31.12.08 | Posted by
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While not all Blogs or Bloggers have Navigation Menus. if you were looking to add one or redo the one you got with something nice yet easy to do. the always nice Annie BlueSky from Blogger University got you covered.
She is showing everyone how she did got the CSS navigation menu she is now sporting so anyone that want to have it, can get it.
A cool CSS navigation Menu via BlogU
The change should reflect from
Looking forward to that.
*Update: edited
*Update 2: something went wrong with my domain vendor, will update when it gets finally done
It is rare that Blogger in Draft maintenance reports happen at the same time the ones at regular Blogger but there are Blogger in Draft features that do mess up or cause a little mayhem in regular Blogs using them making them a spread out problem.
That is why all updates of Blogger in Draft are focused on the BLog List
The Blog list causes lots of problems where it made lots of Blogs suddenly not load and report a Error code. the good news is that given they were forced to spend quality time with that feature is very probable it can be released shortly unless they kept it for the rumored general Blogger update for this summer.
I would hope for the latter because The Blog List is still not anywhere near as good as it should be considering it is one of those features that Blogger should had since 2006.
Blogger in Draft Bug Fixes for May 9th
Glad to see that Blogger is taking bug fixing and tweaking more seriously lately. i hope that is because they are preparing Blogger for this year Big Update and not just to justify that they indeed do something.
Having taken that into consideration here is the quoted resumed bug fixing and updating:
- Layouts now has a blog.pageName datum that gives the name of the current page without the “[Blog Name]: ” prefix that blog.pageTitle adds.
- Picture page element can now optionally link the picture to a URL.
- Warnings and better handling of interrupted video uploads.
- Pictures shot in burst mode on Sony Ericsson phones are now rotated correctly.
- Blog URL now updates correctly when switching between Blog*Spot and FTP hosting.
- Usability improvements to photo deletion workflow on the delete post page.
- “Cancel” button on delete post page no longer has unnecessary
quotation marks.- Miscellaneous translation improvements.
- Profile URLs and threading data are now available via Atom feed.
These bug fixes and updates were not for problems or needs that had weeks but months. so these are fixes and updates that must have been in the back burner. hence my remarks at the beginning of the post.
via Blogger Buzz
Also considering that you can still also add text and photos along your videos if you also need them considering your are using Google Docs.
Embedded Presentations
via Blogger Buzz and Google Docs Blog
Imp at Consuming Experience sure got my work cut our for me. she made a well thought post on the use of Blogger Scheduled Posting and even added the use of Aditya "Keep current time" userscript with it.
Not much for me to add becuase her posts are always good as they go.
I did had the opportunity to test Schedulled posting under several scenarios and it works fine, it works posting by email, it works by phone, it works with external Blog Editors as expected.
So there you go.
Blogger scheduled posts: postpone or delay blog post to future date
Two years have passed from the time i started Bloggeratto with this post:
And some months since i restarted it with this other one:
I made quite a lot of screw ups and mistakes with this blog from that may in 2006 that i started Bloggeratto with the help of Aditya .
I started it and i was happy with the blog. i blogged in a regular basis and did it from May 1 of to Dec 31 of 2006 and then i stopped.
I never truly told the whole story on the why i stopped with this blog and would like to recapitulate just so it stays in the record even if just to amuse myself later:
I.-The Back Up incident.
Unfortunately i lost a template backup i never recovered and things were not the same. it was not the fact that the template got lost, it was the fact that the template got lost and it was both Blogger Fault but more than anything my fault because i didn`t had kept my periodic template back up.
That made me truly mad about it.
Most Bloggers would say:
What is the big deal?,
the thing was the kind of extensive code work Aditya and me had put into the Blog. it was modded to a point of no return where there was no going back and just going forward.
To this day, the features that Bloggeratto had at the moment i lost the template combined with the very few Aditya developed for me and for him at the very end of 2006 was and is stuff i still haven't seen in any blog at the same time or that it simply don`t exists for that matter.
