Feb 22, 2008
22.2.08 | Posted by
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Imp at "A Consuming Experience" got a really good and detailed post on how to implement a Custom Domain in your Blogspot Blogger Blog using the feature from the same name.
It is a great post and really needed because i also got to struggle with it while helping other people to set their own blogs.
One serious note that is not me endorsing a brand just because, but the domain provider that best works with Custom Domain is without a doubt GoDaddy. i had to set some blog in others and they crapped out bad, domain provider fault. i even had to transfer the domains, so that gives you an idea. so if you are not tech inclined just follow Imp tutorial and stick to a GoDaddy domain to avoid troubles.
I don´t have sarcastic remarks to make about this man. if he was the reason more documentation were added into Blogger Help, Support Mails were answered and new blogs got added to Blogs of Note at a higher pace, then i just salute you graham, good luck with your new ventures.
So long, and thanks for all the help via Blogger Buzz
I guess it was not as clear to most that i was joking on my last post about Blogger Filipino Support.
So i want to make a clarification on why i said Tagalog was/is the Official language of the Philippines so i will quote from a note one of my Pinoy friends sent me as a
"you are right but...."
In a nutshell, Tagalog was chosen as the national language in 1937. In 1959, it was renamed to Pilipino (note the
. This was reaffirmed in the 1973 constitution (but set the spark to develop a language called Filipino). Then in 1987 Filipino was made the national language, which "shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages."From my understanding, this was supposed to be some sort of Philippine Esperanto but instead Tagalog was used the base while vocabulary from other Philippine languages was to be imported. And in a sense, it kind of has. There has been a Filipino dictionary (which I've not yet seen) published by the University of the Philippines that has imported these words ===> something from that blog
That means i am fundamentally right from a historic point because even if Filipino is now the national name of the language, the reasons to be it so are merely political unlike when tagalog was named the national language as a ethnic identification of the Philippines.
So yeah, both ways are right, just that i have history on my side to feel i am even more right. :P
My pinoy friend say this is one of those never ending controversies so why arguing with them when i see it in their own blogs like:
The Filipino vs. Tagalog debate: Bisalog
I hope this clears up the why of my last post.
Feb 19, 2008
Oh my, i think Pete Hopskins from Blogger must be drinking while working again because he says people from the Philippines (Filipinas en Español, because they named the country in Honor of Felipe el hermoso) speak Filipino. i guess that means i Speak Mexican and not Spanish. how blind i have been!
But obviating Pete serious drinking problem under working hours, the good news is that all my fellow Pinoy friends can now not only end their sentences with "Po" (when possible) like when they write in Tagalog. but they now can do it in their own Localized version of Blogger.
And am glad they recognized Philippines needed support, it has one of the most vibrant Blogger Based Blogging Communities right now.
Like i said it got some Pinoy friends and i am even making a trip over there, so i am not just saying it just because saying. they do have a huge Blogger Based Blogging Community.
Blogger now in Filipino via Blogger Buzz
*Update*: yes, i do know i am being way too sarcastic, cynic and ironic for my own good. it is part of a sense of humor.
*Update 2*; i posted a clarification here
Feb 17, 2008
I have read recently that many Bloggers are worried about the state of Blogging because of the surge of MicroBlogging. I find such a worry to be not only unfounded but actually nonsense.
Such concerns about MicroBlogging are absurd because it don`t hurts the Bloggers or the Blogosphere just because more people are turning into MicroBlogging services like Twitter or Jaiku.
Why? because of the format. the format and the canvas is what makes conventional Blogging work right.
There are different levels of engagement, interaction and theme at play here.
MicroBlogging
Is all about the way you blog and the focus on what you blog being based on inmediacy, awareness and personal projection and the fact that the canvas where those opinions go is not important because what MicroBlogging did was getting rid of the canvas and place your voice into a river.
MicroBlogging is actually good for the state of the Blogosphere because it cuts out the noise and the crap.
