Friday, May 04, 2012

Better, Not Perfect

A while back, I described the problems I was having with blogrolls in Blogger. The short version is that I could no longer update the main blogroll. Nor could I replace it. I made do as best I could, but it was not a good situation. I know many MBS readers rely upon the chronological blogroll to stay up to date. That's why I've been so eager for a fix these past three months.

This week, along comes Blogger and they decide to take a whack at fixing several of these blogroll problems. They seem to have repaired several nasty bugs, but left one in so we can all feel nostalgic. Before January, there was no limit to the number of links permitted in a blogroll. With the coming of the new white interface, a limit of about 160 was imposed without warning. I think it was a bug. This week, the limit was apparently raised to about 295. I still think this is a bug.

So, here we are, with better tools than last week but not as good as last year. My solution, at least for now, is to split the chronological blogroll into two parts (A-M and N-Z). It's not great, but it's better.

Update: With timely advice from Hermione, I was able to create one complete, unified blogroll. I was absolutely delighted right up until I accidentally deleted it all! Now I have to manually enter 488 links again. Ugh!

Update #2: Everything is now as it should be at long last! Thanks to everyone who offered technical advice and moral support. Believe me, I needed it!

In a bizarre footnote to today's festivities, after I had spent hours re-entering nearly five hundred links into a new blogroll, the one I thought I had deleted mysteriously reappeared. Suddenly, I had two of them, nearly identical, but not quite. I arbitrarily decided to keep the later version, once I deduced which that was.

...and for any of the Blogger development team who happen to be wandering through - Stop laughing, you sadistic nerds!

6 comments :

This Silly Girl said...

Not perfect, but definitely better than before. Thanks for being AWESOME and trying to work it out. Also, thanks for your blog in general. I love it! I've been your lurker for a long time but I recently decided to step into the bloglight.

Hermione said...

Hi Bonnie,

Close, but no cigar. Too bad they still feel the need to impose a limit.

I like the workaround. It makes sense, and integrates the newbies with the older blogs. If either goes above 295, you can always reinstate the Newest of the New.

Hugs,
Hermione

Spanky said...

Bonnie, just popped in to say you continue to do a fantastic job here. I know how hard it must be to maintain everything as perfectly as you do.

I agree with Hermione; it's too bad there's a limit. It would be nice if there was an easier way to see how much traffic you generate for each. I suspect I have many links no one uses.

Bonnie said...

SG - Welcome! It's a pleasure to meet you. I will go visit your blog this morning.

Hermione - Thank you so much for all of your help, technical and otherwise, throughout this debacle.

I don't think Blogger intended to impose a limit either time because the errors/problems look like something is broken.

I hope I don't have to bring back NotN. Keeping two blogrolls straight will be difficult enough.

Spanky - Thank you! I can look at destination links, sort of. Google Analytics doesn't do this (as far as I can determine), but StatCounter does. Unfortunately, my free version displays less than an hour's worth of data. I can see who's hot right now, but not which links are never visited.

A'marie said...

Thank you for all you do. :)

Hermione said...

All's well that ends well. I'm so pleased you finally managed to overcome the Blogger gremlins and finalize one big blogroll.

And yes, they're watching you:D

Hugs,
Hermione

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