That is quite shocking considering that it has passed well over a year from that point.
II.- The New Blogger A.K.A Blogger v3.0
It is not an accident that i was not the only one who left from Blogger with the arrival of new Blogger. almost everything of what i called the Blogger Elite (Bleet) went off with me or moved off to Wordpress and later to Tumblr.
1.-Categories were the hackers muse, the muse died
One big problem that the Blogger v3.0 took care of even if badly was of Categories. a problem that generated incredible amount of innovation and imaginative hackery from lots of Bloggers.
That problem was our big struggle. the big question mark. and i must say that once it was removed. the Blogger Hacking community dried off and leaved to greener pastures.
2.-Republishing sucked but actual previewing and template building ruled
The other big problem Blogger v3.0 solved was post publishing. it is now insane to remember how post publishing worked in Blogger v2.0-1.0.
While Blogger now has instant publication of posts without having the hurdles of republishing. the new model killed true previewing. something that was essential to picking into Blogger guts and developing hacks, mods and methods to do cool things.
What i mean is that Blogger used to show you a preview that was a TRUE preview of a post with the working code as it should show when finally published. the same goes for the template.
Having this was so incredibly important that we only noted what we had lost when we didn't had it anymore. now developing features in a active blog was not only hard but almost impossible thanks to a inherent problem that still exists to this day in the new Blogger. the cache of the blog jams, at some point your template is jammed and not showing the changes and resolving it is a pain.
Also is the fact that since there is no true preview, the only way to know if something worked out in a active blog or not is publishing it. if it didn't` your chances of messing up your blog are high.
Everything you now did/do from this point had to be very well tested elsewhere in a test blog or had to be able to obviate the rules of the new Blogger model. this scared away curiosity and experimentation. it is never the same dealing with a contentless blog than with a active one.
III-The new Template language, The Blog Reboot and the new restrictions.
Blogger v3.0 introduced variables and a new template language scheme against the simple but powerful and specific $BloggerTags$ that most now knew from memory, me included. this changed everything. this changed the game completely.
if you were a Old Blogger user you had to pretty much throw away close to 7 years of previous now given for granted knowledge and start over.
This was not only for what you knew but for your Blog too, imagine having worked on a Blog template for months and then to know you had to start over. that is equivalent of a tornado wrecking your house and being forced to build another one for most users.
That is not a easy thing to do. so is the case that even the most advanced in the Bleet bailed at the idea and if they didn`t leaved, they simply stopped trying like before because the effort was not worth it when the new cool stuff was about to arrive with the modern Social Networks and the plugin based model of Wordpress that made Blogging Platforms be able to keep up with the times as fast as it was needed, compared to the hosted solutions you have to conform with when you are in Blogger because of Google neglect.
Then you got the new restrictions in place supposedly to increase security and prevent spam. did it worked?. HELL NO. and thanks to those restrictions we lost some of the coolest previously trivial features archived in Blogger v2.0 .
IV.- The Labeled Mess
Beyond what i already said and beyond the feature neglect from Google. the New Blogger had a another huge Flaw introduced by Google:
Labels serving two functions at the same time.
Tagging got elemental as a way to specify the notion of a topic in a post and to make it findable outside your blog and in it.
Categories serve as a way to filter a theme/genre/main subject in a blog and classify the posts that way. that is the point of categorizing.
Labels, in the way Google uses them are pretty much a fake name for keywords and grouped keywords that do a query and are served as such.
This makes Blogger Labels neither Categories or Tags but simply shortcuts for keywords.
Why is this bad?. because it limits you beyond Google and it takes away the chance of having them separated like in pretty much all the other platforms where you don`t have a endless list of categories with a matching endless list of repeated tags.
This is of course solvable by using the Labels as well thought categories and then tagging directly into your posts without using Blogger for that. and tag to your heart content.
V.-The New Start, The New scene, The New New
1.-Walking the new road
So Bloggeratto got to Two whole years from being created and One of actual "continuous" content. that makes me feel as if the blog only has one year old even if the actual time passed is double than that.
