All Things Blogger

Feedback Fail

2012-01-26T16:38:00.002-05:00

I read a post about a site that blew up in terms of visitors because it was on a popular site. The developer had to deal with an overwhelming number of new visitors. One of the pains was the form submission. I never heard of the site. When I visited it, I saw a contact form on the bottom of the page.

However there was verbage that the contact form results were ignored. In fact, the form did not submit anything anywhere. Can you say fail? If you don't want feedback, then you don't have to have a place to submit feedback. But if you waste my time with a feedback form that you ignore, then guess what? I ignore you.

I won't even provide a link to this bozo's site. Don't want to drive any more traffic to it. Respect your visitors and users. Otherwise the bad karma will bite you in the end.

Blogging Platform

2011-11-20T02:19:00.002-05:00

Just read a post about a guy trying to decide upon a blogging platform. He passed over Blogger due to a lack of control. Ummm okay. He tried out Wordpress but gave that up too. He ended up choosing Jekyll.

Generating a blog post for this dude under Jekyll amounts to redeploying his site. He needed to enter a bunch of commands at the shell script to do this. He patted himself on the back for sticking the commands in a script. There is just one problem. He needs to be at the command promopt to issue the commands. No blogging from a phone or through email anymore. Oh well.

I am all down for putting power in the hands of the blogging. However easy of blogging is tops for me. I should not have to pull teeth just to get out a blog post. No thanks Jekyll. Blogger is fine for me.

Blog Comments

2011-10-13T15:55:00.002-04:00

I was reading the blog over at Betable. They were talking about great music from video games. I recalled some of the sounds of old from games I used to play. It was strange that nobody was commenting on this post. So I decide to add my 2 cents and chime in.

After entering my info, I the submit button. At first I thought that perhaps I did not click the button successfully. There was no feedback from the browser that it was waiting for the click to process. Then I saw that the Submit button changed its text to Submitting. That was 10 minutes ago.

Yep. This thing is hung. Left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I think this was the first time I visited the Betable blog. It was probably be my last as well.

New Bloggers

2011-09-01T09:13:00.003-04:00

It is always nice to see new bloggers entering the blogosphere. Today I checked out a tutorial by Chase Gale. His layout is nice looking. I especially like how he tags the code to distinguish it and make it easier to read.

I recall back when I started blogging. I thought I was ready to take over the world. Blogging has helped me establish my voice online. Now I am not a Dot Net developer. So I am not going to be following the details of Chase's example. I can, however, enjoy a good new post and a newcomer to the blog game.

Service Unavailable

2011-07-10T13:08:00.003-04:00

These days I find that Blogger is almost unusable. I get the same error many times when I try to sign in or add images to my blog. What the heck is going on here? Things were not always this bad. Blogger used to be tight. Now I can barely get a post up.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the new Google Blogs transition. I also hear that Blogger (or Google Blogs) is getting an upgrade. As for me, I would prefer the old version if it would be stable. These problems are in addition to issues I have with formatting when images are added. Sheesh.

I realize that Blogger is a free service. It is starting to feel like I am getting what I paid for this. Damn. I might have to search out some alternatives. Maybe a paid blogging service would guarantee better results. Then again, there are other free options like WordPress or TypePad. I will let you know what I find out.

Google Blogs

2011-07-06T13:44:00.003-04:00

Pretty soon Google will be retiring the Blogger brand. Instead it will be called Google Blogs. WTF? Blogger is what we have been using all along. I know Google likes to put its name on stuff. But come on.

It looks like Google is doing the same thing for Picasa. The name is changing to match Google. The only thing Google has bought that is still safe is YouTube. At least YouTube will still be YouTube. For now.

All this name changing seems to be taking a back seat to the new Google +1 business. This is Google's answering to social networking. It is said to be a Twitter killer. The service seems more like FaceBook to me. For now I am ignoring the thing. But Google +1 is all over the news.

Product Blog

2011-07-01T16:23:00.002-04:00

I want to put up a blog to gain eyeballs to a product web site I need to put up. It seems the simplest thing would be to use Blogger. Now I do not want to run off the blogspot domain. Blogger lets you host the blog anywhere. Here is the question. Is Blogger the right choice?

One of the reasons I am contemplating jumping to another content management system is that I have been having problems with Blogger. The thing seems to mess up the formatting of my post when I put a picture in there. For now my work around is to work in Edit Html mode. However that is not the best for me. I am not sure if Blogger does not support my browser, or if it just a bug, or what. I do know this is a major inconvenience.

I have also browsed around to see what other people are doing. Many sitemasters recommend Wordpress. I have never used the thing. But I am tying out new things. Maybe I should give it a test run. Either way I am going to be making my decision soon. Right after I get a domain, I will want to drive traffic there immediatly. What better way to do that than to start up and regularly write posts to a blog?

Writing Handbook

2011-04-05T16:52:00.002-04:00

I just went though a university handbook on writing. Use the active voice in your sentences. Do not use nouns that are verbs plus "-ion" at the end. Cut down on the number of words.

Short verbs are best. Skip the word "of". Instead use apostrophe plus "s". Remove clauses such as it is, it was, and there is. Vagueness is poor. That is, do not use area or degree or factor or situation.

Skip the big words. Get rid of multiple words string together. I can use these rules myself. I might have to work very hard when composing my prose.

Line Feed Failure

2011-03-30T10:10:00.003-04:00

Recently I have found a weird behavior in Blogger. I press the Enter key when I am typing text in new posts to separate paragraphs. However once my blog post gets published, the carriage return and line feeds disappear. The result is that all my text is in one big blob on my blog.

Now I know a little HTML. So I go back and manually edit my posts. I click on the Edit HTML tab. Then I put in some HTML to force hard breaks between my paragraphs. However I should not have to do all this. Come on Blogger? What are you doing?

The Blogroll

2011-03-05T00:53:00.003-05:00

I have not had a lot of time to talk about blogging recently. That's in part because I have been learning the JavaScript language. This might be a temporary fad. I really see myself getting deeper into writing code using Java this year.

If I do get proficient at Java, I think I might have a shot at getting a job with IBM Corporation. They got some interesting enterprise level projects that I have a great interest in. I also have the domain knowledge to back it up.

With the rise of FaceBook, some think blogging may become extinct. I have not caught the FaceBook buzz. For me, blogging is the best way of mass distributing information in an easy way. I plan to continue blogging in the future.

Bing Controversy

2011-02-02T10:36:00.000-05:00

Google has accused Microsoft of using Google search results for Bing. They say that Bing is cheating. Google got a response from Microsoft that was vague. They then declared this response meant that Microsoft was admitting that they were stealing Google search results for Bing. All of this info was released on the Search Engine Land web site.

Microsoft quickly came out firing. They state that "we do not copy Google's results." They use about a thousand signals for their search algorithm. They did admit that their original email to Google was not entirely clear. They also call Googles antics a stunt. I am sure as Bing becomes more popular, there will be more to this war.

Google Staffing

2011-01-26T10:01:00.003-05:00

Google has reported that they hired a whopping 4500 people this past year. And they anticipate 2011 to be an even bigger hiring year. Their previous record was 2007 when they hired 6000 people.

There are a lot of big new projects going on at Google. They are working on a web operating system. They are doing work on instant search. And there is even a project to have a computer drive a car.

All of this is very interesting to me. I had thought I heard rumors that Google actually laid off employees last year. Let's hope that they are actually hiring people. The economy needs it.

Blogger Basics

2011-01-03T14:59:00.002-05:00

I just finished skimming through one of those dummies guides to using Blogger. Strangely enough, many of the ideas in the book were more geared towards Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I do want to point out some of the Blogger specific information I learned.

Blogger might make blogging simple. However the Blogger platform is not for beginners. You can do some more advanced stuff with it if you like. Here is something I do not practice that much myself. You should fill in your profile as it is very important to your readers. Put the best info at the top of your profile.

By now you should know that Blogger provides you with templates to guide how your blog will look. However you may opt to use third party templates. That will ensure you blog does not look like everybody else's. Finally you should get in the habit of writing controversial pieces. It will cause a stir and that is good for your blog.

Google Search

2010-07-01T14:49:00.002-04:00

I saw a flowchart on how Google search actually works. It was quite involved. Let me share some of the highlights. To start with, there are Google bots out there crawling web content. They follow links on the pages they find. Google then indexes the page titles and content that the bots crawl.

When you type in some search terms, Google uses synonyms as well to find matches. The results set is capped at 1000 hits. The ones shown have the highest page rank and authority. There is a also a lot of ad processing that goes on in tandem with the organic search results.

Filters are also applied to the results. Popular terms from today's news get a boost. Local issues of interest also get some priority. I tell you. This is all very interesting stuff to me. Thanks to the PPCBLOG for sharing the info.

WebM Legalities

2010-05-25T17:47:00.003-04:00

Previously I had written about how Google's WebM and VP8 may provide a free alternative to video formats. Well this legal issue has received a lot of buzz recently. I read some legal discussions and want to talk more about this.

First let's look at the components of WebM. You got the spec. Then you have both an encoder and decoder. These last two are just reference implementations. The idea is that somebody will improve and replace them. They are only what we call building blocks to the technology.

Let's look closely at another legal video case. Microsoft licenses VC1 free of charge. However VC1 comes from MPEG4. Therefore Microsoft actually does pay royalties to MPEG-LA. They just eat the cost for Windows users. On2, the creator of VP8 which got bought by Google, has done their patent due diligence for VP8. They knew about the existing patents. Then they worked around those patents to produce something new and original.

Catch the Wave

2010-05-22T13:48:00.001-04:00

Google released Google Wave to the public this week. It is supposed to enable real time communications. Google wants you to use it to collaborate with others. Wave is a web app. Google says that it may look like, merge with, or possibly integrate with Gmail in the future.

Google Wave was released to developers last year. Then Google made it available to a select few, who then had the ability to invite people to use it with them. Some of those people sold invites via eBay. LOL. Now everybody can access to the tool.

The app is written in the Java programming language. It is supposed to allow you to have conversations and work on a document at the same time. Waves are actually XML documents. You modify the document like you would a Wiki. Google plans to open source the code some day.

Froyo

2010-05-21T14:33:00.000-04:00

There is a lot of buzz about the latest version of the Android operating system. This would be version 2.2, also known as Froyo. Unlike the iPhone, it supports Flash. It also allows tethering. That means you can use your phone as a WiFi hotspot.

Android is the name of the mobile operating system by Google. They obtained in years ago when they bought startup Android Inc. Since then they have been releasing updates to the operating system. Different versions have been named Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, and now Froyo. In case you do not know, froyo means frozen yogurt.

