Inconveniences while posting to blogger

This post summarizes some of the inconveniences I faced as a new user of Blogger.

Source code

I almost never posted source code to blogger before, so I did not anticipate this problem in advance. After a few hours creating posts containing code snippets, I decided to have a look at my blog’s home page. Unfortunately the home page was distored! I had a hard time figuring out what the culprit might be, and in the end it turns out that the ‘less than sign’, or ‘<‘ is causing the problem. Obviously, the Google WYSIWYG editor does not automatically convert the “less than” (and other) symbols into their html equivalent in some cases. The symbol remains as-is in the HTML of the post and conflicts with other HTML tags, thus causing the distortion.

Captcha while posting

To prevent spam, if you made more than 50 posts per day, you’ll have to enter a captcha every time you post.

Email posting is also disabled. You’ll receive a delivery failure notification similar to below:

From: Mail Delivery Subsystem [mailer-daemon@google.com] This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: mdanh20021.mail2blogger@blogger.com Technical details of permanent failure: You have exceeded the the allowable number of posts without solving a captcha.

Auto-identification of spam blogs

This surprised me. After I made a few post, some of which contains link to my favourite websites, I received the following email:

When I visit my blog home page, there is also a warning that my blog is a spam blog. I clicked the link inside the email and stopped making more posts. Luckily, the following morning, the spam warning disappeared. I am just praying hard that this won’t happen again!