A good fit to fix that would be to up the pace a lot and outpace my original output and also to re-write the year i was gone even if it takes me a full year to do so in time for the Third Anniversary.
2.-Saying Hi to the new Neighbors.
I have already identified the new stars of Blogger and i must say it is funny how it turned into developing customized Widgets for your Blogs, porting Templates from Wordpress and Tumblr into Blogger and also the new focus on having original themes with adjusted third party solutions that are mostly JS Widgets and JS Widgets-Apps.
I bet that if Phydeaux3 is not dead and still paying attention, even him must be amused by how things turned.
3.-More Cowbell
New content, and make it play it out hoping it works out.
At least i am now very used to blog and write daily. so it should not be a problem even if i am facing this alone for a change.
Nuff Said
Update *edited*
I guess they did put this previously Draft Blogger feature in the fast track. or at least that is what it seems like. but i bet that the sudden criticism from various Mainstream Blogs and figures from the competing platforms helped for it to get released in only 44 days. time that is still slow. no reason this feature should not have seen the light in one month anyway.
I am of course among those who criticized the lack of such feature to begin with and pleaded for it to be released to all as soon as possible.
Glad to see that it was exactly what was on the mind of lots more than me. so all in all. good job Blogger.
I also reiterate that the reason why this feature was needed to be active for all was that those who actually would use the feature are not posting from the Blogger Dashboard but from a Blog Editor or a Phone. so i also welcome this feature to, because it will be easier for me to keep Bloggeratto updated.
The last thing to note is that there are no details on this feature yet, and by details i mean it is not confirmed it works 100% well with Blog Editor Apps, by Phone or for FTP users . a reassuring remark by Blogger would be nice, even then it is more than likely than it works as it should given it is all about the time stamp assigned to a post
via Blogger Buzz
No, this is not a continuation of my own posts talking about this over a year ago. this time is coming from a member of the Digital Press at The Standard:
I've been using Blogger since 2004. As a
basic blogging platform, it works. But when I read yet another
account of spammers taking over the service, it made my blood boil. The
problem isn't just that Google has failed to put all of the security and
anti-spam pieces together. No, what really bothers me is Google has neglected
Blogger for years, while concentrating its efforts on newer acquisitions and
higher-profile services, such as Google Maps.
Ian is of course mildly wrong here, Google not only has neglected Blogger, it always has acted this way with acquisitions that were either not invented/developed at Google Labs or assimilated into the Google Brand. some notable mentions not including Blogger are Picasa, Dodgeball and Jaiku.
Flagrant examples of leaving properties to rot. in the case of Dodgeball the case is even more sad because one of the founders resigned angry at Google when 6 month (or so) passed without Google letting Dodgeball do anything to save themselves from irrelevancy against the monster that followed later (Twitter).
The acquisition of Jaiku is also a case of tech that has not moved anywhere. any smart web tech follower would see that in the scheme of things, Dodgeball and Jaiku could or should make a combination of some sort as a way to battle Twitter. the first option of Google when shopping around was not Jaiku but Twitter. it is said (rumors) that Evan Williams (Pyra,Blogger and Odeo) was the reason Twitter didn`t sold to Google. Evan knows pretty well how Google works better than no one and i can assure that if they had been acquired by Google, the Twitter Craze would have may never happened, it would have got called Jaiku Craze instead because of how Google Operates with Acquisitions.
The only exception being YouTube and that was because YouTube was already huge having the upper hand at the negotiation all the time.
Returning to Blogger, Ian commits another mistake in the way he points out:
Blogger is just now rolling out a feature that lets bloggers
publish in the future.
Err no, testing a feature for future roll out, is not rolling it out Ian. you may want to replace "rolling out" with "testing" because it gives the impression the feature is out for all even if you are linking to the Blogger in Draft blog.
I also don`t care about the Blogger Splog controversy. i have known for a long time that Google makes a decent amount of money of Spammers and that they also used to serve another purpose.
