15 posts tagged “blogger”

Fouad Alfarhan is a Saudi blogger who has been writing to advocate greater freedom in his country. He was arrested without charge on December 11. Some bloggers have gotten together to deem today (Sunday, January 6) a day of silence, so after this post, I will not blog publicly for 24 hours. Please tell other bloggers if you feel you should, or observe the day’s silence if you wish to join in this campaign.

Now with two blogs under Wordpress, I have to say it’s OK, but it’s not that big a leap over Blogger. I still prefer Blogger for its HTML controls and there is another reason: Blogger blogs seem to get picked up in Google Blog Search more quickly. They may ping more accurately, or perhaps Google has a natural bias toward a company it owns. Now that the speed of Blogger has been sorted and there is an auto-save, my two main beefs with the service have been solved.
   Still, I can’t say I miss the standard Blogger comment forms and the Wordpress interface is a Doozie. (Or is that Duesie or Düsie?) Being able to group posts by tags and having the whole Wordpress program on our server are boons.
   Let’s say I have no one preference yet, but that Wordpress is not problem-free. But if Blogger ever upgrades again and goofs it as it did last time, I am now skilled enough on Wordpress to do the basics.

I told you that I had worse luck on computers than most people. If you go to the Blogger Help Group, most people are reporting one or two errors with the service. Me, I have encountered at least eight.

Error bX-f65o2t when publishing posts
Error bX-u8psh2 when publishing post
Error bX-8cvpw4 when managing posts
Error bX-sw238 when publishing post
Error bX-uovded when editing posts
Error bX-5kiuq3 when editing posts
Error bX-4gu5tl when publishing posts
Error bX-hdc6sh when managing posts

   I decided to stay with Blogger last week after working with Wordpress, but this is ridiculous. The service is falling over badly today and reminds me of the trouble I had when I was forced to move to ‘New Blogger’ earlier this year.

 
Fellow blogger and novelist Dawn Rotarangi has a book coming out, Ripples on the Lake, and I’d like to see it come up in the Google index, instead of restaurants in Toronto and Sydney. She writes very well on her blog, and her novel will be even more fab. So here’s a link for you, Dawn, to the highest-placed site mentioning your book so far (Real Groovy). Available June 15, and here’s a synopsis taken directly from the Real Groovy site:

A taut, tightly-written paranormal thriller about what happens when a Pakeha family unwittingly invoke an ancient tohunga’s curse. When an out-of-it Billy Delaney steals coins from a sacred rock on the shores of Lake Taupo to buy a hamburger late one night, he has no idea what he is about to unleash upon himself and his immediate family. But then Billy has always been trouble, and when the oldest of Lucy Delaney’s children, Saffron, steps in to try and take care of him yet again, trouble swarms over the Delaneys like bees on a honey pot. First Saffron and Billy’s young niece suffers an horrific traffic accident, leaving her in a coma, balanced between life and death. Then the Delaneys begin to die horribly, one by one. It is left to a disbelieving Saffron and an unlikely ally, Nick—the burnt out war photographer trying to piece his life back together in a country backwater—to try to appease the wrath of the ancient tohunga Tama Ariki, whose quest for utu for his slain mokopuna echoes down the years. Set in and around Lake Taupo, the author creates a subtle web of superstition and the supernatural, bringing together both Maori and Celtic imagery to create a paranormal adventure that is pure Aotearoa.

[Cross-posted] I have been reading Bryce’s Journal. For those who don’t know of Bryce Carter, he is a Virginia Tech student who live-blogged the events of that horrible day when Cho Seung-Hui opened fire on campus. I’m saddened for Bryce and the many others affected by the massacre, and saddened for those accusing him of exploitation.
   Bloggers want and choose to share, for the most part. That is all. I think some are envious of Bryce for the media attention he gained by being on campus during the shooting. It’s worth quoting his words (original emphasis):

I want to declare that I am offended that people are allowing this to become a political debate. People are dead. My friends could be dead. Forget bickering about trivia. Now is not the time or the place. It is the media’s job to report to the public these stories. Take it as you wish. I’m not the media. I’m just me.

