Getting to know the Blogger Community

Posted by Lisa Ding, Community Manager

Hi Bloggers!

For more than a decade now, the Blogger team has watched our community of users grow dramatically and have had the pleasure of seeing some truly amazing blogs along the way. Here on Buzz, in addition to keeping you updated on new features, we’re going to focus on engaging with our user community and connecting more readers to exceptional blogs.

On Buzz, you can be expecting a variety of new posts, such as:

1. A revolving showcase of funny, interesting, beautifully designed, creative, and just plain awesome blogs. 
2. Guest posts from other successful Blogger users. 
3. Re-shares of interesting posts from your blogs. 
4. Personal posts from members of the Blogger Team, so you can get to know us better. 

In the coming weeks, I’ll be asking you to submit quality blogs that you enjoy reading. Each week, I’ll post a sample of the best blogs I’ve found within a certain theme (food, design, sports, etc) or, that incorporate a recently-released feature. I encourage you all to nominate blogs that don’t necessarily have an established following, since we’d like to promote new bloggers who could benefit from more interactions with other bloggers and more readers. Also, we’ll be sure to credit the nominators, so you’ll be getting a readership boost, too!

Please say hello via comments, and tell the Blogger community a little about yourself. Also, look out for the first request for blog nominations coming soon.

Best,
Lisa

Update on Browser Support

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

Our team has been thinking a lot recently about browser support, and wanted to make you aware of our new plan moving forward. For web applications like Blogger to continue to evolve at a rapid pace, our engineering team needs to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. For example, Dynamic Views, which we previewed in March, and Web Fonts both require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just aren’t able to provide you with the same high-quality experience.

For this reason, starting next month Blogger.com will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Blogger as well as many other Google Apps such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites.

So if it’s been a while since your last update, we encourage you to take advantage of the improved performance and security these modern browsers have to offer by installing the latest version of your preferred browser. There are many to choose from:

• Chrome
• Firefox
• Internet Explorer
• Safari

As the world moves more to the web, these new browsers are more than just a modern convenience, they are a necessity for what the future holds.

Whom do dentists often consider their most “difficult” patient

Surveys repeatedly show that dentists often view the anxious patient as
heir most difficult challenge. Almost 80% of dentists report that they themselves
become anxious with an anxious patient. The ability to assess carefully a patient’s
emotional needs helps the clinician to improve his or her ability to deal effectively
with anxious patients. Furthermore, because anxious patients require more chair
ime for procedures, are more reactive to stimuli, and associate more sensations with pain, effective anxiety management yields more effective practice
management.

What behaviors on the dentist’s part do patients specify as reducing their anxiety

• Explain procedures before starting.
• Give specific information during procedures.
• Instruct the patient to be calm.
• Verbally support the patient: give reassurance.
• Help the patient to redefine the experience to minimize threat.
• Give the patient some control over procedures and pain.
• Attempt to teach the patient to cope with distress.
• Provide distraction and tension relief.
• Attempt to build trust in the dentist.
• Show personal warmth to the patient.
Corah N: Dental anxiety: Assessment, reduction and increasing patient
satisfaction. Dent Clin North Am 32:779—790, 1988.

What behaviors on the dentist’s part do patients specify as reducing their anxiety

• Explain procedures before starting.
• Give specific information during procedures.
• Instruct the patient to be calm.
• Verbally support the patient: give reassurance.
• Help the patient to redefine the experience to minimize threat.
• Give the patient some control over procedures and pain.
• Attempt to teach the patient to cope with distress.
• Provide distraction and tension relief.
• Attempt to build trust in the dentist.
• Show personal warmth to the patient.
Corah N: Dental anxiety: Assessment, reduction and increasing patient
satisfaction. Dent Clin North Am 32:779—790, 1988.

36. Discuss behavioral methods that may help patients to cope with dental fears and related anxiety

1. The first step for the dentist is to become knowledgeable of the patient
and his or her presenting needs. Interviewing skills cannot be overemphasized. A
trusting relationship is essential. As the clinical interview proceeds, fears are
usually reduced to coping levels.
2. Because a patient cannot be anxious and relaxed at the same moment,
teaching methods of relaxation may be helpful. Systematic relaxation allows the
patient to cope with the dental situation. Guided visualizations may be helpful to
achieve relaxation. Paced breathing also may be an aid to keeping patients
relaxed. Guiding the rate of inspiration and expiration allows a hyperventilating
patient to resume normal breathing, thus decreasing the anxiety level. A sample
relaxation script is included below.

What's Your Heart Disease Risk?

High cholesterol, lifestyle choices, and other factors increase heart attack risk. Find out if you're likely to have a heart attack within the next 10 years.

Even though you don’t have a time machine, you do have the ability to calculate your 10-year heart illness risk. Decades of research have shown how heart illness risk factors such as high cholesterol & lifestyle choices like smoking cigarettes add up.

The National Cholesterol schooling Program (NCEP) has published a set of guidelines that is intended to help patients & doctors exactly predict heart illness risk. The greater your risk for heart illness within 10 years, the more aggressive you need to be with prevention. For example, the guidelines note that individuals who already have coronary heart illness or an equivalent health condition, such as diabetes, have a more than 20 percent risk of a heart event within 10 years. Add other risk factors, such as high cholesterol, advanced age, cigarette smoking, & a relatives history of early heart illness, & your total risk notches up.

The NCEP guidelines include charts that enable you to calculate a very specific risk score, based on your risk factors, age, & gender. For example, a 57-year-old bloke could use the charts to find out that they gets 7 points for age, 5 points for cholesterol over 280, 3 points for smoking cigarettes, & 1 point for his slightly high but treated hypertension. Adding all of them together, they has 16 points, or a 25 percent risk of a heart illness event within ten years.

The same approach is applied to diet — using the diet appendix in the guidelines, you can give yourself points for the categories of foods you eat regularly to find out whether you are eating a heart-healthy diet.

“We need to match the intensity of treatment that they recommend to any patient with that patient’s level of risk,” says Daniel Levy, MD, director of the Framingham Heart Study & professor of medicine at Boston University in Boston. This is because the changes you may must make all have some degree of risk & burden attached to them.

four times you have a lovely idea of your heart illness risk, you can make an informed decision about the steps you need to take to reduce that risk.