Blogger Threaded Comment Replies: why not...

Certainly it's a cool feature to have at last the in-line replies in comments but this comes to a price...



- no more "Newer> Newest>>" links to jump to the most recent comments when there are more than 200 on a post. Instead, the most unfriendly  "load more..." link will have to be use as many times as there are pages to bring the latest comments. Of course this wouldn't be an issue if Blogger had an option to show the new comments on top.

- embedded comment location restricts customization: e.g. comment numbering scripts don't work in that mode.

- it may require to "revert widgets template to default" or "repair" your post template in order to start working.

I'm normally an early adopter of anything new from Google (except Google+), but I'll pass this one for the moment...

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New Blogger Feature: Open Link in a New Window

Until recently, the easiest way to have all links in a post to open in a new window, was to insert the following  HTML code as the first line of the page:

<base target="_blank"></base> 

But now, Blogger has got a new option to make this frequent operation much simpler...
From the Post editor, just click on Link

...and click on the box next to "Open this link in a new window"

It's not clear since when this has been implemented as I found no official announcement for this. Just ran into this option today.

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Blogger's new Template Designer

I like the simplicity of Blogger, but in some aspects it used to be far too simple. The native choice of templates used to be too limited as well as the ability to easily change them.

I ended up adopting the excellent Scarlett template and, seems this kind of template cannot be edited with the blogger layout designer, I had to spend a good deal of time customizing it without breaking its integrity. Still, I kind of reached my limit in HTML editing and now feel a bit stuck with some details I just can't fix or control the way I'd like.


Now with the official arrival of the Template Designer in Blogger, this might change. I'm considering adopting one of the sample templates and work from there to obtain a result quite similar to the current design, but with the advantage of having more control over my layout and less time to spend editing  the HTML file.


Definitely a big step ahead for Bloggers.

See this video for a quick overview.

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Finding your way on this blog

It is inevitable that questions already covered are coming back again. In particular as new visitor, you are not supposed to know that there are plenty more posts related to the one you landed on.

So check this quick tour on how to find information on this blog, your answer is likely not that far away...

Let's start by the least interesting one: the main search field

This feature is part of the standard Scarlett template design. It works, but it does not return always the most relevant results.

I have included a better search box on the right column, primarily to retrieve some comments that often contain precious information on how we sorted a problem before. This box actually searches not only the comments but the entire blog, so that's the one I'd recommend.

There's a category bar under the logo contains that will return all the topics on the main blog's categories.

For more label-based filtering like above, there's the tag cloud on the right.


Related labels are shown at the end of each post if you want to read more on the same topic.

Finally a list of related article is generated as well.

Enjoy your visit!

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One step closer to Google Wave

When I saw that little "Buzz" icon in my Gmail yesterday, I though "Oh great it's there finally, let's share some maps, pictures and documents in real time...", but I was mixing up with Google Wave.

Although Google Buzz is admittedly inspired from the Google Wave project, it is a social networking tool (kind of advanced Twitter), while Google Wave is a complete online collaboration tool that would be more suitable for working on a group project for instance (but not only).

There are already concerns about Google Buzz making you more social than you'd want so you should ensure that you control who your followers are, who you're following yourself, the privacy level of your buzz, and if you want your profile public or not.
Google Buzz is really a social networking thing, so the non-Facebook/mySpace people should ultimately consider scrolling to the very bottom of the Gmail page to turn Buzz off.


Introduction to Google Buzz:


Introduction to Google Wave
The short version:


The long version:




I want Google Wave!

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Bloody Blogger!

I don't consider myself very knowledgeable on Blogger stuff, with my first blog not yet six months old, I'm still a newbie. But I certainly learned a lot because of all the problems I had so far, and in particular this week.  

I hope this short story of my recent misadventures with Blogger will help some of you: 

I must have been on another planet, but I read only this month that Google Pages would come to an end this month, and that's where I stored my shared files! This started a cascade of consequences for me.

First: Until now, I was using Google Pages as a convenient free storage for my few files and had to look for a alternative.
I wanted to avoid as much as possible a host like filefactory.com but instead a storage giving direct access with no waiting time to the files. As I only have a handful of small files, I tried free websites like Weebly and Jimdo. One was constantly nagging me with "Website not published" even though I made it public and published several times, and the other one gave me dns errors on the early stage of the registration.
Then I came accross DriveHQ.com which free membership comes with 1GB storage. They also have a client application that allows to drag and drop files from a local PC to their server: very convenient. See a review here. There's a drawback though, only a limited quantity of bytes can be downloaded monthly.

Second: I had to change all the references to the old file server (geekandfun.googlepages.com) by the url of the new one (www.drivehq.com/file/.../PublicFolder). That part was simply done by exporting the whole blog from the settings > blog tools, then performing a full search/replace for one string to the other using Notepad++.

Third: The fun really began here: Re-importing the blog turned into a silent disaster.
Silent, because, at first, everything looked fine, but once I started to click on the links in the Recent Comments section, it lead to a 404 error! Then I realized that, upon importing the posts, blogger had renamed all my posts with a numeric suffix at the end, so a page like:
"war-of-clones.html"
was now named:
"war-of-clones21.html"

So all the local links in my blog were now wrong!
From my researches, what happens is that old deleted posts are still in blogger index, and the new one are automatically renamed. I tried leaving the new posts for a day, hopping that they would be re-indexed and the re-importing would allow to recover the original names, but it can take days before a re-indexing occurs, so I had to take a more drastic measure.

Fourth: I went to Blogger dashboard and imported both blog backup and template into a brand new blog. Then I had to re-assign the domain gadgetvictims.com from http://gadgethell.blogspot.com to http://geekandfun.blogspot.com.
Apparently, this "new" blog is in the process of being indexed right now, and everything came back to almost normal. Some links will be invalid though as Blogger still found the way to rename some posts like "wireless-pan-tilt-ip-camera.html" into "foscam-wireless-pan-tilt-ip-camera.html" but that's the price to pay to keep the readers comments safe. If you don't find a page after clicking on a link, just use the tag sphere or labels below each post to narrow down to that article, everything is still there!

I just hope that I won't have to find another file host any time soon!

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