Android makes used of the Linux kernal to get things done. You can write apps using the Java programming language in Android. Version 2.2 has not actually shipped yet. It might be a couple months before you can buy a phone with Froyo on it.

Froyo and Android represent a challenge to the dominant Apple iPhone. Apple Corporation has the lead in the mobile device market. But all is not well in the land of the iPhone. Some people are complaining about dropped calls using the iPhone. We shall see how pleased users are with Froyo. Flash in general might be a good thing, but its use may eat up your phone battery. It might also cause the phone to overheat.

VP8 Patent Attack

2010-05-21T10:53:00.003-04:00

Previously I wrote about Google's new WebM and VP8. They are an open source alternative for video formats. This is in sharp contrast to the H.264 standard which requires a license. Big companies like Apple and Microsoft use H.264. Google also currently pays the license for YouTube videos in H.264 format. However that all might be changing due to VP8.

Larry Horn, CEO of MPEG LA, has said that they are looking into creating a patent pool license for VP8. Google says they did their due diligence with VP8 and On2, the company they bought that developed VP8. Industry seems to be backing VP8. Google is already using VP8 to encode YouTube videos. There is a battle forming here for the future of video.

MPEG-LA is a firm that negotiates claims for patent holders. Some call them patent trolls. A good reason for that might be their assertion that nobody can create a new video codec without infringing upon their patents. Nice. We will see how this plays out. There is big money in video patent licensing. So you know there will be a big battle over VP8.

Google VP8

2010-05-20T13:26:00.004-04:00

Google has come out with their VP8 video file format. The specification has a lot of C code in it. Some have complained that the spec is not precise enough. Google says the spec is in a final state.

A competing standard is H.264. VP8 borrows some pieces from H.264. And VP8 might be a bit slower and not as good.

The exciting news is that VP8 is being released under an open source license with no royalties required. Google got the technology when they acquired On2. This is the company that produced VP6, which was used in flash. Other formats like H.264 used in IE9 require a paid license to use.

Browsers like Firefox, Opera, and of course Chrome will support VP8. Also expect YouTube videos to be converted to VP8 format.

Google Docs

2010-04-26T23:01:00.002-04:00

Google acquired word processing and spreadsheet technology from other companies. They then integrated these apps into a suite. Recently the suite has been rewritten to focus on collaboration functionality. The collaboration works in real time. Two people can work on the same document at the same time. The changes are merged instantaneously.

The entire application suite is called Google Apps. The key apps for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation is called Google Docs. The new versions ensure that Microsoft Word documents keep their formatting when opened in Google’s app. The Google spreadsheet functionality does not have all the features of Microsoft Excel. Power users are expected to stick with Excel. This might be the pattern of the future. Power users keep Microsoft Office.

One drawback with the new versions from Google is that you must be connected to the net for them to run. There are reportedly 25 million Google app accounts out there. The costs are $50 per year for each user. Microsoft will need to provide an online option in Office 2010 to stay relevant.

Big Payout

2010-04-05T20:28:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I posted a new entry on my Micro ISV blog about iPhone development. It had been a long time since I had any posts there. Then a wonderful thing happened. There were a lot of clicks on that blog.

I have AdSense enabled on the blog. Here is the weird thing. Today I only got 3 page impressions from my Micro ISV blog. Since I display 3 ads per page of the blog, 3 impressions means there was only 1 view of the actual blog. However that generated a monster 8 clicks.

Most of the time I get image ads displayed on my Micro ISV blog. The image takes up the whole ad. So that makes it next to impossible to generate 8 clicks from 3 ads. Normally when you click on an ad, it takes your browser to the page that sponsored the ad. Somebody must have purposefully visited my blog, and clicked each of the links to open in a new window. This is very strange.

I am not complaining too much. The 8 clicks netted me an $8.64 profit for the day. Now if only I can keep that up. Perhaps the clicks came because my blog post entry was original. Or maybe I wrote the latest entry in a manner that made people want to click the ads. The most likely reason is that this was a fluke. Let's see how I do tomorrow.

Becoming a Writer

2010-03-29T18:29:00.003-04:00

I just read an article on how to become a better writer. In my world, that means how do you become a better bloggers. Let's check out the advice of the legendary authors.

Choose short words over long. Use the active voice over passive. Break the rules when necessary. Shorter is better.

Write out what you have to say. Know it can take forever to learn to write well. Your characters should want something. And bad things should happen to then.

Give a lot of info. But cut out as much as possible, especially with descriptions. There should be no prologue. Dialog should just use "said". Avoid exclamation points.

If the reader is going to skip something you write, leave it out. Rewrite only for editorial purposes. Get to the point. Read a lot. Then write a lot. Got it?

Success in Blogging

2010-01-22T00:45:00.001-05:00

It is tough to have a successful blog. You need to do a number of things to even have a chance. You should be unique. You also have to get the time to regularly post. Get your own domain name. Then do not change it.

Be original and professional. You blog should have a short bio on yourself. It should also provide a way to contact you. I am not too good in these two areas.

You need to get out in the online community for people to notice you. Do that by becoming active in other blogs. Be active in forums as well. Don’t go for volume. Be active and respected in a few places online.

In addition to having an online presence, you need to meet in person as well. You should attend some live events such as tech events. Then go meet and talk to people. Be direct. Let them know who you are and what you want. It is ok to sell to people. Bring your business cards.

The Google Effect

2010-01-21T00:36:00.001-05:00

Google has a lot of great free products. I make use of a number of them. However I just read an article about a dude who uses Google tools all day long. Let’s look at some of these tools.

Gmail is the big winner at Google. You get a whole lot of space. It is free. The ads are not too noticeable. Then we have Google Reader. That let’s me track a number of blogs efficiently.

As you can see and probably know, I use Google AdSense to place ads on my blog. There is also AdWords if you want to pay to advertise. I personally do not buy ads on the Google network. Another tool I don’t use is Google News.

Google Maps is another one of the popular tools from Google. I don’t use it. I also don’t use or know much about Google Talk. I am slowly trying out new Google tools. I love the price. And everything is accessible on the web which is convenient.

Wordpress Basics

2010-01-10T01:20:00.002-05:00

Blogging is a mainstream activity. There are many choices of blogging platforms. These include Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress. Today I discuss WordPress. My information comes from a book on being a great WordPress designer. I skimmed the table of contents and read the first chapter. So this will be an overview.

WordPress is highly customizable. Many content management systems (CMS) advertise customization. However almost everything in WordPress can be customized. This makes for an ultra flexible CMS.

WordPress is an open source product. It is written in the PHP programming language. The WordPress.com sight is a hosted version of WordPress. Therefore you cannot do heavy customization of the product on that sight.

WordPress.org is the home for the open source software. Note that WordPress needs MySQL to run. MySQL is an open source database management system. An important plugin for WordPress is Akismet, which is a spam filter.

Themes are customizations consisting of PHP and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files. Linkbacks are other sites linking to your page. Linkbacks are also known as pingbacks or trackbacks. The WordPress documentation is called the WordPress Codex. It is available online.

The default WordPress installation comes with same posts. Delete them before your site goes live. I exclusively use Blogger. But I like checking out the competition occasionally.

Disclosure Required

2009-11-25T01:05:00.003-05:00

The FTC is now requiring that bloggers fully disclose their relationships with vendors they promote. In other words, you had better let people know what type of freebies you are getting before you hype up the company. This can include to gifts that enable you to go to conferences as well. I wish I had such perks myself.

Here is what is strange about the FTC guidance. It only applies online. Print media does not have the same restrictions. So let me get this straight. I can put out a print article where I sell my soul to a company, but I don't need to come clean about it? That sounds like the web is getting a stricter rule applied to it.

This is ok. I don't receive any gifts from anyone. So I don't have to disclose anything. I run another blog where I complain most of the time. Therefore there is no room for conflict of interest. Let's see how this FTC guidance plays out in the year to come.

Google Wave

2009-11-20T02:22:00.004-05:00

I have been hearing a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about Google Wave. Like most Google products, Google Wave is a Beta release. It has e-mail, IM, and document editing.

Now I can't be sure, but I think I gave Google Wave a try for a web programming class I am taking. We sampled a couple offerings for document sharing on the web.

Google's main competitor in this space is Microsoft with their SharePoint. Another elderly competitor is Novell.

Team Members Only

2009-10-29T18:09:00.002-04:00

There was a blog I discovered today. And I liked it. The post I read was good. So I decided to post a comment. I proceeded to type in my comment. Then I provided my blogger credentials. The blog came back with an error message stating, "Comments are restricted to team members". WTF?

I tried to locate the e-mail address of the blog author. It could not be found. Weak. Guess what? I am not returning to that blog. I am not sure what this team member business was about. Maybe it is just people who are teaming up to write the blog. I don't know. And I no longer care.

Here is some advice to you bloggers. If you do allow commenting, make sure everyone can do it. Otherwise you will alienate your readers. You have been warned.

Writing Clearly

2009-10-13T01:43:00.002-04:00

Today was a slow day at work. It is a government holiday. So none of the networks were available. What is one to do on such a day? Some slackers just stayed home. I studied up some topics. One was how to write better by Michasl Covington. Let me share some insights I learned from a deck put together by Michael.

The ability to write is a power. You probably don't need to learn too much more grammar. But you do need to learn how to organize your info. Get to the point is a rule of thumb. The first sentence of each paragraph needs to be the main point.

Ensure you know the meaning of words before you use them. Be precise with you vocabulary. Remove needless words. Use a Roman font for most text. That's about it.

You Don't Have Mail

2009-09-09T00:29:00.003-04:00

Gmail was down hard yesterday for around 2 whole hours. It was a compound problem where some boxes were down for maintenance, and then some problems happened. I guess it was a case of Murphy's law. Luckily I have no mission critical mail that comes to my Gmail accounts. Some other businesses were not that lucky.

I did not pay much attention to what Google had to say about the outage. In my mind, I figured Google would work the issue as fast as humanly possible. Others were happy with how Google handled the situation. They are a big company. They have the damage control team firing on all cylinders. Good work Google PR people. You might be doing some evil, but the people don't hate you yet.

Online Dating Tips

2009-09-04T16:32:00.002-04:00

I came across a study of online dating site OkCupid that was quite the find. They looked to see what type of messages got the best returns. I found the analysis on men messaging females was the best.

Here is the conclusion: Send a lot of short messages. Even though a short message may not give you a high probability of scoring for any one potential match, you get a better overall return on investment. That is, you can send more short messages to a lot of people. In the end you will get more responses.

