How to get old-style compact view on the new Blogger interface

Google has decided to finally revamp its nearly forgotten Blogger interface, but sadly the result is far from perfect. Thankfully, there's a way to make it look a lot more like the previous Blogger, with the help of some tweaked CSS.

Blogger editor can now search emoji and symbols by drawing

Blogger is one of those services that seems to have been forgotten by Google, with years going by with practically nothing new being made, but sometimes there's an exception. The latest one seem to put to use the sort of drawing recognition used in Google's AI game in order to find the right emoji and symbols you're looking for.

How to fix Blogger disappearing comments problem

There's nothing more annoying than taking the time to comment on a blog post (like this one), just to find it disappeared when you send it, forcing you to type it again - or, more lkely, to not even bother. This is an issue plaguing the Blogger commment system, but there's a way you can prevent it from happening to you.

Resize and crop Blogger photos using an URL hack

Google's own Blogger platform may not be one of its most cherished products, nor the most advanced blogging platform out there, but it does the trick and you can tune it up to make sure your blog is as efficient as it can be. Today I bring you a "cheat sheet" to put your blogger (and Google+) images under your control.

How to fix Blogger redirect Loop

So... you start your day and decide to write some new post on your blog... But when you try and head to "www.blogger.com", your browser stalls... and stalls... until it shows you a message saying:

This webpage has a redirect loop

So you think "maybe I did something wrong", and you close the browser tab (or the browser alltogether), and try again. And again you get the same error message. Then you decide to clear all you browser cache and cookies. But again... no effect.

And then you remember you maybe selected to choose the "beta" Blogger in Draft mode as default, and that it might have something to do with this. And indeed you'd be right. Google sometimes messes around with "stuff", and it causes things like this to happen.

What you'll need to do is opt out of the blogger in draft - for a little while at least, until they fix the issue - and thankfully you can do it by visiting the settings page directly:

1. Go to http://www.blogger.com/user-settings.do
2. Uncheck the "Use Blogger Draft" check box
3. Save
4. Visit www.blogger.com

That should do it.

How to fix Feedburner redirect issues with Blogger

If you've been experiencing RSS feed problems lately with blogger feeds going through Feedburner, there may be an easy fix for it. It's odd that something that has worked so well for years is now causing issues (and I just hope it doesn't mean Google is hinting that it will soon close down the Feedburner service), but... what matters is how to fix it.

Being both Blogger and Feedburner Google services, one would expect them to work just fine together, but in the past couple of days I noticed something strange: my Facebook, Google+ and Twitter blog accounts were silent, and readers were writing me about how the RSS feed had stopped working.

Indeed, it all came down to the RSS feed not working. Time to go figure what was happening.

In Feedburner, you can access a FeedMedic report that tells you if there's any problem, and indeed there were problems:

In my case the feeds were reporting a "Recursive feed redirection error":

Error getting URL: 400 - Recursive feed redirection error: Are requests for your 'Original Feed' address — the feed that FeedBurner is checking for updates — being redirected to your FeedBurner feed? Make sure your Original Feed is provided from a web address that isn't redirected to FeedBurner.

Blogger has a feed redirection feature that allows it's native RSS feed to be redirected to an external feed service (like Feedburner). But the thing is: both the original feed and the redirected feed are the same:

• http://abertoatedemadrugada.com/feeds/posts/default

This has always worked well (I guess Feedburner had a way to fetch the actual feed instead of the redirected one) but it now seems to be failing.

So we have to take care of it manually, and thankfully it can be done adding some extra parameters to the url:

• http://abertoatedemadrugada.com/feeds/posts/default?redirect=false&max-results=10

The essential part is adding "?redirect=false" to your original url feed in Feedburner. And just to play it safe, you can also add the "max-results=10" parameter to limit the maximum number of items your feed returns (Feedburner doesn't like feeds over 512KB, and this should take care of that.)

Hope that helps!

