Cure For Shaky Sidebar Syndrome & A Google Fail

It rained yesterday so that meant I couldn’t go out and cut the grass – oh darn it all anyway!!  Instead, I had all morning to play around on my computer and found out all kinds of interesting things.  One – I think I discovered a cure for “shaky sidebar syndrome (SSS)” and I believe Google has really failed miserably with their attempt to integrate Blogger and Google+ commenting systems. 

The Follower’s widget is the culprit believed to cause the shakes

Back on April 13th, I wrote about how a lot of bloggers were experiencing a “sidebar shaking” on their blogs for all widgets that came after the Follower’s Widget.  After a bit of research, I never did find a resolution or even an explanation from anywhere about this problem so I just forgot about it.  Then, yesterday I was using the CTRL+ and – keys to adjust the width of my blog and, all of a sudden my sidebar got the shakes!  What the heck?

So, I used CTRL+ to increase the display size a bit and Voila!!  The shaking stopped.  I made the blog smaller - it started again!  I tried it several times with the same result.  Next, I visited a few other bloggers who had the “shakes” and found the same thing.  If the sidebar shook, I just increased it a bit and the shaking stopped.  If you happen to see a blog with SSS, try this out to see if it works!

Google is continuing its effort to integrate Blogger with Google+ 

To a lot of fanfare yesterday, Google announced another in a series of innovations designed to further integrate our blogging platform, Blogger, with Google+ its flagship social media site.  This latest new feature is called Google+ Comments and when enabled in our Blog Dashboard will enable us to view all Blogger comments as well as Google+ comments in one place – i.e. on our own blog!

Curious to see how this worked, I went to my Dashboard > Settings and clicked on the Google+ tab.  All I had to do then was check the box Use Google+ Comments on this blog.  Immediately, my blog comment system was changed to the new Google+ format and it didn’t look a whole lot different than our normal comments but there were some additional options.

This is what my Blogger Comments looked like with Google+ on

Playing around with comments on my own blog, I found I could share them directly with my Google+ page by choosing Public so everyone with access to my G+ page could see them or I could restrict access to certain Circles only – i.e. RV Bloggers.  I publish my blog daily on Google+ so I went there and made a test comment and it magically appeared in my Blogger Comments as well.  I was kind of impressed.

Next, I emailed Russ (Travels in Therapy) and asked him if he could go to my blog and leave a test comment.  He kindly agreed but told me that he was now “required to have a Google+ Profile” before he was allowed to comment on my blog.  What?  You mean a reader, who may not want to join Google+ has to join it just to leave a comment on my blog?  Fuhgeddaboudit!!

That quickly ended this experiment for me in integrating Google+ comments with Blogger comments.  I quickly returned to my Dashboard settings and reverted back to standalone Blogger commenting.  The requirement to create a Google+ Profile before being allowed to comment would only restrict readers from commenting as far as I’m concerned – what a dumb idea!

Just to make sure I wasn’t jumping to the wrong conclusion about this, I did a bit of research and confirmed what my friend Russ had found.  The confirmation was right on Google’s Q&A page:

What if my readers don’t have a Google+ profile or page? Can they still comment?

No, but they will be prompted to create one when they attempt to comment.

I think I see where this is all heading.  Google seems bound and determined to integrate Blogger into Google+.  It may be that Blogger rather than being a standalone system will end up as a simple ‘tab’ in Google+.  If that’s how this goes, I hope Google will not make the mistake of closing all doors to non-Google account holders.  That would be a huge ‘fail’ in my books.

Maybe the sun will shine on Friday and I can drag myself away from computer stuff to get outside and get both the front and back lawns cut – I sure hope so.

Have a great Friday, and thanks again for visiting!