Cotton Says to Bury the Code

Hey, Cotton here. We weren't going to post today but we just found something we'd like to share with you.

Some of you are aware there has been a problem with some blogs lately. Strange things have been happening. We noticed on a couple of blogs the other day that when we tried to visit the blog was immediately switched to an error page with a really long blogrolling url.

Strange, blogrolling shut down a while back. Then last night we were looking through the code of a blog with a problem and found MyBlogLog links still in the sidebar. MyBlogLog was a Yahoo "social network" site. We belonged to it but it closed down in May and we removed all the related code from our blog. Evidently, some bloggers forgot to remove the code for one or the other site from their sidebar.

The reason we suddenly decided to post tonight is because we just tried to visit some old friends who haven't blogged in a few months and were switched to another site. And a lightbulb switched on in my head. The site we were switched to is advertising blogrolling dot com for sale.

It took a few tries but our nimble pawed Percy managed to reach the source code and check it. There were six blogrolling links left on the blog. Fortunately, we have an email address for the blogger, so we notified them. And now we'd like to notify you. If you ever had blogrolling dot com or MyBlogLog in your sidebar and haven't deleted them, you need to do so now. If you can't remember whether you had it or if you deleted it, it's easy to check and correct if you have a Blogger blog.

Go to the main page of your blog.  Not the dashboard; you want to view the actual blog. 

Right click on a portion of the blog that is clear - no photo or links.
Click on "View Page Source."
A new window will open.
Upper left or your screen: Click on "Edit" and then on "Find."


A little bar will appear in lower left of your screen.
In the Find box, type "blogrolling."
If blogrolling is found, click "next" to find all references.

Then repeat the search for "MyBlogLog."

If "blogrolling" or "MyBlogLog" links are found, you will need to go into your blog template and delete each "blogrolling" reference. Before you do this, be sure to save a copy of your template on your computer. Or ask someone who knows how to do this and you trust to do it for you.

I'm not a schoolteacher and I'm not a computer nerd - just the oldest sibling here - so I hope this isn't confusing. If we cats and dogs can figure it out, it must be fairly easy.

But if you've been blogging for a while and ever belonged to either blogroll group, you can save yourself and your visitors a lot of frustration by checking your blog code. Because, believe me, none of us want to come by and get switched to another page. We really don't care that blogrolling dot com is for sale. Or that MyBlogLog will probably also be soon. We just want to see your furry faces.  Cause we love you.

Thursday Update: We should probably add that the easiest way to delete all links to either blogrolling or MyBlogLog, which are not the same thing, is to delete their widget from your sidebar. But we assumed that if you hadn't done that already, you don't know which widget was which. (Some of you have more than one link list in your sidebar.)

Or you could follow the instructions in The Real Blogger Status from yesterday. We read it and we're still trying to figure out what it says.