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How to secure your Google account and Blogger blog?

As a part of contributions to NCSAM, I am writing this article down on what all should we be aware of with respect to Google's security aspect and how to make sure your blog stays yours forever.
What is NCSAM? It's National Cyber Security Awareness Month which is observed during the month of October every year in America.

However, we all know cyber security is a world topic and is not limited to just the USA. So let me give some tips with respect to keeping the Google account safe and Blogger blogs safe from hackers.

As I secure my account, I hope you people catch up too.

In this blog post, I am going to tell about the following,
Securing your Google account.Securing your Blogger blog. Securing your Google account Since Blogger is also part of your Google account, let's first see what all we need to do to keep our Google account safe. Don't share your password to anyone.Keep changing your password every 60 - 90 days.Make sure your password is strong enough. Have at leas…
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Blogger custom domain confusions - Check before you buy

In the Blogger community forum, I happened to help a user who was not able to publish their blogspot address to their custom domain. After doing all the debugging, there was no option left out but to contact Google and finally we have known what the problem is.
The problem was that the URL was not available for use in blogger. 
Here on, before spending money on buying a domain, please ensure blogger allows it.
Why isn't the custom domain available to buy but not available to use on Blogger?
That'd be the first question every user would ask or think to ask. Unfortunately reason is un-disclosed by Blogger themselves. 
So how do we know if a domain is available at Blogger or not?
Earlier, there used to be no way we could do this as Blogger would throw a more generic error like below,

Now, we get a more customised error for this particular case alone like below,

So, here on, before spending money on buying a domain, please try publishing your blog in the domain name you are planning to bu…
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Blogger HTTPS for custom domain and Cloudflare

In BHF, there was a recent issue related to cloudflare where the browser screams the site is a phishing site. So I thought of writing up how does a service like cloudflare affect your blogger blog.

What is Cloudflare?

Well we have that written all over Wikipedia. Let's go on with why Blogger users look for Cloudflare.
Anciently Blogger users used cloudflare for one simple reason. HTTPS for custom domains.

So what happens when you introduce cloudflare into your domain?
DNS Redirect.
Your custom domain will be configured with the proxy info provided by cloudflare and when the request is hit, DNS redirect happens.
DNS redirect is bad for the site's health. A number of reasons, but the most important is that some browsers, when it detects a DNS redirection, it thinks that it is a phishing site.

What is a DNS redirect?

I am trying to explain this in easy terms. I'll try not to be too technical. When a custom domain URL is hit, usually the domain requests go to Name servers from w…
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Blogger Language Confusions - Part 2

An interesting query from one of the Blogger user whose Navbar has a different language than expected.

We earlier discussed that, it's the blog owner's choice to show what language they wish to see in Blogger blog. Read below,

How to Blog?: Blogger Language Confusions
However there's one more small confusion right there. What if the blog you are visiting has the old theme which has Navbar on the top like below?


Could you see the "More" button near the search box in the Navbar? This button is in English while the blog is in a different language.

Now, how can that happen?

Here's the confusion. Navbar although incorporated inside a blog, it is a part of Google products and not the blog. To confirm this, I went ahead and changed my Google account language.

How did I do that?

Go to https://myaccount.google.comNavigate to Data & Personalisation > Scroll down to "General preferences for the web"Click on "Language"Click the Pencil icon near y…
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Blogger in Draft says "Try the new Blogger!"

It's been long time that I wrote something here. Interestingly there seems to be a new update in Blogger in Draft (https://draft.blogger.com).

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Blogger profile confusions

Since Google has closed it's social networking service called the Google+ for consumers, few products has some effect on it. One of them is our very own blogger.

We could see that update notification in our blogger dashboard as below,



Besides from the things gone as mentioned in Blogger's official blog post here -> An update on Google+ and Blogger, we have a confusion on profile that needs to be clarified. That is the reason why I am writing this down.

There are now two profiles,

Blogger profileGoogle profileBlogger profile - Where does this appear?
This appears in all of your blogs if you have your profile gadget added. You can see that on this blog in the top right, How do I update this profile? Go to blogger.comNavigate to Settings > User settingsClick Edit under Blogger in User profile sectionYou'll be navigated to https://www.blogger.com/edit-profile.g where you can edit your profile that appears on the blog.Google profile - Where does this appear?
This appears in…
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Blogger description confusions

Blogger, like the language confusions have one more confusion with respect to Blog description. We have two descriptions setup in Blogger.

(Note - The screenshots are replaced from legacy Blogger UI to New UI recently)
Blog display description.Blog search description.Display Description is the description that appears when you visit your blog in the header under your blog title. For example, you could see the description of my blog,
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