The real killer from this post was the phrases in your message that would give you a better chance at getting a reply. The best phrases to use are awesome, sorry, haha, and pretty. The worst phrases to use are ur, im, hit, wanna, and beautiful. Go figure. Pretty is better than beautiful.

Hapi Spammers

2009-09-03T01:13:00.002-04:00

Recently I was going to add a new post to my blog. That's when I found something weird. Somebody left a comment to my last post. This was confusing because I thought I turned comments off on the blog. I double checked and they were turned off. So I investigated.

This took me to the Hapi blog hosted on Blogger. They had a lot of views on the profile. There was a bunch of technical information for blogging. That is when I understood. The schmucks were spamming comments on blogs. They must have found a way to automatically post blog comments on blogs. The script even bypassed the option of comments being turned off.

That was a bit disappointing. Spammers are evil. There is nothing happy about Hapi. I won't even give them a link. Why send my readers to the spam box? Somebody should teach these bums a lesson. Maybe Google (Blogger) can set them straight for their evil deeds.

Too Personal

2009-08-24T21:59:00.002-04:00

I read an open letter to a celebrity on the Internet. It must have been written well. Because it motivated me to post a response. However you needed to be a member of the site to post a comment. I tried to sign up. But I was taken aback by the questions on the form to create an account.

Here are some way too personal questions they ask: What is your household income? Do you have kids? Have you voted in the most recent election? What is your political party affiliation?

LOL. What kind of interrogation game are these schmucks running? I am not providing that type of information to these jokers. Note to people running blogs: Make it easy for me to post responses. Otherwise I am not coming back to your blog. Rant off.

Label Frustration

2009-08-05T21:17:00.001-04:00

I like to add labels to my Blogger posts. It helps categorize things. This is a plus for my readers as well. There is just one problem with this. Blogger wants to auto-complete the words I type as labels. I guess they use the past labels I have entered to guess. But this is getting in the way of my typing the correct labels I want now.

How the heck do you turn this off? Even Microsoft Word has the ability to cut out this nonsense. Come on Blogger. This is just good user interface design. Don't get in the way of the user who knows what they are doing. Stop frustrating me. Please. I beg you. Don't make me run to another blogging system. We've been together too long.

Googles Sites

2009-08-04T21:25:00.002-04:00

It is time to return to Google. Today I am not going to discuss blogger. But I am going to talk about my first experiences with Google Sites. This is a free feature from Google that allows you to design and deploy web sites. I think this was previously known as Google Page Creator, which is currently being phased out and is no longer available to new users.

I found Google Sites pretty intuitive to use. I don't think I ever consulted the online help. But I did manage to bang out a nice looking web site with over 25 pages. It only took one evening. The hardest part of the experience was waiting for the tool to work with very large web pages. Google wants me to upgrade my browser to Google Chrome. Perhaps that will help. But for now I want to stick with my Internet Explorer 6.0. For now I plan to try building some new web sites with Google Sites and see how far it takes me. If it turns out to be anything like Blogger, I will most likely be using it for years to come.

The Time Line

2009-07-27T23:31:00.003-04:00

Let's wrap up the things I learned about writing good fiction (and hopefully good blogs). You should start by plotting the time line of the story. This does not mean you tell the story in this order. It just gives you the big picture.

Then you write your first draft. This is when you hit the plot main points. It if often fun and beneficial to jump to the interesting scenes. This may give you the motivation you need to go the distance.

The main goal for all of your prose is to advance the plot. Get rid of anything that does not accomplish that main purpose. Get a second pair of eyes to do your proofreading. Have your proofreaders give you an outline of your story. See if they get the plot, theme, and main characters from their first read.

Much thanks to Terry Wessner for teaching me some of the finer points of good fiction. See you at the next Anthrcon.

Dialogue Plus Action

2009-07-21T18:43:00.002-04:00

Let's continue to learn how to write great fiction. Props to my main man Terry Wessner who instructed me on these techniques one day.

Be careful not to make your characters sound alike. It is tough given you are just one author. You should also avoid using slang. It gets old quick. That will make your piece dated.

Do not worry much about the genre for which you are writing. There are more important details that will determine your success. You should focus on providing dialogue plus action.

The audience can do the hard work for you. The will fill in the details that are not explicitly written in your manuscript. Just provide the reader with the bare minimum amount of information that is necessary.

Next time I will go over the story timeline, and how you can keep it all together. For now I will leave you with this quote - "God is a great supporting actor."

Characters Redux

2009-07-19T22:29:00.002-04:00

Ok let's talk some more about the user of characters to produce good fiction. As always thanks to Terry Wessner for teaching me this stuff. Here is the main point. You should only include characters that move the plot forward. The only other characters you should add are those that give required information.

Your story's characters have to support your theme. That does not mean the characters should follow what the story needs them to do. They should always act in the spirit of their own motivations. But include characters that are vital to the storyline. Be also aware that complex characters can have many motivations. Some of those motivations will be competing ones.

When writing about character activities, make sure they do what they want. They should not act as the author wants. That's enough for today. Next time I will go into character voice and other things related to dialog.

Characters and Setting

2009-07-10T23:39:00.003-04:00

Let's continue with more lessons I learned from Terry Wessner. This is how you write good fiction. You should engage the senses. In fact, try to stimulate all the reader's senses. You want to put the reader in the story. It must be concrete. Otherwise you get a shallow image and might lose the reader.

The narrator should describe the setting of your imaginary world. Don't let the characters do this with their dialog. That is weak. Often time some little details that the narrator shares can make a huge impact. You may have the narrator describe the setting as the character perceives it.

Here are some final points. The audience has to relate to your writing. It is key. You will also need to do a lot of research before writing. However 90% or more of the research will not actually make it into your verbiage. You still need to go and do the hard work. Good luck for now. More fiction tips to come.

Cause and Effect

2009-07-08T20:00:00.002-04:00

Today I continue sharing some of the fiction writing tips I learned from Terry Wessner at Anthrocon 2009. It is a good thing to construct a timeline of your whole story. This is not necessarily the order in which you will tell the story. It is just what happened and when in the universe you are creating. You may in fact want to start your story in the middle of the timeline, then fill in past details with flashbacks.

Here is a tip. It is best to avoid any types of prophecy in your writing. In other words, don't do flash forwards. That just tends to remove tension from your prose. Lack of tension could cause a lack of attention from your reader. I am sure you would agree that it is a bad thing.

Another recommendation is to go all out to demonstrate consequence. Follow through on this. Next time I will go into senses, details, dialog, and setting. Wow. That's a mouthful. Maybe I will just touch on those subjects next time.

Dealing with Details

2009-07-07T21:02:00.002-04:00

I am currently blogging a series about Rules for Writing. This information was presented by Terry Wessner at Anthrocon 2009. Here is an interesting quote from Terry: "People who can make mistakes are more interesting."

You should provide the reader with all the critical pieces needed before writing about the solution in your prose. If you delay this presentation until after you have already solved the mystery, you are going to have some disgruntled readers.

Likewise you need to deal with any details you draw attention to. Note that you do not have to fully explain the details. You just need to address them. This even applies when dealing with a red herring.

Terry did not have a high opinion of Hollywood movies. He did not think they always lacked entertainment value. But he did have this to say: "Hollywood entertainment is strictly coincidental." In other words, Hollywood is out to make money. Period. If the films happen to entertain somebody, that is just happenstance.

2009-07-06T21:40:00.002-04:00

I continue to share some of the fiction writing tips I learned at Anthrocon 2009. Terry Wessner gave a presentation on rules for writing good fiction. Here are some things I recall from part of that session.

This may seem like common sense. But idiot plots are just plain bad. An interesting plot may follow from a situation where the challenges encountered exceed a character's powers. The result of this imbalance can make a great story.

You should open with a strong hook. Then you should follow through on reader expectations. Along the way you can reveal motivations of the characters. Don't wait too far into your text to do this. The meat of your writing would then explain the implication of the character motivations.

It is boring if the reader figures everything out on their own too early. Then there is no need to continue reading. So you can provide some false clues along the way. Just make sure you also sprinkle in some true clues to keep the reader involved.

Rules for Writing

2009-07-06T01:18:00.003-04:00

This week I attended Anthrocon 2009. Terry Wessner put on a great presentation for writing good fiction. I figured I would apply these skills to my own blog writing activities. And I shall share some things I learned here in the next couple posts.

Meaning, also known as the theme, is important. Fiction is supposed to entertain the reader. Both grammar and spelling are important. You should follow these rules. Some of them may be broken, but you must compensate later in your prose for it to work. It is simpler to just follow the rules.

You should first get to know your target audience. Your goal as an author is to maximize the chance that the audience will get your theme. They don't have to agree with it. But they at least have to read and understand it.

Here is something your should know. Audiences will read meaning into your text based on their own personal experiences. They will also not accept any behavior that is contrary to what normal humans will do. You can write about unrealistic events and actions. However it must be at least believable.

Scheduled Post

2009-06-28T15:45:00.002-04:00

I downloaded a trial version of some new software. The marketing guy from the company asked me to blog about it. I figured I needed to kick the tires first before endorsing the product. There was a lot that I experienced from install to testing. So I had a lot to write about.

At first I thought I could fit my experience into one blog post. But that was resulting in a huge post. People don't want to read 10 paragraphs in just one blog post. So I decided to split the thing up into 3 posts. However I had all the information ready. This seemed like a good case for a scheduled release of blog posts.

I used the Blogger feature to schedule some blog posts for future days. In the end, I decided to schedule one blog post to appear per day. There was just one problem. The thing did not seem to work. After a day, the first scheduled blog post did not show up. What the heck? I looked on my Blogger dashboard. It showed the right date. But the post had not been showing up on my blog. I intervened and cancelled the scheduled post. Then I immediately posted the first post. We shall see if the second one works. If not, shame on you Blogger.

Recruitment

2009-04-29T17:23:00.003-04:00

My company does not have a Human Resources department that does hiring. That work is farmed out to subcontractors. Our team has the need to hire a number of people. However the recruiters were having trouble finding qualified individuals to interview. The problem is that we are looking for very specific skills which are hard to find. The skills are legacy skills that were prevalent 10 years ago. People have mostly moved on.

Most candidates provided by the recruiters were just not a good fit for the positions. I got a call from a team within recruitment about a new way to find highly qualified candidates. The recruiter had taken a look at my company blog. Luckily I had listed the skills I have and use for my job on there. I also had a blog roll for other great blogs that I read.