People are no longer making as many blogs as before to say nothing or to say little, they have now rationalized that having a Blog is being able to not only say things but say them at a certain length and not just as bursts of Babble.
That is good right?. i think it is. then there is another perspective to have in count:
FastBlogging or Fast Blogging as you see fit say it is another kind of Blogging that does disrupts more into the regular Blogosphere that MicroBlogging does or ever will.
What is FastBlogging?
While being placed on the same view as twitter and Jaiku. services like Tumblr and Soup.io represent another new kind of Blogging (also referred as tumblelogging,just that in this very post i am judging them from a perspective of Blogging as the base from where they divert), because unlike Twitter and Jaiku where the way and the focus is based on inmediacy, awareness and personal projection and the canvas where those opinions go is not important because what MicroBlogging did was getting rid of the canvas (Your Blogging Platform, Your Blog Template, You Blog as online destination) and placing your voice into a River; FastBlogging is about changing the way and changing the canvas to refocus Blogging on a immediacy of use with a instantly flexible Canvas.
And even if FastBloggging posts are usually brief, they are not as brief as in microblogging or is implicit to them and they do can carry a theme just like any other blog.
I have used both Tumblr and Soup.io so i can see that they are not the same thing as having a Blog in a Blogging Platform like Blogger or Wordpress is.
They are FastBlogging Platforms because they have take away the complexities of entry even something we believed to be incredible as Blogger has. it leverages the way you blog content into it by serving Focused Functions into what you are blogging by giving you Automatic Post Templates. They let you decide what level of identity and representation you want to have in your Blog because the way you can edit a template in a instant to be just a River of Posts without Any Interaction or Add Modules, Widgets into it at the same speed,. something that is possible because the platform is designed to help you resolve most of the Blogging Work you have to do in a regular Platform like Blogger.
If you post a photo, thanks to the automatic templates, you only need the link of it, the same goes for the video that you usually embed into a post, or making a quote, sharing a link,etc.
FastBlogging Platforms also work more into the Social Web Idea because they are meant to let your merge services into them and then republish that content into your FastBlog.
And that is just if we refer to Tumblr. Soup.io is taking it even further by making possible to FastBlog without identity, without account, edit a template while you see it, let you do some Drag and Drop instant design, and the most important advancement in it is that there is not separated dashboard, your template is a live dashboard, the posts you write is moving WYSIWYG to be more literal than before as you see the post be filled into a post as you type it.
and finally the bending of the Rules of Blogetiquete, where in FastBlogging it is ok to Republish and Reblog what other said because the platform not only allows it but encourages it.
Back to Blogging
Of course that the advancements cited in MicroBlogging and FastBlogging will also get into regular Blogging platforms, but they will be integrated to a whole as a option in the same format we use now, not as the sole way to do so like in both MicroBlogging and FastBlogging.
So, these two new ways to Blog will not pose a threat to Blogging, Blogs will not go away as some say, and is more than Likely that regular Blogs will actually get to benefit from it in one way or another.
Even then, it is interesting to see how the Landscapes change and how Blogging Culture changes and adapt into new branches.
First there were Modular Blogging or Blogging Modules (where Blogging is a part of a larger platform and it only represented as a Scope or feature in it, like MySpace, LiveSpaces and even Facebook to some degree ) that reside in Social Networks and then this development of MicroBlogging and FastBloggging as a direct response or after effect to that.
But all of this means no change to you if your are already Blogging, as i said once and i will say again: "The Format is Everything" because everything else just revolves around it.
I don`t know if there was a line in the Blogger in Draft team 2008 resolutions that said they needed to release features in february that should have been in the latest Blogger Version Launch (v3.0). that is what one could think just from judging the last two Blogger Draft Features.
The latest is one that made more than one to leave Blogger in 2007:
Scheduled Posting.
Because Scheduled Posting importance increased a lot in 2007 as Blogging was getting more serious and more previous Old Media personalities drifted into Blogging. the reason is because while one of the principles of common blogging is inmediacy, another in Pro Blogging is "Journalistic Quality" (yeah, i know most don`t stand up to that). so there are Articles you just cannot write in one go, or that you just can`t post on the go and in the latest case, there are sometimes you are under embargo and cannot post something until the date of if passes (yeah, some bloggers don`t respect that either) and those are pretty much the biggest reasons why you would need scheduled posting.
But in average blogging terms, there is also another to have in count: Blog Flow.
Blog Flow is the periodicity you set yourself to Blog and that to some it is the easiest way to mantain a Blog.
So if you are used to post once a day from monday to friday, but sometimes you write two posts, you can easily schedule the latter post to cover for one of the days you are used to post.
Same goes for those that follow a theme and whose entries are long when they go on vacations, they can then easily leave the Blog Flow in automatic while they are gone if they don`t want to interrupt it.
Having said all that you can understand how strange and incredible it results that Blogger just now is testing that feature to add it to Blogger when some had it two years ago!.
Because Scheduled Posting importance increased a lot in 2007 as Blogging was getting more serious and more previous Old Media personalities drifted into Blogging. the reason is because while one of the principles of common blogging is inmediacy, another in Pro Blogging is "Journalistic Quality" (yeah, i know most don`t stand up to that). so there are Articles you just cannot write in one go, or that you just can`t post on the go and in the latest case, there are sometimes you are under embargo and cannot post something until the date of if passes (yeah, some bloggers don`t respect that either) and those are pretty much the biggest reasons why you would need scheduled posting.
But in average blogging terms, there is also another to have in count: Blog Flow.
Blog Flow is the periodicity you set yourself to Blog and that to some it is the easiest way to mantain a Blog.
So if you are used to post once a day from monday to friday, but sometimes you write two posts, you can easily schedule the latter post to cover for one of the days you are used to post.
Same goes for those that follow a theme and whose entries are long when they go on vacations, they can then easily leave the Blog Flow in automatic while they are gone if they don`t want to interrupt it.
Having said all that you can understand how strange and incredible it results that Blogger just now is testing that feature to add it to Blogger when some had it two years ago!.
The Blogger in Draft blog does detail how easy to use Scheduled posting is:
"Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the “Post Options” toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the “Publish” button, your post will become “scheduled.” When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog.Your scheduled posts appear in your Edit Posts list alongside your drafts and published posts. To un-schedule a post, simply save it as a draft any time before it gets published."
Now,what happens to those who use Post into the Future as a way to have welcome post or adding a Widget or Element into blog?. that is resolved in the Additional notes:
"We know that some bloggers currently use future post dates in order to keep one post at the top of their blog for a while. Though we recommend that you use a Text page element for this, you can still get this old behavior with just one additional step. First, publish your post with the current date and time. This will publish it to your blog. Then, once it’s published, edit the post to change the date to the future and publish it again. We don’t re-schedule posts that are already published, so the post will stay on your blog but sort to the very top"
"As with published posts, the post editor does not autosave scheduled posts if you go back and edit them. You wouldn’t want the post to publish while you’re in the middle of editing it! You can save the scheduled post as a draft to remove the scheduling and this will turn autosave back on"
"In some testing we’ve found that schedule posting is not working for some FTP blogs. If you run across this, please let us know in the comments so we can try to track it down" <--- (in other words? it has lots of bugs, so avoid using it now if you are a FTP Blogger user)
I understand that this is a Draft Blogger feature because it needs to be tested to ensure it works right for when it is deployed for everyone. but given you need to use the Draft Blogger Dashboard to use it, it is one of those Draft Blogger features that really needs to be put in the Fast Track for the regular Blogger.
Simple because the users that are going to use this feature the most usally don`t use just Blogger (one platform) so they use Blogging Editors like Windows Live Writer, Scribefire, Flock, Ecto or they also use their Phones to post.
via Blogger in Draft
Feb 15, 2008
The History and Story
Retro-Posting is an old, old idea i had in the late 2005 where i wondered how a blog written in back and forth in time would fare, would work and if that Blog could survive around and get indexed by Google just like any other blog.
In my TimeOut from this blog i managed to do that experiment and found that at first it didn`t worked very well, but later on it picked up indexation like any other blog, the reason for this was several adjustments Google has done to its search engine in the past year or so where, it gives more juice based on freshness and proof of content.
That means Google got fast enough to index a blog post in a manner of 90 seconds if that blog or site had enough Proof of content and Authority.
Proof of content seems to be the way Google filters Spam now and freshness at the same time and it is based on the lots of the same SEO-SEP rules that started with Google about a blog post having to be of certain length, format and not pass beyond a certain number of links in one post or conform to a specific guidelines.
Many Popular Blogs do posts that would seem to others as link spam lists, how does Google knows the blog or site is not a Spam site?, by measuring Authority as a fact check. that way it knows what it is indexed is "good to be indexed content".
All of this is processed by the Google Search Engine in a mater of seconds. but one could not expect less of a search engine that got dozens of billion of dollars invested into it.
Yahoo Search rules and engine are the more Old School from the bunch and once you get to be indexed by it, it will index almost everything and it will adjust as time passes. no wonder it is faring so bad. also because it is quite hard for something to get indexed right in it in the first place too.
Live Search last update index things as fast as Google and does pretty much everything the Google Search Engine does, but it don`t counts with the Advertising backend or the reference data backend Google does but you can check that Live Search results are now very close to Google.
I have seen how Live Search behaves and i can make it index a post pretty easily now, but it is also interesting how it reacts to spam and you can get to see things erased almost everyday if you try some specific queries everyday to test that behavior.
The only thing Live Search Lacks is Marketshare, but it is picking up slowly, and if certain merger happens, it will pick up faster.
Opinions on that may still differ drastically , so it is just based on my experience.
The How
You will begin to see how the Archive of the blog starts to populate with posts if you visit often, the blogs populating the archive will be the post that i used to do and even posts that are a direct reflection to new post threads, etc.
These Posts will be Labeled normal but will be Tagged with a Technorati Tag and will also sport the Following Notice at the end of each post:
***Retro-Posted-***
And will have a link to this very post that explains what that exactly means.
That way it is fully disclosed so no one feels i am mysteriously adding posts into the Bloggeratto archive.
The Why
I got many reasons to do so, but i can list the most important ones here:
So there you go, hope it makes sense.
Retro-Posting is an old, old idea i had in the late 2005 where i wondered how a blog written in back and forth in time would fare, would work and if that Blog could survive around and get indexed by Google just like any other blog.
In my TimeOut from this blog i managed to do that experiment and found that at first it didn`t worked very well, but later on it picked up indexation like any other blog, the reason for this was several adjustments Google has done to its search engine in the past year or so where, it gives more juice based on freshness and proof of content.
That means Google got fast enough to index a blog post in a manner of 90 seconds if that blog or site had enough Proof of content and Authority.
Proof of content seems to be the way Google filters Spam now and freshness at the same time and it is based on the lots of the same SEO-SEP rules that started with Google about a blog post having to be of certain length, format and not pass beyond a certain number of links in one post or conform to a specific guidelines.
Many Popular Blogs do posts that would seem to others as link spam lists, how does Google knows the blog or site is not a Spam site?, by measuring Authority as a fact check. that way it knows what it is indexed is "good to be indexed content".
All of this is processed by the Google Search Engine in a mater of seconds. but one could not expect less of a search engine that got dozens of billion of dollars invested into it.
Yahoo Search rules and engine are the more Old School from the bunch and once you get to be indexed by it, it will index almost everything and it will adjust as time passes. no wonder it is faring so bad. also because it is quite hard for something to get indexed right in it in the first place too.
Live Search last update index things as fast as Google and does pretty much everything the Google Search Engine does, but it don`t counts with the Advertising backend or the reference data backend Google does but you can check that Live Search results are now very close to Google.