How to fix Facebook Thumbnails of blogger posts using Google image resizer web service

Ok, so bear with him for a bit as this is quite a technical issue, but I hope that it may help someone that had to go through the same frustrations as me while trying to fix the post snippets that show up when you share a post in Facebook.

For the most part, Facebook does a good job at figuring out what to show when you share a post. But for that to happen your blog/site/page need to have some specially crafted open graph tags that it can interpret. You can simply say its a way for Facebook to know what to show: the title, url, what kind of item it is, and what image to show.

Well, most of the time you'd just rely on a social sharing plugin and be done with it - but sometimes you'll want/need to to it yourself and implement it in your blogger template. It's something that I won't recommend for anyone not comfortable enough in dealing with blogger templates, but even if you are, you'll end up facing a seemingly inescapable fate. You see, there's only so much that you can do with blogger preprocessing directives, and while you'd think it would be enough to set the open graph image tag to the first image that shows up on your blogger post... there isn't any way to get it automatically in code. The second best thing you can get is the post thumbnail image.

Ok, that should take care of it... but then you'll notice it doesn't. This thumbnail image is only 72x72 pixels, and Facebook requires an image to be at least 200x200 pixels. When it isn't it will try and find a more suitable image, and more often than not, it will pick up a completely inappropriate image, like your profile photo, an ad, your banner... etc.

So, while all this could be simply avoided by Blogger providing a suitable way to return the first post image link, we're on our own and have to figure out a way to fix this.

The most simple way to do it is by simply resizing the image so it fools Facebook into accepting it, and for that we can use a useful Google web service that does just that: a url accessible image resizer!

• https://images1-focus-opensocial.googleusercontent.com/gadgets/proxy?container=focus&gadget=a&rewriteMime=image&resize_h=200&resize_w=200&url=

The links is self explanatory, you just throw your image URL in there and specify its width/height ("resize_h" and "resize_w"), and it returns you a resized image. So, you only need to apply it to your blogger open graph meta tag, and your thumbnail image can be resized to 200x200 and satisfy Facebook's requirements

[left: url resized image; right: original image (check URLs)]

There's only one last thing, due to some bug, the resulting resized images are downloaded as files with the name "p.txt" - at least on Chrome. Should you need to download it, you just need to rename it to the proper file extension (jpg/png/etc.) to sort it out.

Google Takeout Now Inlcudes Blogger and Google+

There's nothing worse than having invested hundreds or thousands of hours using a service, creating and storing valuable data and content, and then not be able to easily download it for safe keeping, or for whatever other purpose you so desire.

Google has its own Takeout service that allows you to do just that, and that has now been expanded to include more Google services, that will come in handy for all those that use either Blogger or Google+.

Yes Google Takout now includes Blogger and Google+ data, meaning you can - at any time - take all the data you've ever written in those services. Blogger already supported an export function to XML, so... it's just a matter of now being easier to use (and it does include all you blogs in one go, unlike the export function in each blog). As for Google+, while you also had the option to "takeout" your Google+ Stream and Google+ Circles data, you can now include your Google+ Pages as well.

Now, all that is missing is for Google to add Gmail to Takeout... that's what most people are still waiting for.

Blogger gets Google+ Auto-Complete

I really can't say how long this has been around, but considering I've been using blogger several times per day during the last few years and have just now noticed it, it certainly hasn't been that long. When you're composing a new blog post on Blogger and happen to type a "+" sign, you now get a auto-complete popup suggesting Google+ contacts, pages, people. (Strangely enough, communities don't seem to be included, at least for now).

It's just one more step in Google's battle to promote Google+, and that certainly will help reference pages - like our own +Aberto até de Madrugada (sorry guys, it's in portuguese, but I really don't have the time to maintain both a portuguese community *and* an english one as well) - and people. And as you would expect, easily referencing something it the first step to start using it more.

Also, I've noticed that slowly but steadily, more and more people have been flocking around Google+. Some are people that are simply disgruntled by the way facebook and twitter are behaving lately... other that have found Google+ to be a "safe haven" where they can do everything they wished for in a social network, and more: with pages, communities, video hangouts, photo sharing, powerful group management (with the circles), and more.