   Most bloggers hear you, Bryce. We know what it is like to want to share, and then have some get the wrong end of the stick. Blogging is seldom about ego or offence, but a plain desire to tell a personal story. It is human to wish to share—one would have thought more would understand.
   And since the wounds of April 16 have not yet healed for most of us, it’s worthwhile reading Bryce’s words. I’m reminded of events such as July 7 and 9-11, and how mass murders will keep creeping up in the news till we, as a people, change how we behave.
   The comments to my Va. Tech post make interesting reading, especially the third one by X: THC. As Bryce records at his blog, there is a lot of emotion now among the Hokies, and among Americans in general. People are reaching out to one another. The worst imaginable tragedy at the polytechnic has given way to some of the best, most generous human traits.
   The trick is to keep our caring nature going. A friend of mine was a waiter and noted how people were nice to him for a fortnight after 9-11. After that, his customers became bastards again.
   I hope this does not recur. We need to change how we are—and this massacre reminds us of how we let one of our own fellow human beings commit such unspeakable acts.

Yes, finally! Blogger has a survey. Time to rip in to them. At least they are listening, but this is ex post facto.

What if anything do you find frustrating or unappealing about the new version of Blogger?
1. It is slower and less flexible: republishing is a pain, and I would like the option of doing just the index, not the whole blog.

2. Could not easily format tag field as I am using a custom template. When I decided to remove all my tags, the Blogger system crashed on republication (error code bX-7cgtlg).

3. Site feeds no longer grouped by date. They became random: I had 2006 posts mixed with 2007 posts, with no logic as to which would be chosen.

4. With the message 'Your Publish is Taking Longer than Expected. To continue waiting for it to finish, click here', the link did not work initially.

5. We should have been given the option to remain with the old Blogger, but I was forced to change. You are still supporting a lot of old Blogger blogs, and you should have continued to do so, especially while the new one was so unreliable.

6. The big dislike: if I log in to Blogger, I am also logged in to Google. I do not wish for the two to be that closely associated. If I search on Google, I don't want to get the impression Google is watching. I do not want my preferences and searches watched like that.

7. I have to regularly re-sign in to Blogger even though I never logged out, and I am still logged in to Google. This, admittedly, has happened less over the last week.

8. The abandonment of nice, short Blogger usernames in favour of a longer email address. On some blogs, Blogger says it gives me the option of using either my Google account or my old Blogger account. Fact: using my old Blogger account will not work. It's like you've pulled all the plugs out and left those of us who liked your old service totally in the cold.

What changes or additional features would you like to see for Blogger?
None. I am switching to another platform as soon as I get some spare time. I am surprised that in all your beta testing, all these bugs remained.

What do you like best about Blogger?
HTML editing, but not much more besides any more. You used to be a nice Dodge Dart, now you are a Dodge Aspen.

As much as my first impressions of Facebook were negative, I have to say that at least its customer service is responsive.
   Justin replied to my questions today, probably as he woke, and clarified that the repeated posts from my blog were related to a bug, but he says it’s Blogger. I still don’t think the bug should have been there, but if it’s a Blogger bug, I find that very easy to believe.
   As to Facebook’s relevance to me, I am still not sure.

[Cross-posted] I’ve now read the WordPress site about what their service offers, and want to shift my Blogger blog over, after endless troubles with a new service that is inferior in most ways to its predecessor. My question now is: anyone want to tell me what their Blogger to WordPress transitions were like? Did all the posts go over smoothly? Can I make a WordPress blog look like this one and host it at the same place? Can I hack my posts’ HTML?
   I’d rather hear from users, rather than brochureware pages. The computer industry has let me down too often for me to believe anyone.

New Blogger’s site feeds do not work, if an email from my friend Johnnie Moore is any indication. He is right: I just put my mouse over the old Atom feed button, which used to be correctly linked at old Blogger, and it gives the wrong URL—regardless of whether I have this set right in my new Blogger settings. I have just hard-coded the URL into the template code, rather than rely on the string that Blogger’s template uses (as it seems that old templates and new templates do not appear to be compatible).
   In the old days, I could choose for only the home page to be updated. I no longer have that choice, and I am going through the process of waiting for the entire blog to be republished in another IE7 tab right now. Only thing is, as I typed this post, the following came up at Blogger: