Blogger platform gets a make-over Friday, August 15, 2008

When I logged into Blogger to write a couple of posts this morning I found a new dashboard interface - not an improvement, just a different layout. Somebody on the Blogger team was evidently bored.

"There’s a new look for the Blogger Dashboard, which we think you’ll find more attractive and functional. If you have a ton of blogs (as we do) try out the “hide” and “show all” links to help manage the list."
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Zemanta - we now do English Thursday, March 27, 2008

Back in September 2007, I wrote about Zemanta who were winners at Seedcamp. Under the headline of "we do your homework", I suggested it was a tool for lazy people to write articles and hence a sure fire winner.

Sadly, at that time it was only available in Slovenian and so of little use to me. I subsequently learnt from Sean Park, who was one of the Seedcamp judges, that they had all nervously laughed when choosing Zemanta as they really had little idea if it worked since it was all in a foreign language!

Well Zemanta has now launched a Firefox add-in version of their service in English which can be used for Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad.

I had some difficulty installing the add-in and had to resort to saving the installation file to my desktop and then dragging it into the Firefox add-in window. Thereafter it has only operated intermittantly, not always appearing when launching the blog post window in Blogger, albeit this is an alpha version.

When operating, it is definitely easy to use and throws up links and tags for common/popular words which can be easily added to a blog post, as evidenced by the liberal sprinkling of links in this post. Similarly it also provides suggested pictures/photos and articles that may be related. In each case you have the option to review a link destination before adding it, albeit I suspect others will be lazy like me and hope that the links are both valid and appropriate - if you hit a porn site by following a link Zemanta suggested, I shall be accountable but shall pass on responsibility!

Do the tool results add to the blog post? - I'm unconvinced but if the explosion of links is helpful to a reader then great.
Does it save me time? - not really, as these are links I wouldn't have otherwise added and those served up appear to be for mainstream brands and phrases, rather than industry specific terms
Will I continue to use it - yes, as there is no downside I'm aware of as yet
Would I pay for it - nope

It is a considerable improvement on their Seedcamp offering and has been well engineered, but to me, it's not a must have app and I wouldn't miss it.

Techcrunch and others seem to like it, each gushing with praise.

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Wordpress - Worth checking/comparing Friday, March 07, 2008

I confess that having started using Blogger as the host for this blog, there has been little motivation to move. Whilst it may not have all the sexy features offered by some other hosts, I didn't perceive the need for anything other than the basics. In almost 2 years of blogging, it's been fine.

Yet as with backups, it is wise to have alternates in your back pocket. Many people I know use Wordpress and are very pleased with it, mainly because it has such a breadth and depth of features.

Whilst I've had a Wordpress account, other than playing with it a little when I opened the account, it has remained dormant. However, having decided to check that the restore function of BlogBackupOnline service actually did work [it did work], I took a fresh look at the Wordpress offering. It is immediately obvious why people enthuse about it, since the configuration options are several magnitudes greater than with Blogger.

Interestingly they have already catered for users of other blogging services and enable you to directly import your blog and related comments from Blogger, Live Journal, Moveable Type and other Wordpress blog accounts.

If you're contemplating starting to blog or want a racier service, you should definitely check out Wordpress.

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Backing up your blog

Early on in blogging you quickly realise that losing your blog posts/entries would be incredibly annoying and hence should be subject to the same backup procedures you might employ for other irreplaceable data.

Of course, you could rely upon services like Blogger, to never lose your data but that seems a tad risky - for instance, they may decide to disable your account or data cente problems means it is accidentally lost. Such things are not unheard of amongst online services. Moreover, if you ever decided to migrate your blog to a different service provider or host, you would probably want to copy your posts across as well.

I've been using BlogBackupOnline since it came out in beta, which was incredibly easy to set up and feature rich, with no ongoing maintenance required. It enables you to take a full backup of your blog at a point in time and then will incrementally add to that backup thereafter.

The service allows you to restore your blog to one of four services [Blogger, Live Journal, Windows Live Spaces and Wordpress] although you should be aware that Blogger only allows 50 entries per day to be restored and so you would manually have to perform the restore function each day per 50 entries. You can also export/download your blog and the export file created will include all blog entries and comments output in the RSS 2.0 format. To date, I confess I've no experience of using the restore or export features and so can't personally verify their success, albeit writing this is prompting me to try it using an alternate service such as Wordpress.

The service is now coming out of beta with several sevices levels, one of which is a free service offering 5mb of storage. To give that context, my blog is using 3.2mb for the current 885 entries.

So, if you blog, you should obviously backup and you may as well do it for free with this incredibly easy to use service.

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Skype take down a blogger Sunday, April 29, 2007

Phil Wolff reports that Skype lawyer Seema Sharma emailed blogger Jan Geirnaert Friday afternoon. She told him his popular skype-watch.com and skype-gadgets.com blogs put him in legal jeopardy, because they use "skype" in the domain name. As consequence, these popular sites have been taken down.

What a great PR move for skype - not! Of course they have to protect their brand name, but it doesn't feel like this was a competitor trying to pass itself off as skype. Nor was the site portraying itself as an officially endorsed site.

It'll be interesting to see how the skype "big company" machine plays this one out.

Update: Robert Scoble thinks Skype did the right thing but suggests Skype could have easily licensed Jan if they felt he was a positive force.

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Hurray - Its official from Blogger. I'm not a spam blog Thursday, March 01, 2007

Yes. I'm back online and able to post again.

And only out of action for 7 or so hours since receiving my notice.

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Blogger think I am a blog spammer! Wednesday, February 28, 2007

I just went to post and got the following message

Your blog is locked

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

You won't be able to publish posts to your blog until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than a business day.

If we don't hear from you, though, we will remove your blog from Blog*Spot within a few weeks.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.



So this may be the end of the road for greatapps.

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