Here is the plan that recruitment had. They would use the blogs in my blog roll, in addition to any other groups that might have people who could do the job. They would then use those as sources for people to try to interview for our requisitions. So my corporate blog was working in multiple ways for recruitment. It helped them get insight into what I do. It also helped point them to like minded people to help find the right skill set.

So if you host a blog or post comments to other popular ones, you may have recruiters from my company watching you. They may further get in contact with you to see if they can get you to join us. Blogging is serving some extra purposes here. And I like that.

Google Reader

2009-03-25T16:40:00.002-04:00

I have been started to read a great number of blogs recently. Each day I want to read any new posts from these blogs. I accomplished this by visiting each of the blogs. This probably made the bloggers happy. But it was getting tedious, especially when I visited each of the blogs and there were no updates.

Other people who read blogs seem to use readers to manage the new content from the blogs they read. Since I use Google products for most of my new needs, I decided to try out Google Reader. I have to say that it was a little confusing to use this tool. I added all the blogs I read. However after I changed some of my settings, the screen seemed to change.

Since Google Reader is a tool with a web front end (you access it through your browser), I was able to hit the back button to get the screens looking like they started. I have seen a new gadget for blogs that shows blog followers. If I sign up to read blog content using Google Reader, do I then show up as a follower to that blog?

I am pretty new in the world of blog readers. Right now I am not sure what other products there are out there which do the same thing as Google Reader. I might want to do a quick survey of the blog readers before I settle on Google Reader.

Other Blogging Platforms

2009-03-18T20:20:00.002-04:00

Recently I have been working on a side project which requires me to create blogs on other blogging platforms. Some examples are LiveJournal and Wordpress. There are some other less popular platforms I have worked with as well. It is amusing to see how different platforms support and implement blogging functionality.

One thing that I really need to do is add links to my blog posts. This seems to be a basic, simple, and required feature in a blogging system. Here is what I would like to do. I want to specify the URL of the link. I also want to specify the text that is displayed in the blog for the link. This does not seem like unrealistic demands.

I have found that Blogger does not make this easy. By default it sets the URL as the link text itself. I do not like that. It also does not serve my needs. Blogger does have a work around where I can manually edit the HTML text of the post, and choose whatever text I want displayed. That feels clunky though.

Some other blogging platforms let me type the text I want to be displayed, highlight that text, and specify the URL it refers to. This seems to be the optimal approach. Why can’t everybody make it like that? Yes I guess if users have gotten used to other clunky techniques to achieve the same thing in a system, the developers may not want to make the change.

You should be careful to provide easy tools to allow the users of your system get their work done. Otherwise you may end up with unhappy users. When they become unhappy enough, they will leave to use another system. And you do not want that. For now I am sticking with Blogger because I have some blogs on there I have had for a while. But I am starting to look elsewhere.

Del.icio.us Is Not

2009-03-13T16:14:00.001-04:00

I was happy when I discovered the “del.icio.us” web site. This was a place where I could add browser favorite links. Then I could access them from any computer. I did not even share these links with the public. They were just for me to make my life easier when working with multiple machines. Delicious became my new web home page everywhere.

There were some annoyances with delicious. I would have to log back in every 2 weeks to see my private links. I guess they were trying to encourage me to share my links with the rest of the world. I lived with this. Delicious was a free service after all.

Then they went and redesigned the web site. It was hard to access my links. The site just did not look good. Perhaps they were trying to go Web 2.0. I don’t know. But as a user, I was disappointed. Don’t they know you are not supposed to mess with a good thing? They had a good thing going. Now the site was ruined for me.

I am a programmer. So I told myself there was no reason why I could not create my own delicious style page. After half a day of playing with some HTML, I have a nice page like the original delicious. Let’s call this my delicious.

I no longer need the real delicious web site. They have lost a customer. I know they did not lose any direct money from me since their service if free. But they should be careful. Their user base and market share may decline further if they continue to pull stunts like this,

Follower

2009-03-09T21:40:00.002-04:00

Recently I logged into Blogger to add another post. That’s when I noticed that my blog had a follower. To tell you the truth, I was not sure what that meant. Blogger Help says a follower is somebody who is interested in your blog. Well that sounds nice. I thought if you were interested in a blog you just read it.

Apparently Google has a “Following” gadget which you can put on your page. This allows readers to easily follow your blog. The thing is that I had not put this gadget on my blog. A little more Blogger Help research led me to understand that you can also follow blogs using your Blogger Reading List.

Now I am wondering whether I should add the Following gadget to my blogs. I would like to do whatever I can to make it easy on my readers to keep up with my blog entries. However I also want to make sure my readers actually come to my blog to read the content. I prefer that to just having them see my content in a reader somewhere else.

Blog Roll Gadget

2009-01-18T16:56:00.002-05:00

I used to have a Blog Roll on all of my blogs. This linked them together so a reader of one of my blogs could find my other work. These were implemented with Blogger’s link list gadget. It was a little clunky. But it got the job done. After a while, I found other uses for the space where my blog rolls went. So I deleted the link lists.

Recently I wanted to restore the Blog Rolls to my blog sites. When I was going through the motions to add some link list gadgets to my sites, I found a new Blogger gadget which was specific to blog rolls. This new gadget only asked you to put in your blog URLs. It automatically extracted and displayed the blog title on your page.

The really cool part of the new Blog Roll gadget is that you can show a previous of the most recent post from the blogs on your list. This is all done automatically. I imagine it will update when new entries are added to the blogs on your list. This is really handy, and makes my blog page look visually appealing.

You can bet that I have gone back and added this Blog Roll gadget to most of the blogs I author. It seems as though the Blogger team is still adding useful features to the Blogger platform. They had better do this. There are other choices for blogging software and platforms. I can not complain any because Blogger continues to be offered free of charge. How does Google do this?

Magazine or Web

2009-01-14T16:05:00.002-05:00

I finally got around to reading the latest issue of Redmond Developer News. It is very informative about all the technologies being released by Microsoft. This issue I noticed a new column in one of the first pages of the magazine entitled Dev Disaster. This column had some crazy story about a real life developer. It seemed very familiar to me.

When I got to the end of the column, I found out that the story was provided by The Daily WTF. That is a web site I enjoy reading from time to time. Perhaps I had already read this very story, and that is why it sounded all that familiar. I suspect this column will continue in future issues of Redmond Developer News.

It felt like I got short changed a bit there. I want to have original and new content when I read this magazine. I am not looking for some recycled web site information. To their credit, Redmond Developer News solicited readers to send their own stories in so they might be able to share. The other stories in the magazine are normally good breaking news that I cannot easily find elsewhere.

There is some benefit to having a physical print magazine to touch and read. It is nice when most print media are either going out of business or going to the web. For all I know, this magazine is funded by Microsoft profits on the software they are selling. I do know I get the magazine for free. For now I plan to continue to read The Daily WTF on the web, while still looking for original content in this print magazine.

Google Risks

2008-11-14T21:22:00.002-05:00

Some guy wrote a rant that his Google G-Mail account got disabled. So he used the Contact Us form to alert Google. He swore that he used a secure password. Therefore he doubts that his password was compromised. Google responded that they were looking into the problem.

In the end, the poor dude lost all his G-Mail history. This falls under the general risk of keeping your data in the cloud. I understand how easy this can be. Google has huge amounts of disk space. They have a nice and free product for you to use. You start using it and don’t look back. But you have to plan for the work case. That’s what I do.

You do not have to move away from the cloud to minimize the risks associated with it. For example, you can keep more than one Google account. That way you can split some of your email across multiple failure points. Yes this might cause some overhead while you check multiple accounts. However you can also use one account to aggregate mail from all the others.

The example guy from this story also lost his blog. This is something that is dear to me. I have spent the good part of a year blogging hard. I would hate for all that to go to waste. That’s why I have moved away from creating multiple blogs under one Google account. I am at the point where I create a new account each time I create a new blog. This is done even if I am working on a throw away blog.

I expect these problems to become more common as the industry embraces and moves into cloud computing en masse. You would be wise to assume that everything on the cloud will fail. The earlier you prepare for such a pending disaster, the better off you will be.

Blog Authority

2008-10-27T17:07:00.002-04:00

In 2006, Mads Kristensen stated on his blog that Deflate was faster than GZip. In fact he found Deflate to be 41% faster than GZip. Recently Jeff Atwood wrote a post on his Coding Horror blog about this. He figured there was something wrong with this comparison. Both programs use similar algorithms. He determined he would not take this information for granted. So Jeff did a test. He found the programs to have comparable performance.

Jeff used random HTML files. He varied the file sizes for his tests. Jeff did realize that the Mads post was from two years ago. However he used this example to make a point. You should not trust what you read on the web, especially in blogs. He said that blogs posting incorrect information are dangerous. The real danger lies in developers believing what they read on the web. The real interesting part of Jeff’s post was the numerous comments from developers.

Not all blogs are created equal. Incorrect information posted on rarely read blogs does not do as much damage. In other words, blog authority matters. You really should not trust anything you read. A blog is just somebody’s ideas. It is not hard fact. It is unfortunate that programmers are gullible.

There may be some hope. There were a number of readers who commented that they did not believe in Jeff Atwood’s findings. This caveat holds true – reader beware. Blogs after all are really not that important. You can read blogs to look at different approaches. However you should verify all that you read. That’s the due diligence that us developers must perform.

The Future of Blogging

2008-10-22T18:24:00.001-04:00

I read two articles/blogs about the future state of blogging. One was from Wired. The other was a response to the Wired article by Mark Evans. Both painted a somewhat bleak picture about the state of blogging. I take these outlooks seriously since I am very much into blogging myself.

The Wired article stated that blogging has been overrun with assorted marketing campaigns. There are very few real voices in the blogosphere. Blogs are becoming very impersonal these days. They are mostly professional sites that do best. It is hard for the little guy to get noticed. The true bloggers get a lot of aggravation like being insulted on their blogs. New formats are talking over. Twitter is the new Blogger.

Mark Evens responded to the Wired article. He is a guy that provides the Canadian perspective. He said that blogs showed up around 5 years ago. Now there are a total of over 175 million blogs out there. And by blogs, he means sites with text, links, and maybe an image or two. There is a very low barrier to entry. Hey. Most of my blogs are on free hosts. Even though the total number of blogs may be large, there were around 7 millions new blogs in the last 4 months. In other words, the popularity of blogging may be dwindling.

Is it true that Twitter and video logs are taking over? I know they are popular. However I continue to author a number of blogs. I also read a good deal of other people’s blogs. Perhaps it does not matter what other people are doing. One important side about blogging is that you do it if you like it. I also don’t care about others if people continue to visit and read my own blogs. It might be that blogs are not the hip thing to be doing. That is also fine with me. However I don’t think the sky is falling here.

Auto Blog

2008-10-07T21:57:00.002-04:00

I enjoy writing posts to some of my blogs. However sometimes it is a real chore. I want to add some value and provide some pictures for a bunch my blogs. But who has the time? Hey. I am a computer programmer. Why don’t I write a program to do this for me automatically? I shall call this project “Auto Blog”.

At first I think that I will just write a program that mimics me. In other words, the program will start my web browser. Then it will type in my Blogger account and password. It will upload some pictures. And it will type away in the browser. This is almost like a virtual me. It also seems like it will be a lot of work. I might be able to handle writing a program that mimics what I would write. But it will take some time to make the web browser think the program is me typing away at the keyboard and clicking the mouse.

So I do a little research. There must be a way for my program to communicate directly with Blogger. I find that there is. Blogger has an API that programmers can use. It even does this via XML which I want to learn as a programmer. If you do not know what XML is, don’t worry about it. I start to dig into the details of how to make my program communicate with Blogger. Then I find a critical piece missing. There is no way to programmatically upload images.

Ouch. That was the whole point to my Auto Blog. I want to share a lot of images and post some commentary with them. I guess I will have to go back to the drawing board. In other words, I need to take the path where the program simulates me typing on my keyboard and clicking my mouse. This is the hard route. I figure that the good things in life do not come easy. This is a prime example of that principle. Go me.

Maximize Clicks

2008-09-05T22:03:00.001-04:00

I have a number of blogs on miscellaneous topics. Recently I added Google AdSense to them. The goal is to make as much money as possible from users clicking on the ads in my blogs. To this end, I want to eliminate any distractions that might cause the users to not click on the ads. So I have tried to configure my blogs to not have many things to click other than the ads.

Therefore I have removed comments from my blogs. I have also hidden the labels for each post. As far as the sidebar goes, I got rid of the About Me link. I also ditched the blog history. In some cases, I have even gone as far as to eliminate the titles of each blog post. The title is clickable and brings you to a page with just that blog post on it. There should be no need for users to click that.

One of the few extras I did keep was the images I include in each blog post. Those are essential to a good looking blog. I did shorten the number of posts that are displayed on each page of my blog. This number was strategically chosen to be as long as the ads that are placed on the sides of the blog posts.

My hope is that this increases the chance that viewers of my blog see the ads and click them. The danger in these extreme methods is that my blogs will not remain interesting to keep the users coming back for me. So now I really need to engage the readers with some sharp writing and awesome pictures. I also need to ensure I post very often, as they see less blog posts per page.

I will let you know how this works out. For now I am already seeing an increase in the click through ratio on my popular blog pages. It is my hope that this trend continues indefinitely.

Blog Lessons

2008-09-02T18:19:00.002-04:00

I read a post on the Latest Geek Stuff blog. This is a blog written by omfut. His post was entitled “1 Year of Blogging, What I Learnt (sic)”. Some of his experiences matched mine from my 10 months of blogging. I thought I would comment on these findings.

Omfut has been blogging for 1 year. He said blogging is fun when you enjoy it. He cautioned bloggers to not let it run your life. Even though it is hard to write every day, that does usually increase traffic to your site. What is your goal? Are you just trying to gain more traffic to your blog? Or are you sharing quality posts? The best blogs are those for which the author has a true passion.

My initial goal getting into blogging was to make a lot of money. I have not been successful at that. However I have chosen blog topics that really do interest me. It is also fun to learn about the technical side of blogging. For example, I liked learning how to use Blogger. And it was a trip to get into the world of Google AdSense. I am finding more and more that I want to learn how to do web programming.

Here was a funny thing from Omfut’s blog post. He said he put AdSense on his web site just as an experiment (as opposed to making money). Yeah right. It is fine to try to make a few bucks on your blog by using ads. But don’t try to fool us into thinking the goal behind it is not to make money. You will be only fooling yourself. Just for that you get no clicks on your ads from me buddy. Aside from that, good blog post. Hopefully you will still be blogging 1 year from now. I know I shall be.

Got on Reddit

2008-08-25T22:40:00.003-04:00

I normally read Reddit to find good posts on programming. My default view on Reddit is to view the top “Hot” articles. This weekend I was surprised to find my Days of VisiCalc post coming in at item number 63 for hot programming posts. It was on page 3. This was very exciting as I did not even submit the blog post to Reddit. I could not help but log into Reddit and vote my item up. Hey. I wrote the darn thing, so I am going to give it a thumbs up rating.

My blog post that go onto Reddit was just my 2 cents on another interesting blog post about VisiCalc development history. Some comments on the Reddit submission said that my post helped call attention to the blog item I wrote about, even though it had itself been added to Reddit a couple months ago. Other comments stated that the blog I referred to was better than my own blog. This may be true since that blog was written by a guy who worked on VisiCalc.

My Redddit submission had received 16 points. Not sure if that means there was a net of 16 positive votes for it or not. I don’t think so as the submission received 42 up votes and 32 down votes. Whatever the point calculation, I am still happy that I can say that I was on Reddit. Thanks to Reddit user gst who submitted my blog entry in the first place. Props man.

Beware Spell Check

2008-08-14T22:18:00.003-04:00

Tonight I had a lot of blogs entries to post on my Software Maintenance blog. However I still had time to spell check each of my entries. One such entry took a long time to spell check. Then I made corrections and tried to post the results. I was not surprised when Blogger bombed and I lost my changes.

I was not phased so I edited the entry again, ran spell check, then successfully posted my changes. Then I went on with creating other blog posts. At the end I did a quick check on all my posts for quality control. Wouldn't you know it? The post that initially bombed still had some of the Spell Check highlighting in the actual published version. What a crock.

Luckily I was able to go back, rerun Spell Check on the blog entry, then post one more time. Now the yellow Spell Check highlighting is gone. What is the moral of this story? Double check your work, especially if Blogger acts funny when you are editing your post. I think there may be another moral lurking down somewhere inside me. However this rant is now over.

Blogger Broke Again

2008-08-04T20:32:00.004-04:00

I would like to upload a picture to show you an error message I continually get in Blogger today. The only problem is that the error happens when I upload pictures. This is a bummer. Recently I have been trying to post images with the blog posts I create. Now I cannot do this.

Wouldn't you know it? I am finally fed up enough that I want to help. So I try to figure out how to report the error. But when I get the error, my only choices are to go back to my post, or try again. Trying again produces the same error. I am determined. So I log into Blogger and see if there is a way to report an error using the Dashboard. Nope. I found a link to review known issues. None of the issues seem to be the one I am facing. What's a blogger to do?

In case the Google Blogger development team is paying attention, here is the error I get:

There were errors during upload.
The following images were not uploaded.
filename.jpg : This image could not be uploaded due to an internal error.
RETURN TO POST TRY TO UPLOAD IMAGES AGAIN

Company Response

2008-08-04T20:28:00.001-04:00

Some time ago I read an article from CNN Money about “when bloggers attack”. It outlined the best approach for a company to take when bloggers write bad things about the company or its products. In general the article recommended that you first check out the history of the blogger. See if the blog makes any difference to the big picture. Check if the blog is high in the list of search engine result pages for your company. You can always try to generate higher ranked positive hits in the SERPS.

The article warned you to not get emotional or hostile. The best way to handle such a situation is to turn it into an opportunity. For extreme cases, you can always hire a professional company to manage your online presence. This could be a costly option. And it may not provide any more benefit than what you can do yourself.

CNN stated that bloggers in general are fair. I am not sure if I agree with that statement. But let’s assume it is true. The article I read recommended that you provide the blogger with more information. That way they can generate more posts that at least speak the truth. Bloggers are interested in generating more content after all.

I can relate to some of the information in the CNN article. My own posts often criticize companies. However I have not been contacted by any companies following the advice from the article. But sometimes I praise good companies and products. Wouldn’t you know it? I have been contacted by people thanking me for giving them positive reviews in my blogs. Perhaps I am just a small fry. And companies that I slam are just ignoring me. I hope to become bigger and more influential. I also hope that I am not on the receiving end of bad blog posts too.

Link or Cross Post

2008-07-29T20:47:00.003-04:00

I was reading some new interesting blogs and came upon a blog by Kasper. There was no was to directly add comments to his posts. So I e-mailed Kasper and told him I liked his 8 ball problem. Then I added a post to my own Black of Hat blog called Eight Ball.

Later I started an e-mail dialog with Kasper. He was appreciative to my comments. He offered to link to my blog or cross post. Now I know about the idea of linking out to another blog. I e-mailed Kasper back and told him I had already wrote a blog post and linked to his.

Then I gave the cross-posting some more thoughts. In essence, Kasper said he would duplicate any blog post from my site on his own. He would then give me credit and link to me. I asked him to cross post my Loopback IP Address post. And he followed through and did so on his First Class Thoughts blog.

So I hope that I did the right thing. What method would be better for search engine optimization? What method will give me a better page rank? In the long run it may not matter much. But I am finding more people posting comments to my own blog. And I will want to know how to make the most of every opportunity out there. What do you think?

Google Knol

2008-07-24T18:18:00.001-04:00

Google has publicly opened up Knol. Google defines Knol as a “unit of knowledge”. Knol was originally launched in December of 2007 to a select audience. The project is headed by Udi Manber, Google’s vice president of engineering.

Knol is similar to Wikipedia. The difference is that entries must have an author that put their name behind the work. There is no anonymous posing on Knol. Readers can suggest changes to a Knol entry. However the author controls whether those changes get applied to the Knol.

Google is positioning Knol to be the first thing someone searching will want to read. That being said, Google has stated that they will not artificially give a knoll more page rank than their existing algorithms calculate. There can be more than one knoll for any given subject. Readers have the ability to rate knols they read.

Authors can add New Yorker cartoons to a knoll. They can also monetize a knoll by adding Google AdSense to the knoll. However the positioning of the ads is fixed. Authors are free to link out of the knoll to other sites (including their own web pages). By default the entries submitted to Knol are licensed under the Creative Commons license.

Currently Google has a couple hundred knolls created. For the most part the knolls are related to the medical industry. I have been wondering what effect this will have on blogging, and more importantly whether this will be a Wikipedia killer. It is very exciting to get in on the ground floor of a new system created by Google. I encourage you to create a knoll on a subject for which you have expertise. Good luck.

Lists

2008-07-22T17:46:00.000-04:00

I continually have a problem with some Blogger formatting. Here is the scenario. I enter a lot of text in my blog post. Then I go back and want to make some text in the middle to be a list. So I select the text and click the button to make a bulleted list. However instead of turning my selected text to a list, Blogger makes my entire post a list. The entire text is made one big item in the list.

