Testing after some more mucking about

I've done some more mucking about behind the scenes and this post is mostly just to test something about the way entries display on my custom Google home page now that I've set up this blog to utilize "Atom" feeds. The problem, though, is each entry is showing up in Google as more than just the entry title alone, the first few words of actual text are there as well.

Apparently way back at the beginning of time (or at least of this blog) I somehow managed to turn off an option that would let me specify an actual title phrase for each blog entry. That's why "recent posts" as automatically listed in the sidebar used to show up as the title and the first short bit of text—because there really wasn't a title, just body text as far as Blogger was concerned. Once I discovered the option setting to allow actual post titles I had to go back and re-edit each and every entry to date to shift the title I wanted from the body to the real title field and re-publish. I expected that to fix the Google display from the feed. Well, it fixed the way recent posts display in the sidebar, but not on the Google home page.

So now I'm simply trying a new post by itself, created from the start with an actual specified title field. I want to see if it displays properly in Google as just the title phrase. If so, then this issue will simply correct itself as I add future posts. If not, then I'm not sure what to do to resolve it. It's not that big a deal really, but I sometimes get lost in details.

By the way, to add my blog feed to a custom Google home page, look over in the sidebar area for the "Atom" link, right-click it and select "copy shortcut." Next go to your Google home page and click to "add stuff," then on the next page click to "add by URL" and paste the copied shortcut into the box which appears. Hit the "Add" button and you're done. There may be an easier way to set it up, but for now that's how I did it.

I'm probably the only person who will ever do this anyway and it's only because I was curious about how some of this feed stuff works. As I said, I tend to get lost in details sometimes. But hey, as long as I have my own blog displaying on my Google home page, I'll always know the minute I add a post!