Blogger Profile

In the antepenultimate act of the Google+ saga, Goodbye Google+, Hello Twitter (October 2018), I learned that the failed social network was closing and moved any relevant dependence elsewhere. In the penultimate act, Google+ Sunsets (February 2019), I learned how the service was going to close and established one further dependency:-

I also received a notice from Blogger.com -- 'In March 2019, Blogger will revert to only having Blogger profiles. Users that have selected a G+ profile in the past will appear as unknown authors until they next login to Blogger and supply a new display name and avatar.' -- As far as I can tell, that's the only part of the shutdown that I need to watch.

For the last act I need to re-examine the Blogger profile. My blogs switched to using the profile earlier this week and after I entered some missing data it looked as shown in the following image.

The left box shows the portion of the profile that is displayed on each page for my various blogs. The right box shows the profile itself. That's all fairly routine, except for the 'Gender' tag. I didn't like the way it blared 'MALE' in uppercase, so I deleted it. Most people know that 'Mark' must be a guy.

There were a few other data fields that needed attention. I located my profile photo in the archive that Google+ prepared for me before closing down. After adding it to Blogger, I also added it to my Twitter account, Mark Weeks (@bemweeks), which is my index acrosss all of my chess blogs. While I was adding the profile photo to Twitter, I also added a header photo, the same lightning photo I used on Google+.

The Blogger profile offered a few other data fields that were unusual -- 'Show sites I follow', 'Wishlist URL', 'Random question' -- but they either didn't work as I expected (maybe they are obsolete) or weren't particularly useful. I'll keep them in mind for some other time.