Being savvy in HTML, I can switch into HTML mode with Blogger. I got in and move the UL tags around my selected text. Then I go and insert and bunch of LI tags around each of my items. Then when I revert to compose mode, my post looks as I expect it. However this is a pain that I go through every time I try to make a list.

What should I do? I guess I could chose a list before I start typing. Then I could type in the list and hope that Blogger works correctly. Perhaps I am expecting Blogger to work like normal desktop applications. Do we do things differently in web based forms? I would think that the people who tested Blogger would have had the same expectations as me.

Overall Blogger is a good tool. The price is right (free). That does not mean I don’t wish some bugs to be fixed, or some user interfaces to be better. I blog here because it is fun. If I were more responsible, I would submit a problem report with the Blogger team at Google. It is the least I could do. If I do follow through and submit one, I will document my experience here on my blog.

My Blogging Not Dead

2008-07-18T17:40:00.001-04:00

Previously I had written a post about the ruckus in the blogging world about a famous blogger decided to end his blog. He declared blogging as dead. I thought I would share my own reaction to this, as I am an avid blogger myself.

First I want to give a little background. I read an article about Ashley Qualls a year ago. She is the founder of Whatever Life. This site has made her over a million dollars so far. And the amazing feat is that Ashley is only 18 years old. I figured that if an 18 year old can make it large on the web through advertising, I should get in on this too.

So I started up my Software Maintenance blog. My goal was to write up daily experiences in the software development world, put advertising on my site, and get rich. Things did not exactly go as planned. I did not rich. Thus I could not quit my day job. Along the way I read that you could get a better Google Page Rank if you had a lot of separate web sites, each of them linking to each other. Therefore I have created over 20 separate blogs. They all cross link with each other. My hope was that this would boost my page rank for each of the blogs.

In retrospect, since I still have my day job, I am not avidly posting to all these blogs. The Software Maintenance one is my main blog. I do not post to it every day. But usually I post every other day. I find it a fulfilling task. Even if the big money has not rolled in from the advertising, I continue to share my thoughts with the world on this blog. I plan on continuing this indefinitely, at least until I have retired from the software development industry.

Is blogging dead? Some of my throw away blogs that I created just to achieve page rank are definitely dead. However my life as a blogger is not over. That which I care about and blog about continues. My software maintenance blog lives on. It even thrives. I want to give a shout out to Ashley Qualls. Her experience excited me and inspired me to create my blog. This initial desire was for riches. But I have found that there is more to blogging that making cash through advertising.

Blogging is Dead

2008-07-17T17:38:00.000-04:00

Everybody seems to be writing about a controversial blog post that stated that blogging is dead. Somebody special said they were hanging up their blogging hat. Their plan was to resort to e-mailing their blog info instead. The rational behind this move was that mainstream media was starting to monopolize the blog universe. Another was that people had moved on to other mediums such as MySpace, Facebook, Digg, and Twitter.

There are some statistics which seem to indicate that the rate of new blog creation is slowing down as well. In July of 2006, there were 175k blogs being created per day. By March of 2008, the rate had fallen to 120k blogs created per day. The topic of whether blogging is dead is an interesting one I want to explore.

I think that it has become clear that blogging is not easy. It is not easy to sell a blog or create a sustainable business around one. There is not really a quick buck to be made here. You almost need to blog daily to have a shot. You need commitment. It can be very difficult to get any sort of discussion going on a blog.

The long term question is whether blogging is a fad. Will people stop updating the majority of blogs causing them to die? Some existing blogs such as TechCrunch so no sign of ever slowing down. And they seem to be profitable as well. Perhaps the authors of blogs such as these have already determined that with hard word, and with a high quality blog, that results will follow.

I have some things to say about my personal take on this topic, since I dream of getting rich by blogging. I have a number of blogs that I have started. But my story is a topic for another post.

Who Else Likes Blogger

2008-07-04T05:10:00.002-04:00

Every once in a while I like to find people on Blogger that share my interests. So I go to my Blogger profile which is set up to list my interests. Then I click on one of the words I list as interesting. Blogger automatically shows me me a list of other Blogger profiles which also list those interests. I found 751 other Bloggers users who like "Blogger" as an interest. Here are blogs by 5 other Blogger users who list Blogger as an interest.

Check out PCWizKids Tech Talk. I think his motto is "You don't have to be geek to tweak". The blog appears to be 2 years old. And there are a number of videos that teach you how to do tech things.

There is a neat layout on Lily Yessss' Majoring in Economics blog. It looks like there is only one blog post per page. But the page itself has an inner scroll bar on the left. It looks a little weird next to the brower scroll bar.

Random Me is a blog that seems to concnetrate on pictures of animals. That may seem like a strange description. But the animals all seem cute. Some of them are pictures of stuffed animals. Do you get the picture? If not check out the blog.

If you want to see a lot of fashion models, head over to That's Fashion. There are a lot of pictures on this blog. Watch out though. Like some cutting edge fashion, there is the occasional nude picture.

Finally I enjoyed reading The Dummies Guide to Google Blogger. It has a nice layout. And it seems to try to teach you the ins and outs of Blogger.

That's all for now. I encounrage you to check out other people on Blogger who share your interest. You will be surprised at the kind of variety you will find. Sure there is some chaff. But you might discover some treasure if you look carefully. Happy blogging.

Proper Layout

2008-07-01T15:37:00.001-04:00

Recently I opened a blog post about writing a build system. This was a very apt post as my team is working on porting our build system to use new versions of our tools. We are encountering some pain and developers are looking to improve the build system. I knew immediately after looking at the blog post that something was wrong. There were a bunch of links aligned down the left hand side of the page. This by itself is not a huge problem. However the link text appeared on top of the blog text. The effect was that I could not read the text of the blog post.

Now I am not sure why this was happening. I am running Internet Explorer version 6. Perhaps the blog author is using some complex HTML tricks that are not supported in IE6. Or maybe there are some bugs in IE6 preventing the correct display of his pages. I don’t know. But I do know that it was very difficult to view the blog text. I had to carefully copy just the blog text to the Windows clipboard, then paste it into something like Microsoft Word to read it. This author was lucky that I was so hungry for his blog topic to go this far.

I think my experience points to two very important lessons. 1. If you topic is hot, readers will go far to read your post. 2. For maximum exposure you will want to make sure that everybody can correctly view your blog.

Now I cannot say for sure, but I suspect that my blogs hosted on Blogger are easily viewed on most browsers. I will confess that I only tester my blogs using Internet Explorer version 6, and sometimes Netscape Navigator and Mozilla FireFox. But my instinct tells me my stock Blogger layouts are safe for the viewing public.

The State of Blogger

2008-04-16T09:56:00.002-04:00

I am totally paranoid about Blogger now. Every time I write a post to one of my blogs, I copy and paste the text into Notepad before clicking the Publish Post button. Been burned too many times with Blogger errors that caused me to lose all my data.

Today I thought I would write about a less serious but still telltale problem I have with Blogger. I like to add images to many of my posts. It gives them a fresh and interesting looking. However when I click the Add Image button in Blogger, I get a window that looks like the one shown above. Notice anything strange about the Cancel and Upload Image buttons? Yeah they are cut off. And it is not that the rest of the buttons are visible if I scroll the window down further. The window is scrolled all the way down.

Yes. I can still make out the text on these buttons. And when I click them, the upload to Blogger usually works. However in my mind this is typical of the state of Blogger. It is always seems a bit broke down like a 3rd rate blogging site. Why do I stick with it? I got a bunch of blogs with many posts already entered. It would be a huge pain for me to move them somewhere else. And I have invested in getting a lot of links to my Blogger URLs. All the work getting those links would have been wasted if I switch now.

Blogger rant off, for now.

Blogger Acting Up Again

2008-04-12T00:28:00.005-04:00

Just when you think you are out of the water, the shark known as Blogger comes up to bite you. Today I submitted a post to my IBM Tools blog on Client/Server and DB Objects. Prior to publishing this large post, I saved the text to a Notepad file. The post published fine. So I assumed all was well with Blogger.

Then I tried to follow this post up with another one about DB2 storage, SQL, and security. I did not bother to backup the text prior to publishing. Big mistake. Blogger choked and gave me an error message. My text was lost. This is all too familiar of a horrific experience. Can't Blogger remain stable for even one day? What kind of buggy system are they running over there at Google?

I might have to start copying and pasting the text each time before I submit a post. Because I don't like losing my data due to Blogger hiccups. Or maybe I should write up my posts in another editor, then copy then to Blogger. This only works if the post is just plain text. It is not as easy when you have images and URL links in the post. I just wish Blogger could be stable enough to not lose my data. Yes I understand it is a free service. But at this point, if it keeps losing my data, it is worth less than free to me. Know what I mean?

P.S. While I am ranting about Blogger, does anybody else find the auto complete function in the labels edit annoying?

GMail Conversations

2008-04-09T00:40:00.002-04:00

I have Gmail accounts that correspond to my Blogger accounts. And I recently noticed something strange. Today I received a number of e-mails from Ad Engage. But when I went back to check some of the details, it seemed like there was only one e-mail on my Gmail page.

Then I figured the number in parentheses next to the sender must have had something to do with it. It turns out that Gmail automatically bunches e-mails in the "same conversation" together on one line. You have to open the e-mail and choose the stacking tabs to see each separate e-mail message.

I searched all over the Gmail settings, but could not find a way to turn this feature off. It was very annoying. This is not intuitive in my opinion. Judging from the number of questions posted to Google Groups about this very feature, I guess a lot of other people share my opinion.

If you use Gmail, be aware that messages from the same sender can "stack" in your Inbox.

Spell Check Option

2008-04-04T11:56:00.002-04:00

I thought I would take the time to praise the "Check Spelling" option available in Blogger. Most of the time this button works. And when it does, I usually have some misspellings in my posts. Blogger has a good user interface for the spell check. They highlight potentials misspellings in yellow. Then Blogger provides alternate spellings it thinks that I meant. Not having correct spellings can make a blog look unprofessional. This is a nice touch that helps my blogs look crisp.

One funny think about the spell checker is that it often marks competitor names as misspellings. However all things Google appear to be in their dictionary. I am not sure if this is something of a joke with the developers of Blogger, or a business decision to subtly take down the opposition. Either way it has me LOL.

P.S. This post alone had 5 items flagged as misspellings.

Note to Blogger Team - Please add "LOL" to your spell check dictionary.