Blogger gets Google+ Sharing

Lots of bloggers using Google's own Blogger platform have been having a hard time trying to use Google+. For starters, there isn't an easy way to get your blog content posted automatically to your Google+ account, or even to your Google+ Pages, that Google incites you to create. So, you have to manually post and share all content all over again... which kind of defeats the concept of using technology to make things easier.

However, it seems like Google is (slowly) acknowledging that something has to be done, and has now placed a Google+ tab on blogger, allowing you to connect your blog to your Google+ account, as well as prompting a G+ sharing popup whenever you publish new content. It still takes some manual interaction... but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

How about you? How much/little have you been using Google+ lately?

Blogger Gets Custom Dynamic Views

Remember the dynamic views that allow any blogger blog to instantly get a new look?

• Classic: A modern twist on a traditional template, with infinite scrolling and images that load as you go
• Flipcard - Your photos are tiled across the page and flip to reveal the post title
• Magazine  - A clean, elegant editorial style layout
• Mosaic - A mosaic mix of different sized images and text
• Sidebar - An email inbox-like view with a reading page for quick scrolling and browsing
• Snapshot - An interactive pinboard of your posts
• Timeslide - A horizontal view of your posts by time period

Now you can customize it to better suit your blog: modify your background, fonts, or colors, and add a custom header image (65px high) - or simply choose from one of the “suggested themes” that we provide.

To begin personalizing your blog, log in to the Blogger dashboard, select “Template”, choose from one of the seven Dynamic Views, and then click “Customize” to access the Template Designer.

New Blogger UI vs Old Blogger

Still regarding the new Blogger look, I can't stop but complain once again.

Yes, I know change is hard and people often complain just because things are "different" (that's not my case, I'm really trying to give it a fair try and make it work); yes, I admit the old interface was in dire need of deep renovation; yes, I'm all for the new interface, as it sure looks like it has a lot of potential.

But...

There's still lots to be done.

I usually keep my blogs with scheduled posts, so my readers will always have something to read even if I fail to write a post that day. So, my blogs are usually preceded by a few dozen scheduled posts in the posts listing.

Now, look at the next two screens and tell me which makes it easier to see which one has the scheduled posts and where they are?

In the old interface, the scheduled posts "jump to view" in their own aligned column and orange color; in the new blogger interface, the scheduled tag jumps around like a regular tag, and the focus (orange color) is given to the regular tags (which, in my humble opinion, should have a neutral color - surely not more "important" than the post title itself.)

The other aspect, as I've noted before, is the wasted space. I thought it happened by chance, but it looks like it was carefully calculated... as the new interfaces uses up exactly twice the space per post compared to the old one!
Meaning, you now see half as much in the same screen than before:

I can't see the point in having so much wasted space, which - for my regular use - is extremely inconvenient, as I liked being able to see which posts I had scheduled for the next days, as well as the recently posted titles, without having to scroll around the page or moving back and forth between pages. (And also, please add a "navigation" bar in the bottom of the page. There's nothing worst than scrolling to the bottom of the page and then having no way to quickly move to the next page.)

So, my suggestions are:

1) Please leave the scheduled/draft tag identifications in their own aligned column as you previously had

2) Please let us decide which "density" we want to use.
Just like you let us decide to see 10, 25, 50, 100 posts per page, please allow us to see it in "high/medium/low" densities. Where "high" mimics the old spacing, offering twice the number of visible posts per "area" compared to the new one with all its white space. (In that case, the edit/delete could show up inline just as before - though I don't know if it's such a good idea having the delete/edit placed next to each other - in the old one, the "delete" was far off, preventing any accidental activation)

For me, that would take care of 90% of my "problems" with the new interface.


If you can't stand the new interface, don't forget you can still revert to the old blogger in draft look... at least for now.