Right now boiling all down to wanting the most needed things. i think the most needed things at Blogger are a Revamped Comment System (the truly worst part of Blogger by far) and a update to the Dashboard, Post Editor, Template Editor and Profiles.
Just making them work better and giving them a decent update to 2008. i mean, even Orkut looks better than Blogger now...
The latter are usually always covered by me over there, but never in detail because i am there to report, not to tutorialize or go deep into the implementation of such Widgets.
I think i can bring those cases to Bloggeratto either Widget by Post or in Resume when viable.
Could be a good way to give a more Rounded coverage on certain widgets that deserve such treatment. i would then follow suite and post a list of those posts in Widgets Lab that lead here.
Convergence and Subject re-use FTW!.
I think it Makes sense and it lets me shamelessly promote myself. what is not to like?
I will not deny that it has been hard to maintain my track on this blog, not because i don`t want to post in it. but because how i used to post in it. i was used to do long posts in Bloggeratto. doing long posts is no longer that cool and everyone is on the train to Blogging Economization. The downsizing of writing whatever you had in your mind into a resume of what you have in mind.
I don`t get used to the idea of that. i am trying to separate my channels of attention and expression so they don`t overlap and then i can find different angles to cast into the world.
The New New
I finally found the right way of continuing Bloggeratto plus i always have done. the first thing was to identify from where the new Blogger based talent blogs that are improving Blogger and check if they were constant enough for me to bother taking them into account then it was about the rest of the content. i have nailed it. i have found enough Blogger based Bloggers worth of my time and yours.
Blogger Fashionetti and The Re-Use of Other People Clothes.
The most dramatic change i noted in Blogger is that you can now find any Wordpress based template in Blogger or that people can port pretty much any design from Wordpress, Tumblr and elsewhere into Blogger.
While my friend Aditya would argue this means nothing. i think it is a good deal. that proves the point that sometimes the template do make the blog or help it compensate. now no one can say that Blogger don`t has the cool themes Wordpress has because Blogger users have ported the best already.
there are also wonders of adaptation and modification, from what were wordpress or tumblr templates turned into something else entirely. something i did here in Bloggeratto with the help of aditya almost two years back.
Then you got the new designs executed in Blogger blogs. i am pleased to see that there are some quite creative people that managed to make their blogger blosgs very pretty.
Blogger Concept Bloggers.
A special trait to be found more in Blogger based blogs is ultra specific Blogging. it goes beyond niche blogging, i do that in Widgets Lab and it is harder than it looks if you don`t want things to turn into infologging.
I mean Blogs about very specific things just to give some offbeat examples, i have found hundreds of these blogs in Blogger and never anywhere else. blogs blogging about Sharks, Photoshop errors, prank calls, etc,etc,etc.
That is something i also want to cover, it is that unique.
There are also concept blogs like the now inescapable Post Secret that take things further on the notion of having "unique content".
Brand Blogging
Closing Up
Those are some of the points i want to take from. just figured that it would be nice to share what i was thinking lately and to confirm the blog is not dead or comatose again.
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.
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
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:
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
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
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
i will no longer set things as i am announcing them for facts, that is a very scripted thing to do, i will opt to go more for the novel aproach. the novel aproach is to simply state where i see myself going with this blog and where i would like to see it go. i do this instead because i do believe in not commiting the same errors from the past.
I.- The Template.
I made several templates for Bloggeratto, make no mistakes, i ended up liking none of them, one of my main problems is that in the new blogger you are no longer able to correctly manage the design of your blog as integral thing without it being live, that means not only the design of the layout and general theme, but a fully featured template with blog specific features and hacks. trying to pre-do all those changes is not only time consuming but ultimately fruitless unless you set up pre made content to go along with it.
Part of it is ,because when Blogger adopted Instant Publication instead of the reloading model we had before, preview mode got broken. you cannot longer preview a post that contain executing code without publishing it and correcting later, something i find a pain since i am not a talented coder at all so i commit lots of mistakes.