AdSense Code

2008-03-26T22:35:00.005-04:00

In the past, I used to monetize my blogs with Google AdSense. It provided me with Javascript code that I pasted into my web page HTML. Google seemed pretty good in matching up ads to the content in my blogs. However I got kicked out of the AdSense program. They did not mention any real reason. I have read about a lot of other people who got banned as well. I did not even bother to protest the ban.

Since then I have added BidVertiser ads on all of my blogs. We shall see how that works out. In the mean time, I thought we would have some fun with Google AdSense. One of the primary rules of AdSense was that you were not allowed to change the Javascript code that they provided. You had to cut and paste it into your HTML. Otherwise they might kick you out of the program. I have never messed with this Javascript code before, carefully following the AdSense rules. However now that I am out of the program, I say let's have some fun.

Here is a piece of some AdSense Javascript I copied from Digital Point Forums:

script type="text/javascript"
google_ad_client = "pub-5676236325709660";
google_ad_channel = "4467843311";
google_alternate_ad_url = "http://www.digitalpoint.com/ads/ads.php?t=seo";
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = "468x60_as";
google_color_border = "63513F";
google_color_bg = "63513F";
google_color_link = "A9B7E7";
google_color_url = "A9B7E7";google_color_text = "CF815C";

This is the type of code we are not supposed to modify. However I actually already did some modifications to it. I tried to remove the publisher name "pub-5676236325709660". This causes the ads to not show up. That name uniquely identifies the publisher who gets paid when somebody clicks on the ads. When I substitute my old banned publisher ID in there, the ads don't work either. I think part of the problem is that the rest of the JavaScript has to match the publisher. It also does not help that I am banned from Google AdSense.

One change I found that does work is that I modified the color choices who various objects in the code. I can control the color appearance of the ads. I think I am going to play with this Google AdSense code some more. I imagine there is no downside to this. I have already been kicked out of the program. If I find anything else that is interesting, I will keep you posted.

Blogger is Up

2008-03-22T19:30:00.003-04:00

Just checking in to say that Blogger seems to actually be working fine recently. I am always still very cautious and paranoid. Blogger has not been stable long enough to forget all the times that the darn thing made me lose my latest post.

However it seems I can spell check and post without error now. Not sure how long things have been well. Maybe about a week. You only notice the state of Blogger when it goes down. And when it does go down, it goes down hard.

As always I cannot complain too loudly when problems arise. This is a free service. And it does a whole lot for me that would be painful to do by handle. Keep up the good work Blogger team, or Google, or whoever you are that have fixed the recent bugs. I dream of the day when I don't have to worry about Blogger bombing out on me.

Black of Hat Blog

2008-03-20T23:29:00.004-04:00

I have started a new blog entitled Black of Hat. Of course I used Blogger since I am very familiar with it. This blog's purpose is self contained in its description: "Writing progs to achieve questionable ends."

So far I have already posted one free program to Black of Hat. It is a program which launches Internet Explorer and navigates to web sites of your choosing. This program can be used for a number of purposes. See the blog for some initial ideas I had.

Right now I have another idea for a program to write and release under the Black of Hat blog. It will be a type of web crawler that strips link information from a web site. I intend to run all my blog URLs through this program. Should make for some interesting tests.

Information Reformation

2008-03-16T22:21:00.003-04:00

I continue to aggressively read all print books I can find on blogging. My latest read is one entitled "Blog - Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World". Wow that was a long title. The book itself is long as well. I am not talking about the number of pages in the book. But there is a lot of reading that is not really all too interesting. But there were a number of interesting points in the book I want to talk about here.

The book states that there are 2 main reasons for blogging: (1) to persuade, and (2) to leave a record. LOL. I think they forgot about (3) to make some money. Yes I know that if that is your only goal, it may be difficult to succeed. However we cannot overlook a major reason why some people such as myself blog. Its not that I don't want to persuade or leave a lasting legacy. But I really want to make some dough.

There were some interesting blog statistics given in the book. These were collected from a study done some time ago. I suspect these numbers are still valid today though. 66% of blogs get less than 1 post every 2 months. And over 92% of blogs are authored by people under the age of 30. The first statistic is not so hard to understand. People start up blogs and either through them away, or don't stick with it. While I know a lot of young people who blog, I know a few older folk who do too. However worldwide, maybe it is the younger generation that is heavily into blogging.

My favorite part of the book were a number of rules for blogging success:

Post often
Link freely
Keep it brief
Avoid profanity
Keep titles short

This all sounds like good advice to me. I will try to practice these in this and my other blogs. In fact, I have noticed that I am starting to post more frequently on All Things Blogger. And I am really trying to get myself to be less stingy with outbound links. I am still in the beginning stages of that effort. Maybe I can give a shout out to Blogger whose generosity makes this blog possible. Thanks people.

Blogging Business

2008-03-16T22:11:00.002-04:00

Today I finished the book "Start Your Own Blogging Business". Although the book had less than 100 pages, it was chock full of good information. I want to share some of the highlights from the book. However I recommend that every reads it for themselves.

Some of the book was dedicated to starting up a blog. The book cautioned the reader to choose a blog topic carefully. The topic should be one that can hopefully last forever, and not fade like a short term fad.

The book recommended you post to your blog under a pseudonym. I fully agree with that. My birth name is not Blogger Chief. It is not that I am not proud about what I write. And I am not ashamed of it either. But there could be some information shared which might be kept relatively anonymous. Some of my blogs talk a lot about my day job. As long as my real name is not tied to those blogs, I can sleep soundly without worrying about getting in trouble or fired.

A final highlight from the book was to be careful in developing your blogger voice. In particular, it warned against sound too preachy. Perhaps I need to work on this myself. This blog in particular sometimes accuses Blogger (and Google) of falling down on the job. Hey. They are a big company with big profits. So they should be able to take it. However I should maybe tone it down a bit. This does not mean I will water down posts on serious topics that affect my life. But rather I should watch the tone to ensure what I write is communicated the best for the sake of my readers.

I do have some other blogs which are truly accuse guilty parties. And in these cases it is hard not to preach. Maybe I can take it easy a little bit, while not letting the guilty get away with murder. How is that for a plan?

Books on Blogging

2008-03-16T16:10:00.003-04:00

I decided to read some actual print books about the topic of blogging. Specifially I wanted to look at books geared towards making money through blogging. Previously I had purchased some books for this topic. But that was getting a big expensive. So I went to the local library. The librarian pointed me to a couple general sections. Here are the books I went home with:

Startup - Start You Own Blogging Business
BLOG - Understanding the Information Reformation
blog! - how the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture
HOW TO publish AND promote ONLINE

Interests on Blogger

2008-03-15T00:07:00.003-04:00

You can list your interests on your Blogger profile. This allows others with the same interests to find you. In addition to blogging, I am really interest in Google AdSense. There were 163 other people on Blogger who listed that as a keyword in their interest. I visited each and every one of these users. I also checked out all their blogs. This was a monumental tasks since some of the bloggers had 20 or 30 blogs each.

One common pattern I found was that there are a lot of blogs that are light on content. By this I mean the blog has exactly 1 post which is only 1 paragraph long. Perhaps I can understand this. I created a test Blogger account once and old added one blog post. But I did not enter in a lot of interest in that Blogger user profile.

There was another interesting thing I found on quite a few blogs. Many blogs were hosting Google AdSense ads. But some of them had their pages arranged so these ads had the label "Ads by G". The rest of the label got cut off (it should say Ads by Google). I am not sure if this was intentional on the part of the blogger. I have found that when choosing a wide ad that will just not fit on my web page, the resulting text will often get clipped. I emailed some of these blog authors to ask whether this was an intentional move or not. We shall see what they say.

P.S. Blogger is marking the word "bloggers" as a misspelling. LOL.

Blogs with AdSense

2008-03-14T15:05:00.002-04:00

I started out in my main blog of Software Maintenance. Then I kept clicking the "Next Blog" in the navigation bar, checking out each random blog I arrived at. It seems like only 1 in 10 blogs are monetized with AdSense ads. I guess a lot of people just want to put up blogs to share information with other people. I was surprised that most of the blogs looked pretty good and had nice pictures.

There are a number of goals I have in blogging. One of them is to make some extra cash using Google AdSense. But I also wanted the experience of being a Blogger. I wanted to learn about blogging and web publishing in general. Delving into the AdSense world has only given me more things to learn. When you publish a blog for fun without ads, you probably don't care how much traffic comes to your blog. And you are not concerned with how many people click through on your links.

All Systems Go

2008-03-13T21:52:00.003-04:00

Just thought I would take a moment to report that Blogger is actually working recently. When I publish a post, it gets published. And when I click Spell Check, my text actually gets spell checked. It is a shame that this comes as a surprise to me given my bad prior experiences. But I am a happy camper for the moment.

Another nice thing is that my "All Things Blogger" blog appears to be getting served up relevant and interesting ads from Google. I think I even saw a Google ad for Blogger itself on my blog. People are visiting, and a small percentage are clicking through. The price per click that I earn is smaller than other keywords and sites that I run. But that is OK. At least the ads are interesting.

A couple of my blogs have high paying keywords. But when I look at the ads that are served up, I can't imagine anybody actually clicking them. Maybe this just means I like the subject of blogging better than those other niche markets I write about. I do not know. The good thing for me is that some people out there are reading my other web sites, and are clicking on these boring ads. I guess that is a win, right?

Weird AdSense Ads

2008-03-10T20:23:00.002-04:00

I author a number of blogs. Currently they are all hosted on Blogger. And for the most part, I have Google AdSense ads displayed on these blogs. A nice ad format is the 160 x 600 shown directly to the left. This format is a tall one that lends itself to the right or left of a blog nicely.

However I have been noticing that sometimes one advertiser takes up the whole 160 x 600 ad like the one shown on the far left. I really don't like that. It does not look as good, since there is a lot of empty space. It also provides less ad options for the user to click.

So far I have been adding the URLs in the weird ads to my AdSense competitive ad filter. Google will then prevent these ads from displaying on my blogs. But this is still a weird effect. I also think this is wasting my slots in the competitive ad filter list.

This is really more of an AdSense issue than a Blogger one. I just wish there was another way to eliminate this weird ad distribution of one in a 160 x 600 ad format.

Spell Check Broke Again

2008-03-09T12:56:00.003-04:00

This morning I tried to work on a new post for a new blog. Got a couple paragraphs of text. Hit the spell check button. All that happened was that I saw a couple strange messages in the Internet Explorer status bar. And the text of my post was not spell checked.

