, to let you control your security and visibility as you Follow each individual blog.

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Removing the "Subscribe to:" Caption / Link

Not everybody who produces a blog, and not even everybody who produces a blog and provides a feed, likes the caption / link at the bottom of the posts column

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

or

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Some folks think this feature makes the bottom of the posts look cluttered. Maybe they're right.

Fortunately, it's not hard to remove.

First (and I always advise this) Backup Your Template. Next, From the Template Editor, select "Expand Widget Templates". Look through the code for "nextprev".

<!-- navigation -->
<b:include name='nextprev'/>

<!-- feed links -->
<b:include name='feedLinks'/>

Remove just one line.

<!-- navigation -->
<b:include name='nextprev'/>

<!-- feed links -->

Save. Test. Finally, Backup Your Template, again.

Internet Explorer: "Operation Aborted"

Recently, many bloggers, when loading the blog of their choice under some older versions of Internet Explorer, have been faced with a rather monolithic error

Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://<Web site>.com.
Operation aborted

This error has been seen before - just last month, SiteMeter updated their script, and many blogs with SiteMeter code became unreadable. Right now, though, the culprit doesn't seem to be SiteMeter, though we can't tell for sure at the moment. Nitecruzr Dot Net does use SiteMeter, and it's apparently not affected by this problem.


This won't make your readers very happy.



As of March 2009, we are seeing some bloggers state that removing the recently updated Followers or Friend Connect gadgets resolved their issue. Of course, with Following / Friend Connect becoming an immensely popular accessory, this isn't a good long term strategy, but it may provide a way for you to at least diagnose your problem. Alternatively, you can try structured diagnostic procedures, and remove any recent updates.

You can find a few discussions about this problem, by Googling "Internet Explorer SiteMeter Operation Aborted". Here are some examples.

• Cam Riley: Sitemeter and IE's Operation Aborted, for an overview.
• Microsoft: (KB927917): BUG: Error message when you visit a Web page or interact with a Web application in Internet Explorer: "Operation aborted", for a Microsoft style technical description.
• The Reference Frame: Fix: IE7 with Sitemeter: Operation aborted, for a detailed overview.

Right now, all that I can recommend is that, if your blog is affected by this symptom, try and figure out what changes you made most recently, such as adding any HTML / JavaScript code, maybe in a gadget.

• Reverse each change, one at a time, until the problem is resolved.
• Or, restore the template, from a backed up copy, or from an original.
• If none of these suggestions helps, isolate the problem, diagnostically.
• When you make changes, test more frequently, and test against multiple browsers.

(Update 5/21 11:45): Blogger is working on this problem.

We're looking into this and will update this message when we have a fix.

(Update 5/21 9:00): This problem appears to affect this blog, for some readers. You may need to use a proxy server, in that case.

(Update 5/20 17:30): Blogger has acknowledged this problem.

We're looking into this; thanks for the report! We'll update the thread when we have a fix.

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This problem comes and goes periodically, with differing basic causes.

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