Our comments feed died a few weeks ago. Not only does our recent comments widget no longer work but we get no notification of new comments so if people leave comments on old topics we have no idea. It is extremely annoying and it means we cannot properly manage our blog; if someone left something defamatory on our site we wouldn't know unless we happened to stumble over it; the recent comments widget enabled visitors to see other people's interactions with our blog at a glance, we have noticed a drop in comments since it has been down.

Repeated attempts to get some help from Blogger, some indication of when this will be fixed have been unsatisfactory. As such, I am now seriously contemplating moving MandM from Blogger to Wordpress.

However, I am concerned with the effect on our backlinks, particularly the deep links. Will these still work if we shift the blog? Are there any other issues? When we moved to our own domain last year we lost all our Technorati rank and had to contact everyone who linked to us and ask them to update their links some of them took a lot of hassling and a few we've given up on. If you have every moved blog platforms, particularly if you have moved from Blogger to Wordpress, please let us know what we may be in for.

Alternatively, if you have any idea how we can fix our comments feed that would be my first preference. The feed stopped on 25 May. I had made no changes to the site around that time. Prior to this it would occasionally stop for a few days and then restart and it has been doing that on and off since December.

If someone Stumbles your blog it can bring a lot of traffic to your site so it is a good idea to make it easier for visitors to your site to Stumble it.

But have you ever tried to add a StumbleUpon button to your blogger template only to find that the instructions are impossible to follow, you cannot work out where to put the code or your icon sits higher than your text? I have played around with the code provided by StumbleUpon and got it sitting how and where I want it and have now created this simple tutorial so you can too.

Log in to Blogger

Click on 'Layout'

Click on 'edit HTML'

Click on 'download full template' and save a backup of your blog to your hard-drive in case anything goes wrong

Check the 'expand widget templates box' (you are still in 'Layout', 'edit HTML')

Click anywhere in the actual code then press 'ctrl' and 'f' at the same time (which will bring up the find box)

Enter post-footer-line-1; into the find box and click next to find the line of code that should either be identical with or look a lot like:
<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>

Make some space under this line by clicking at the end of it and hitting 'enter' a few times then past the following code into your template:

<span style='float: left; background: url(http://cdn.stumble-upon.com/images/16x16_su_round.gif) left no-repeat; padding-left: 20px;'><a expr:href='&quot;http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=&quot;+ data:post.url + &quot;&amp;title=&quot; + data:post.title' target='_blank'>Stumble it! </a></span><br/>

Save your template. Easy peasy. You can change the background url to any button you want to use.

Cross posted at Coping in a Technological World.

If you like this tutorial you could always Stumble this site to say thankyou ;-)

We are having two site issues that I cannot fix. I have searched high and low, I have left messages in help forums and I have asked all my tech friends (who admittedly are not au fait with Blogger html). The problem remains. The only suggestion I was offered required me to revert the template back to normal and manually add the widgets back in by hand, one by one. I was hoping for a simpler solution.

Can anyone help with the following problems?

Post Titles
If you load a post into its own page and click on “create a link” at the bottom of the page, the link that comes up in the "BlogThis!" window is now always just “MandM” and not the correct title of the post. However, the url it points to is the correct one for that post. Previously the correct title for that post would show up.

I suspect that this recent phenomena is related to this related problem. Take a look at our Popular Posts widget in our sidebar. This is supposed to display the 10 most clicked pages on MandM. One could be forgiven in thinking that it is malfunctioning and showing the homepage in all 10 slots - run your mouse over each link, it is showing the top 10 most clicked pages but like the BlogThis! program, for some reason it is not extracting the correct post titles, just the url for them. I cannot leave it looking like this, if I can't fix the problem causing it I will have to remove it from the page.

The same problem was evident in our tweetmeme gadget, if you wanted to tweet a post using it it would pull up the correct url but only the title of the blog - I have since gone back to Amanda's tweet this widget because it at least still manages to grab the right title even if it will only display on individual post pages and the text order that appears in Twitter is kind of silly.Can someone tell me what I need to look for in my html to fix this problem?

Missing Spaces from our Post Footer
Take a look at our post footers. The date and the labels are mashed up against the text and the labels no longer have spaces between them.

In the first line see how the ‘at’ and the ‘Friday’ have no space between them?

In the second line see how the first label, ‘Aspergers Syndrome’ has no space between the 'A' and the ‘Labels:’; see also that there are no spaces after the comma's separating the labels.

This is happening on every post now. Again, it didn't used to. We are entering spaces between the labels prior to posting but they show up like this.

How can I edit my html to put the spaces back in?

These problems are recent, they arose around the time I put Comment Luv into our site but they may have begun when I did something else too as the point I noticed them may not be the point they began. That said, I am all but certain the second problem arose when I installed Comment Luv as the other day I removed Comment Luv and the problem went, though the post title problem was still there, and then I put Comment Luv back in and the problem came back.

Most blog platforms have the no follow tag set by default in their scripts so that those who link to or comment on a blog will not have their link followed by search engine spiders which will not increase their page rank; this was implemented by the major blog platforms as a method to prevent spam.

It is increasingly agreed that spam continued and all that was achieved was that commenters and those linking in missed out on link love.

We really appreciate your comments and your links so we wanted to give you something back.