Blogger Adds New Features

Blogger has been quietly adding some new great features. These include some which have been on my wish list since 2007 (Read 'New features in Blogger that we want to see').

New widgets you can add to your Blogger blog include

• Follow by Email which makes it easy for your readers to follow your blog via email. 
• Popular Posts which displays a list of popular posts on your blog. 
• Blog's stats: Just to show off I guess. Not a good idea unless you have a good number of visitor.

The great news is that there are more features on the way. Really makes me feel happy that I stayed on with Blogger rather than jump ship to Wordpress powered blogs.

Anyway, here is a video of What’s New With Blogger.

UK Personal Blogs

This is a list of personal blogs in the UK. When I initially started out my PhD research, I had a really hard time trying to find a database of personal blogs in the UK. So I decided to make my own list and hopefully other researchers would find this helpful as well.

The list is an ongoing project and if you are a blogger based in the UK, do drop me a line if your blog is not on the list.

NOTE: This is a list of personal blogs. It does not include corporate blogs, newspaper blogs and blogs of British expats based in other countries. Blogs with explicit adult content and any other blog which I find offensive won't be on this list. 

Please email me if you don't want to be on the list.

List started officially on 18th April 2010.

This page will be continuously revised.

A

• Adamok.net
• Ah Ok Lah 
• All Five Horizons
• Aref-Adib

B

• Bad Science
• Binary Moon
• Blah Blah Technology
• Blogger Buster

C

• Caroline Middlebrook
• Cars Blog - Auto Lah
• Case Insightsh
• Chris Garrett

D

• Daddy Papersurfer
• David Airey
• David Naylor

E

• E-clecticism
• Ecoexplorer

G

• Guido Fawkes' Blog

H

• Here.org.uk

I

• Immigration Alert UK

J

• Jason Bradbury

K

• Katharine Widdows
• Keith’s Personal Blog

L

• Lazy Laces
• Lick That Riff

N

• Naids Chamber
• Neville Hobson

P

• Phill Price

R

• Ramblings
• Recent Reflection

S

• Scotland for the Senses
• Simon Willison
• Spittoon
• Sylvie D

T

• Tim Worstall

Bye Bye Geocities

I recently received an email from Yahoo saying that "GeoCities is closing." Geocities users won't be able to access their accounts after October 26, 2009.

I joined this free web site building service and community way back in 1998 and built my first web site on it. The site was about my favourite places, my attempts at poetry, photographs, my research on pines and favourite links. It also had an "Environmental" page talking about my concern about Mother Earth.



At that time Geocities was one of the most popular sites on the Web and We had a real sense of community then. I was really fond of their Page builder interface which let amateurs like me get a feel of designing web pages without using html. I did eventually learnt html and later CSS. Designing my pages by trial and error was really frustrating and exciting at the same time. My web site would often disappear completely or appear as a mass of strange coding.

I guess Yahoo never really harnessed the full potential of Geocities like Google did with Blogger. I mean, even after more than 10 years, it was almost the same. No user friendly innovations or updates. I guess one reason for the decline was the growing popularity of blogs especially blogger with their blogspot blogs. I got tired of static sites and hardly updated my Geocities site. I cannot even recall the last time I actually visited it but I still left it online as most of my old friends found me via the site.

I will definitely miss Geocities.

Does anyone else have fond memories of Geocities?

Minor blog redesign

I am not sure whether you have noticed but I made some minor layout and design changes to my blog yesterday.

Based on the comments of some reviewers, I resized the logo so that's it is smaller (they thought it was way too big) and moving around the widgets on the right hand side bar so it looks tidy. For example, the keyword tags are now at the bottom of the page.

There were some widgets which I thought was useful - like the translation and links to my social networks. However, my reviewers didn't agree. I have also created a contacts page which is apparently very important and moved the links to my social networks over there.

Gone also are some of the affiliate buttons - they were taking up precious real estate on my side bar but were not bringing me in anything.

So what do you think?

How to set up a blog on Blogger

I have had so many people asking me on how to start up a blog and I was seriously considering creating a video tutorial until I realised that there were so many good ones out there on the net. There is no point in reinventing the wheel.

For beginners I recommend starting a blog on Blogger, said to be the most popular blogging platform in the World (I actually have no way to confirm this claim). For your information, Blogger is part of the Google family.