So, that is why i didn`t started with a new look this time around, i may try some other themes to kicks things out while i decide what i want to do but given the nature of the new blogger you are now gonna have to come along in the ride. so i hope you don`t mind having to see my stumbles too.
II.- The Direction of the Blog
If it is not broken, not change it comes to mind as a phrase that would be suitable here. the only thing i would add to it is that "keep it the same but scale the new in". that means that i will also resume the plans i had back then, and that was to conserve the Blogger Centric stance of the blog while looking at the other main platforms and general issues on the other blogs.
III.- The Content
One of my ideas from before bailing out still came along to today. and giving the situation where i find that me posting about old stuff as if it were news is completely out of the question, but at the same time i find myself cringing about all the important and relevant stuff i didn`t posted in all this time i was away, so i will resurrect the idea of Retro-Posting.
I will explain what that entails at full detail later but the quick explanation of it is that the whole year i was away in worth of post will appear into the archives of the blog as if i had actually posted them, the only giveaway will be a tag line at the end that will indicate that the content was retro-posted into the blog.
What is the point of it?. i find the idea amusing. interesting and as a way to bend the rules of not only posting but what constitutes blogging to my liking, after all, i do know that a search engine records will start counting a blog age from the first time content from certain url was indexed into it., it will keep a record from that moment and all later references are usually based on the dates indicated in the posts plus a time of indexation, the latter is the one i see matters the most.
So, given there is a full disclosure to my readership of what i am doing,i see no harm been done into it. and it will bring calm to my Obsessive- Compulsive side of my mind.
It will also bring traffic of course, i am not pretending such a thing is not also the point of trying this experiment.
Other things as new post threads will appear as the order of time, ideas and news present to me, so, the only thing i can hope is people will tag alone and read the blog.
One of the things that i never had complains about Blogger is definitely its vast languages support, even from the early days, sure, it only supported 10 back then, but for back then, that was huge because it truly showed that Blogger was a global thing.
Past the support of 30 languages is where it gets though, because that means you are now supporting the languages that are without a doubt the hardest either to talk or to display languages around, either by supporting Hindi as blogger has already done or languages that are pretty much less spoken than dead languages as it is the Finnish language, but they are not the hardest to support from a display focus, the hardest are the ones that now are being incorporated to Blogger support, and that is Arabic, Persian and of course Hebrew.
They are hard not only because of the font and because they need to be rendered perfectly but because they are from right to left so everything must be adapted to that.
But now, that is water under the bridge and the support is there, a summary of what has now been incoporated to blogger can be read as follows:
Changing your language preferences and settings
To see the Blogger interface in one of these languages, just use the menu on your Dashboard. You can also choose your language on Blogger’s homepage and via the “Language” link in the footer of most pages.
Right-to-left templates
For Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew blogs, we will also rearrange your template to read more logically from right to left. So, a blog that once looked like this:
Bidirectional text editing
We’ve also added right-to-left and left-to-right buttons to Blogger’s post editor. They’ll appear if your Dashboard language or your blog’s language setting is for a right-to-left language.
A more detailed notes on the matter can be read in the Blogger Buzz
No, i have not gone away again, and yes i do real ALL comments, messages and e-mails.
Will the blog be able to be better than before?; i think it will, things have changed quite a bit with Blogger while i was gone even if most of the limitations are still in place, so are the advantages and the chaotic freedom it offers.
And while most will not even remember this blog and almost all the people i knew that were active in the Blogger platform have left Blogger now or lay inactive, i still look forward to dwell into it and see who i can meet while doing so.
There is not much to say right now about where the blog will go but giving the letters and the poll i put here, i will find the balance of being Blogger centric and covering what is passing outside Blogger.
Thanks to the people that still keeps Bloggeratto in their Feedreader of choice (300) and those who visit daily (200) even when the blog was pretty much dead.
That was it, Bloggeratto Officially resumes to Active duty.
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