The funny thing is that this did not stir me up. These days I fully expect Blogger to bomb out on me. When I tried publishing my non-spell checked post, it actually worked. My expectations are getting really low for Blogger now. Just sharing the state of Blogger in my mind with you.

The Google motto is to do no evil. This is supposed to be in direct contract to Microsoft. However I have found that most Microsoft products I use are mature and seldom have blatant bugs like I have been experiencing in Google. Come on Google. Don't be evil man.

P.S. It appears the spell check worked for this post. Ironic.

Blogger is Broken

2008-03-08T19:55:00.003-05:00

Had a couple of blog entries to write this morning. Blogger refused to work. Could not even start the blogging process. I don't think this was limited to just adding new entries. Some blogs that I have served up by Blogger were unavailable for viewing this morning. Maybe that is why I have not clicks on my ads.

This is very frustrating. Why is this happening? Blogger should be a mature product. And Google should have the resources to maintain it. Maybe it is not a high enough priority for Google? Maybe all of the original Blogger staff has retired. I do not know. When things go wrong, users like me who get the shaft start thinking all kinds of crazy thoughts.

Yeah. Blogger is a free service. Nobody is forcing me to use it. I guess the question I have to ask myself is how important is up time and working functionality? Or more directly, how much is this worth to me a month? I don't have tons of data or viewers for my blogs and web sites. So I imagine it would not cost me a lot to get good service from an ISP.

P.S. I have just discovered the Blogger known issues page. Maybe Google will let me know what the heck is going on with this service.

Falling Apart

2008-03-08T05:46:00.001-05:00

Blogger is really starting to fall apart on me. One of my blogs is starting to get some good content. So I decided to add a blog roll to it. I chose to add a page element from the layout view. Clicked on the Link List item to add. Nothing happened. I tried clicking a few more times. Finally I got some error page. This kept happening. Luckily my latest changes to the layout were saved. But this was still a pain in the neck.

Finally I decided to get out of all my Internet Explorer sessions. Closed down all my windows. I even killed any process that was "iexplore.exe" on my machine. When I logged back in to Blogger, I no longer had the problems. The crazy thing is that, when I got the errors, Blogger gave me a unique error code to help the Blogger Team identify the problem. But there was no link on the error page to contact the Blogger Team. WTF is up with that?

When I am blogging or making changes to my page layout, I don't want to worry about when Blogger is going to bomb out on me. I want the focus to be on content creation. What is a blogger to do? I am starting to think that Blogger needs to be renamed Bugger.

Lost my Entry

2008-03-07T23:21:00.004-05:00

I had this great idea for a blog post. So I sat down and typed my thoughts into Blogger. I went back and made sure my thoughts were well organized. I even clicked the spell check button. Should have known something was not right when it took a long time for spell check to complete. Then when I thought I was done, I hit the publish button. Blogger just gives me an error message and code.

Apparently I had lost my entire post. This can't be happening to me. OK. So I just hit the "back" button in my browser. It brought me back to the post in edit mode. But all my text had disappeared. I am starting to really dislike Blogger. I have heard about this happening to other people before. But I thought that was some type of personal problem. Well now the problem has found me.

So what is a blogger supposed to do? I for one typed this current blog entry in Microsoft Notepad. Then I copied the text to Blogger. I cannot afford to lose another whole post to some Blogger type error. I thought Blogger was supposed to save my draft automatically. Guess when it rains it pours. If spell check has troubles, and publish post does not work, of course auto save is going to be broke down too. If the current trend continues, I'd say it might be time to experiment with another blogging solution like Wordpress. My time is money. And I don't like people stealing my money.

P.S. I had to LOL when Blogger spell check decided that "Wordpress" was a misspelling.

HTML by Mistake

2008-03-06T14:59:00.003-05:00

There is one nuance of Blogger that gets me frequently. I write a post about some facet of HTML. And I include the actual HTML markup in the text when I am in Blogger Compose mode. It all seems to go well until I try to Publish the page. That's when Blogger complains that I have invalid HTML.

The problem is that Blogger is treating the text itself as HTML. And when there is HTML in my text that is supposed to be just text, Blogger treats it as markup. I guess there must be some way to quote out the text to indicate that it is indeed quoted text. But shouldn't that happen by default? I am in Compose mode to start with, not the Edit Html mode.

I have had some hangups with Blogger in the past. However I need to keep my perspective. This is a free service. And overall I would say the service is pretty good. I would hate to think about the pain if I had to roll my own blogs by hand with HTML. Ouch. Hopefully the people who invented Blogger are rich and celebrating out there somewhere.

Blogger Problems

2008-03-03T17:31:00.004-05:00

Recently I have been noticing more and more problems with Blogger. For quite a while I had been unable to to Check Spelling. When I clicked the button, I would just get some error message in the status bar of my Internet Explorer window. This is not a huge deal. But spell check helps my posts look more professional.

Another problem that Blogger seems to have is that I cannot always use the Add Image functionality. I click the button, but nothing happens. My work around has been to publish my blog entry without images. Then I would go back, edit the entries, and add images later. This is a pain.

I am not sure why Blogger has been degrading in quality. These guys are owned by Google after all. There should be resources that are working to increase quality. This is troubling because I have a number of blogs that are hosted on Blogger. I have invested a lot of time on these blogs and don't want to start over on a new domain. I plan to carefully monitor Blogger before I make my final decision. And I guess if I was a good user, I would open trouble tickets with the Blogger Team. But I have a business to run. My goal is to use a tool that works which does not require my help in debugging the product.

P.S. Thankfully the error check functionality worked for this entry.

AdSense Payments

2008-02-27T19:30:00.004-05:00

I have AdSense ads on my main blog. Instead of using the Blogger support to put generic ads on my blog, I paste in custom Javascript that I get from AdSense. This gives me the advantage of being able to track profits from different sources easily.

So I watch as my earning grow. However a recent annoyance is that Google appears to be cracking down on AdSense accounts. I had to go through 2 separate confirmations that I live at my address and have the phone number I listed. Guess they are combating fraud.

This was just an annoyance though. I will jump through a number of hoops to get my AdSense paycheck. In fact, I thought the phone verification was pretty cool. I chose a time when Google should call me. An automated system call me and asked for my confirmation info. I guess Google has a bunch of programmers working on projects like these.

The bottom line is that, even though blogging is fun, I plan on having even more fun getting paid through Google AdSense.

Subtitles in Templates

2008-02-24T00:04:00.003-05:00

Many times I like to have a subtitle section that spans many lines with Google Page Creator. However a number of templates (specified using the Change Look link) do not support multi-line subtitles. I figure the problem must be with me. Maybe subtitles by definition are supposed to be only 1 line deep.

Luckily a couple templates adapt nicely to the multi line subtitle. My problem is that I have many web sites. And I getting to the point where I keep reusing the templates that support mutli line subtitles. I want to be able to create web sites with all the templates. What is a web site developer to do?

A radical plan would be to switch to a web site generator other than Google Pages. But I have invested a lot of time creating domains and content with Google Page Creator. Could there be a way to start with the stock templates, but modify them to accept multi line subtitles?

Perhaps the true solution is staring me in the face: Don't use multi line subtitles. Alas. This will make my job harder. I like to edit the one subtitles and put a lot of stuff in there at once. Other schemes will seriously slow down my web page (and web site) generation speed. My goal is to publish a lot of material. So speed is of the essence. Any ideas?

HTML Tables

2008-01-27T23:22:00.000-05:00

I have not been doing much blogging lately. Instead I have been working with Google Page Creator to put together a web site. I often find the need to display tabular data. And at first I tried putting the items in a list and spacing them apart manually. However this turned out to be a bad idea. The spacing got messed up.

So I turned to HTML tables. This required me to click "Edit HTML" to code my own markup. But it was worth it in the end. Which of these two tabular data displays looks better:

Software Maintenance Oracle Development
Software Management Surfing the INTERNET

Software Maintenance	Oracle Development
Software Management	Surfing the INTERNET

The second one is better, right? It just seems neater. Alignment is clean. You know exactly where the end of each link is. And this effect is more pronounced for tabular data with more rows and columns. Simple tables are easy to code up in HTML. I wish I had thought about this before I started doing my web site without tables. I know I will be smarter when I start my next web site.

Trip to Page Creator

2008-01-20T18:36:00.000-05:00

For the most part I use Blogger to do a lot of blogging. But sometimes you really need a web site and not a blog. Being partial to Google, I have used Google Page Creator to make some sites. But I think something must not be right with Page Creator. After I have created about 20 or so pages, the thing seems to really slow down. My work around has been to close Internet Explorer and start it up again to do the rest of the pages.

Another thing that irks me about Page Creator is that sometimes I want to embed some Javascript in a field. Page Creator lets me edit the raw HTML. However there is some logic built in that detects that there is no static text in a field and deletes my Javascript. Not nice. As with most things, I have a work around for this. I ensure the first item in each field is some static text. But this limitation is cramping my style.

All in all Page Creator is pretty good. The price is right (free). Free use of the tool. Free space to host pages on Google. What more can you ask for? Wait. Don't answer that.

Adsense Channels

2008-01-18T22:20:00.000-05:00

The latest blogger allows you to easily add Google AdSense to your blog. You just go to your template, click "Add a Page Element", and choose "Add To Blog" under AdSense. This will bring up a dialog with many options to customize the AdSense ads.

I did this for a while. However I have a number of web pages and blogs which take advantage of AdSense. And I like to track which pages and ideas are generating me the best money. So I use Google channels to track each ad type differently. The method previously described does not allow you to choose an AdSense channel.

However you can use channels with your blogger blogs. You still click "Add a Page Element". But instead of choosing "Add To Blog" under AdSense, you choose it under HTML/Javascript. Then you paste in the AdSense HTML code from your AdSense page. The normal AdSense ad configuration page has the option to choose a channel for your ads. And this HTML code has the channel information built in.

In it to Win it

2008-01-18T01:34:00.000-05:00

I read a story about the founder of whateverlife, a web site to help you spice up your myspace page. This was a high school girl with a rags to riches story. It was very inspiring. After reading about her I decided to blog myself. So far I have been experimenting.

Now I am reading my third book about blogging. The first book I read was Make Easy Money with Google. That was a little too simplified. I am a programmer by trade and can handle deep topics. The second book I read was the Adsense Code. This one was more exciting and much deeper. Currently I am getting near the end of Blogging Heroes. This one is very interesting.

I plan to chronicle my experience with blogging in general here. Let it be known that I use Blogger exclusively for my blogging needs. And so far I am using just the basics of blogger. Once I tried to host my blog at another sight but still use the blogger software. That experiment failed because my web host was weak. But that is a story for another post.