Anyway, here is a short but extremely informative tutorial on setting up a blog on Blogger (hosted on YouTube).

Now you can blog in Melayu

Good news for all my Malaysian friends- Blogger is now available in Bahasa Malaysia (BM). This is a sign of recognition for all the Malaysian bloggers out there.

I am not really sure how this works whether it makes any difference because BM also uses the normal Latin alphabet. A lot of people have been blogging in BM for a long time. However, this might make it easier for some newbies who are not really familiar with the Blogger interface.

New recent comments widget

For quite sometime, I have been using the "recent comments" widget provided by Blogger templates. However, I noticed that they have stopped working. A number of Blogger users have been asking for a "recent comments" widget for quite sometime but the guys at Blogger don't seem to be listening. Going through all the gadgets you can add to your blog in Blogger in draft, I came across the Blogger comments gadget provided by Tigersyard.com. It shows the latest comments of any blogger blog. However you need to know your Blog ID. It's not perfect but it is the best working wigdet for this purpose. I am sure others will come and improve it further. I would prefer to have a few lines instead of the whole comment listed. Please tell me if you have a solution.

Review of Blogger in draft

They have loads of new experimental features on the Blogger in draft site.

The best feature is the Scheduled Post Publishing which allows Blogger users to write a post which then appears on a scheduled later date.

There is also the option to add a "Blogroll" which some might feel is a replication of the existing "Link List" widget. However, the later involved multiple steps - first the url followed by the name, then you would have to click the "ADD LINK" button and finally clicking the "SAVE CHANGES" button. Now, you can import all your subscriptions from Google Reader and only need to paste the url of the blog then click "SAVE CHANGES" to add a blog to the blogroll.

Other features that Bloggers users have been demanding for a long time have been such as a Search box and Subscription link have also been added.

However, some of the features I really want to see as listed in my post "New features in Blogger that we want to see" are still not there.

Having said that, I was amazed at the number of widgets under the "fun and games" category that can be added to your blog - a total of 2776 at last count.

There are literally thousands of widgets available and you can add yours as well. Feels good to be a Blogger user.

WordPress users - Eat your Heart out.

Free E + A Blogger Template

Do you like the template I am using for my blog? If you are a Blogger user, you can now use it for your blog as well. It has been heavily modified from the original Adsense Tech Template by Charm Skins.

I have decided to name it the 'E + A Blogger template'. This is the first version.

Download the template

Please drop me a line if you use this template, have any problems with it, or want to modify it.

End to spam comments

I recently wrote a post "Sick of comments with ads" after getting sick and tired of having to delete loads of spam comments everyday. However, quite recently I suddenly realised that I have not been receiving any spam comments on my blogs anymore.

The apparent reason - Blogger has modified the comments page so that now, there is no url field to fill in.



If you are registered with Blogger and signed in, the comment will include a link to your profile. Otherwise you can comment with a nick name or comment anonymously. I don't know why they left the third option as I know that most bloggers hate anonymous comments.

This is both good news and bad news.

Looking at the bright side, this move has definitely reduced the number of spam comments. On the other hand, I guess that this might put off a lot of bloggers who are now part of the "I Do Follow"movement.

If you are not registered with Blogger, just leave a comment with your nick and your blog/ site url in the text. However, I still hate spam comments.

Hundreds of Blogger blogs carrying bobby trapped links

According to a BBC news report, a number of Blogger blogs are carrying fake entries with bobby trapped links which downloaded viruses on clicking. These were first noticed by security researcher Alex Eckelberry from Sunbelt Software on Blogger blogs on 27 August.

Blogger has responded saying that:

the blog posts are from bloggers whose machines were compromised by a Trojan horse.

Apparently, the trojans exploited the mail2blogger feature that lets users post to their blogs directly via e-mail.

Read more on Blogger Buzz: Blogger and malware.

Adding images to a post on Blogger

this tutorial is for my cousin Reena and other newbies out there, who just moved up the blogosphere ecosystem from a blog visitor to blogger.

1. Open up 'Create Post' page:



2. You should see the icon of a picture frame as shown here. Click it.



3. This will bring up a pop-up window.
- Make your selection of layout and image size.
- You can either add an image from your computer or from another website. In case of the latter, you have to fill in the url of the image.
After you are done, click upload image.



4. You should see this window, indicating that the image is being uploaded.



5. It's done.



6. The image inside the post in html.



You are done.