I have seen how Live Search behaves and i can make it index a post pretty easily now, but it is also interesting how it reacts to spam and you can get to see things erased almost everyday if you try some specific queries everyday to test that behavior.
The only thing Live Search Lacks is Marketshare, but it is picking up slowly, and if certain merger happens, it will pick up faster.
Opinions on that may still differ drastically , so it is just based on my experience.
The How
You will begin to see how the Archive of the blog starts to populate with posts if you visit often, the blogs populating the archive will be the post that i used to do and even posts that are a direct reflection to new post threads, etc.
These Posts will be Labeled normal but will be Tagged with a Technorati Tag and will also sport the Following Notice at the end of each post:
***Retro-Posted-***
And will have a link to this very post that explains what that exactly means.
That way it is fully disclosed so no one feels i am mysteriously adding posts into the Bloggeratto archive.
The Why
I got many reasons to do so, but i can list the most important ones here:
- Why not?, there is nothing that tell me i cannot do it so
- It amuses me to do so
- While i was away i accumulated over 50 drafts, so that is also a good reason for those posts
to do something useful instead of getting erased or discarded. - I Should never had leaved this blog, it is my way to recovering the time lost.
- I will drive Traffic to the Blog.
So there you go, hope it makes sense.
This is one is weird, because after writing about Widgets for some months now (Widgets Lab)
i truly could not imagine or anticipate this new Blogger Gadget (Page Element) because of a simple reason: It should have been available years ago!
I mean, seriously, it really could have been introduced when The New Blogger (v3.0) launched. not only because it was possible to have it, but because we cannot trust the "Next Blog" button in the Blogger navbar, or the Blogger navbar itself for it to be visible at all times for that matter ;) .
But ok, a Dynamic BlogRoll, that is still a good thing, more in the way they have implemented since it will share Google Juice (gRank) to your favorite Blogs and if other has your in their Blog Lists that Google Juice benefits your blog.
And you can import directly from Google Reader if you happen to be a user of it for Extra Commodity.
"You add blogs to your Blog List by entering blog or feed URLs directly, or by importing subscriptions from Google Reader. When you add by URL, Blogger will attempt to detect an Atom or RSS feed for it in order to show post and update information. If none is found, the blog will still be added to the Blog List, just as a simple link."
Beyond what i have written and quoted, here are the bullet points:
- Blog List is parsed in HTML, that is why placing it wil pass Google Juice to other unlike JS
- Will take favicon if found in Home Directory, No support for linked ones yet
- Do not play to much with your Blog List or you will cause cache bugs in your blog, if so, reinstall.
- If feed is not found via domain link, submit feed link directly.
- Blog List can only be modified by Admins, more adjustments to Blog Lists to come.
The Blog List looks pretty much like the Recent Comments Hacks but with Blogs, so i know many will also think that this Blogger Gadget (Page Element) is not worth it, but the fact it is parsed in HTML and you can enjoy a super simple set up with some customization in the horizon is worth to have so, load in your Blogger Draft homepage and add it away.
Via Blogger In Draft
Feb 14, 2008
I am glad the Bloggger Team is not losing the pace and got to release updates and fixes to Blogger in January and February. i hope they still got lots of the same for the whole year.
it sure would make the evolving of Blogger encouraging to endure and experience.
Updates:
- Streamlined Commenter Identity Options
- Four new Transliteration Options
- Comment Pagination every 200 comments.
- Layout and Template blog Distinction in Dashboard
Fixes:
- Fixed Persina Translations and BiDi layout issues
- Corrected Label Counts
- Almost Full Safari 3 support
- Editor Speed Boost
- Better International Dashboard Settings.
- Picasa’s BlogThis! support corrected.
- Comment Pagination exclusive of the new Blogger (v3.0)
- New Photo Upload into Header and Picture "Shrink to Fit" don`t work.
All in all a decent upgrade, i hope the next ones focus on enhancing the comment system even further while they work in new features for the summer (hopefully)
Via Blogger Buzz
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