You can also add images to your sidebar and to your header as well, but that's another lesson.

Updating to New Blogger

I finally updated my blog ah ok lah to the new Blogger. Even though I had moved to new Blogger like the rest of the World, I still retained the classic template because 1) It was fast, 2) I couldn't find a new template I liked and 3) I was too lazy.

As mentioned in my post Do follow ah ok lah, I finally found a template I liked, which was modified and tweaked to my heart's content. It looks like my old template but with all the bells, whistles as well as hidden gears. The only drawback is that it loads a few seconds slower.

I know! You are probably asking, "what's the point if the blog still looks the same?"

Well! I have several valid reasons. My motivation to update was not to change the look but rather to take advantage of the features provided by new Blogger and to overcome some drawbacks of using the classic Blogger template.

1. It was impossible to remove the nofollow tags from the comments section if using the classic template.
2. I couldn't put up Text link ads even though my blog had been approved.
3. The introduction of new features like ability to put up polls and videos.
4. The numerous hacks available, some of which I have mentioned in my post - New features in Blogger that we want to see.
5. The ability to drag widgets around on the layout.
6. The ability to change entire look - fonts, backgrounds, etc. just by a few clicks.

If you haven't updated, you should.

New features in Blogger that we want to see

updated: 16 August 2007

I have been a loyal Blogger user since 2003 and have observed the gradual evolution of this popular blogging platform. Now, I can confidently say that it has single handedly brought the web closer to millions around the World.

Most of the extra features were introduced after Google took over Blogger from Pyra Labs in 2003. There was a complete overhaul after the launch of the new Blogger in August 2006. However, looking at Wordpress powered blogs with their numerous plugins, I can't help but feel a tinge of jealousy. So far, I have resisted the temptation to jump.

So what improvement would I like to see on blogger?

After discussions with a few other bloggers using the Blogger platform, I have compiled a short list as given below:

Page Elements:

First of all there are a number of widgets (or Page Elements as Blogger calls them) that I would love to see on Blogger:

1. Top commentators.
2. Most popular posts.
3. Latest comments.
4. Label cloud.
5. List of related posts after every post.
6. List of recent posts.
   

I already have the last 5 features on my blogs using hacks from various sources:

- Added the "most popular posts" list manually, based on the page statistics provided by Google Analytics.
- For recent comments, I use the simple widget provided by Blogger templates. Also read my post: Popups on my blogs.
- Got the hack for the label cloud from Phydeaux3.
- Got the hack for related posts (that come after every post) comes from Purple Moggy's Blog.
- List of recent posts from the IT Skyline blog.

Blogger allows us to upload pictures but wouldn't it be great if we could link those pictures to another page or site. Unfortunately, right now we can only put up a title and a caption.


I got around this problem by uploading the picture on a post and then using that picture with a desired link on the side bar using Add a Page Element > HTML/JavaScript.

Templates:

A lot of people would also be really happy if they gave us a few 3 column templates along with the generic 2 column ones to choose from even though there are some free sources out there on the net.

Etc.:

One thing that really bugs me is that Blogger doesn't allow me to show html coding inside the post. However, there is a solution. Check out the hack on the Beautiful Beat blog.

BTW, so many people have been asking me on how to put the Digg button on their blogs. So here's the code. Can't remember where I got it from though. If you are the author, please inform me and I will put up an acknowledgment accordingly.

1. Go to your dashboard
2. Choose your blog
3. Open the template
4. Click Edit HTML
5. Expand Widget Templates
6. Find

<p><data:post.body/></p>

in the template
7. Replace it with the following code. Just make sure you save your old template first.

<p>
<!-- DIGG -->
<div style='float:right; margin-left:10px;'>
<script type='text/javascript'>
digg_url = '<data:post.url/>';
</script>
<script src=' http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js' type='text/javascript'/>
</div>
<data:post.body/>
</p>

Are there any other features that you would like to see on blogger?

High ranked Blogspot blogs

updated: 17, Nov. 2007
Made numerous changes to the list. Had to drop a number of blogs from the PR 5 list. This includes among others, Paula Neal Mooney's blog which is now a PR3.

My Blog ah ok lah is now in the list.
................................................

Right after I wrote my post "Don't ignore blogspot blogs", I went over to the PayPerPost boards to see what other fellow posties and advertises thought about it. I was really surprised at the response. Almost everyone who replied to the thread were against it. Not surprising as almost all posties who replied were NOT Blogspot users. I know that a lot of posties are Blogspot users and I expected them come out in support of my campaign but they didn't.

It seemed like most of those who replied had decided that Blogger (Google) banning blogs that carried paid or sponsored posts in the future, is inevitable.

One advertiser even asked:

If you're on a free host, how seriously do you take your blog?

What do you think?

Would love to hear your views on this issue. In the meantime, here are some high ranking Blogspot blogs (with PR 5 and above).

PR 5

• ah ok lah
  
• Baby Care
• Don to Earth
• My Mum's Blog by Thoroughly Modern Millie (From PR 6)
  
• Pi's Twist
  
• RantingsbyMM
• rocky's bru

PR 6

• Digital Inspiration Thanks for the link Paula.
• Dummies' Guide to Blogger (from PR 5)
  
• Echidne of the Snakes
• Ikea Hacker
• Paleo-Future (from PR 5)
• Pedram's stream of consciousness (from PR 7)
• PostSecret (from PR 7)

PR 7

• continuations
  
• Dr. Razavi's Good to Know Info
• Ego Food (from PR 6)
• grokster
• Peter Fleischer: Privacy...? (from PR 5)
• Piaw's Blog
• So Many Games...
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs (from PR6)
  
• Stevey's Blog Rants
• Technical Revenue

PR 9

• 
  

Tell me if your's is missing from or you know of others missing from the list.

Don't ignore blogspot blogs

Can't recall the blog but one blogger was saying that if you are serious in making money from your blog then you should get your own domain name. I toally agree with that but what I didn't agree was his suggestion that advertisers should ignore all free blogs including Blogspot blogs hosted on Blogger.

Also noticed that on a number of online advertising sites, several advertisers exclude Blogspot blogs from carrying their advertisements. I agree that there are thousands of Blogspot blogs that are really lousy and hardly receive any web traffic but to generalise them would be a mistake. I know of several Blogspot blogs which are highly popular. Take My Asylum for example. It is a PR 5 blog and receives around 200 visitors per day. Not much but way better than a lot of blogs with their own domain names.

Barring blogs from carrying ads just because they don't have their own domain names simply doesn't make sense. Google PR might be a better screening option.

Polls added to my blog

If you look at my side bar you will notice a simple poll I put up. This is one of the new features just added by Blogger. If you are a Blogger user, you would need to go to http://draft.blogger.com/ and log in.

To add a poll to your blog:
1. go to "Template",
2. Click "Add a Page Element",
3. Choose "Poll" and click "Add to blog",
4. Write your question and possible answers,
5. You can also allow visitors to select multiple answers,
6. Click save after you are done.

Poll ready.

That's not all. Now Blogger also allows Enclosures and Video Podcasting.

I guess I can stop contemplating moving to a Wordpress powered blog.

Trying out Blogger in draft

Giving the new Blogger in draft a test run. I guess I am among what they call the early adopters. It's still in the testing phase but according to the guys in Blogger

the features are almost ready for publishing, but not quite.

The only new feature I noticed was the Video Upload. Can't wait to see what they will have up next.

So here's a video:



Tags: blogger Blogger in draft google video

Hosting with Blogger

Wrote this post after I received a few e-mails asking me how I hosted my site with Blogger.

In case you were not aware, Blogger now hosts your blog for free under your domain name. It is not forwarding but actual hosting.

The documentation provided by Blogger is under "How do I create a CNAME record for my custom domain?"

I registered my domain name with godaddy.com and here are the steps:

1. Log in to your account at www.godaddy.com.
2. Open the Domains tab and select My Domain Names. You'll be directed to the Manage Domains page.
3. Click the domain that you'd like to use with your blog.
4. Click the Total DNS Control And MX Records in the box entitled Total DNS Control.
5. Click Add New CNAME Record. If you've already created a CNAME record for your blog's address, click Edit next to the existing CNAME record.
6. For the Name, enter only the subdomain of the address you want to use for your blog. For example, if you picked www.mydomain.com as your address, enter www here.
7. Enter ghs.google.com as the Host Name.
8. Click Continue, and then click Add. If you're editing an existing CNAME record, click Continue and Update.

BTW, I have another blog called Freebies hosted with Blogger. However, it was initially a blogspot blog with the url: http://tidakapa.blogspot.com