New Blogger Look - Still Lots to be Done

We all knew a new and improved Blogger was coming - it's interface was long past due, and we all welcomed a better one. But, as with all changes, I was both wishing for it... and afraid of it.

I wasn't one of the selected few to try out the new Blogger look, but now it's available to all those using Blogger in Draft. And, as a "draft" user... it was time to experience first hand.

And, unfortunatelt, my worst fears were realized: if this is the new look, I'd rather have the old one!

The low contrast colors make it a lot harder to grasp, and - the worst of all - there's too much wasted white space!

(I've updated my considerations regarding this, in a new Blogger UI vs old comparison post)

Just compare the new interface, where we can now see around 12 posts on screen...

... with the old one, it could show twice as many posts per page!

How can they have not noticed this dramatic change that makes any high-res monitor as informative as an ancient 80x25 text mode monitor? At least give us the option to choose a "dense" layout ("denser" than the "dense" one being tested on gmail - which is still not enough) that closely mimics the spacing/density we had before.

Also, don't know why the blogger team is wasting time implementing their own custom scroll bar - when that's something that should be better left to the browser! Are they trying to reinvent the wheel, and making it square in the process?

I welcome change, and think this new look can really become a very good thing: but please fixe the color scheme - and more importantly - the wasted white space!

For now, if you want, you can still access the old "Blogger in Draft" looks and editor.

How to Revert to Old Blogger in Draft Interface

The new "enhanced" Google look as made its way to Blogger in draft, the beta version of the blogger interface where things are first tried before making their way into the the regular blogger platform.

However, the proposed new look has some major drawbacks, and besides the appalling color scheme (light grays on white? what are they thinking?) the most annoying difference - to me - is this:

... where you could easily get over 24 post titles visible on screen on a single page...

... you can now get half of that, if as much!

Lots and lots of wasted white space, turning any high resolution screen into something that reminds me of the old VGA days or even the 80x25 characters text mode. It's plain nonsense!


So, how can you go back to the old draft editor?

You just need to replace the "blogger.g" in your browser's URL navigation bar with "posts.g", turning the new layout:

• http://draft.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=...

into the old layout...

• http://draft.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=

I sincerely hope the Blogger team is listening and will do something about it.

Blogger gets Custom Favicons

It took them a while (a very long while, just like so many other "simple" features lots of Bloggers users have been waiting for, year after year), but at last we can now choose custom favicons to use in Blogger.

The favicon is the small icon that shows up next to your blog name/url in a browser, and it's quite useful to  make your website stand out from the rest in the middle of dozens of open tabs. Until now, if you wanted to change your blog favicon, you had to mess around with the HTML in the template - not a very user friendly affair.

Now, it's a lot simpler and can be done by anyone in their blogs design/layout section.

(All I need now is a nice logo for Internet Best Secrets... as the one I have in my portuguese tech blog: Aberto até de Madrugada. :)

Blogger Nightmare

It was supposed to be a simple maintenance update, but Google's Blogger soon proved why you shouldn't try this kind of stuff just before a Friday 13th.

The maintenance update went terribly wrong, forcing the Blogger team to revert to a earlier backup.

Though they're trying to recover posts and comments, some people say they're still still missing stuff.

Just the other day, when Wordpress had problems, I told to a friend that we shouldn't mock that - as someday it could be happening to us "blogger users". Seems like I was proven right sooner than I expected.

Sorry for any issues you might have experienced when visiting here. Let's hope Blogger has finally sorted everything out.

Dynamic Views for Blogger

After offering us an automatic template for mobile devices Blogger does it again with these truly amazing Dynamic Views for Blogger, which allow any blogger hosted blog to instantly gain a completely new look and style by just tweaking your url a bit, and making it a lot more appropriate for... say... browsing it on a tablet.

There are several different styles which can easily be accesses by adding "view/style" to any blogger blog:

• Flipcard: http://internetbestsecrets.com/view/flipcard
• Mosaic: http://internetbestsecrets.com/view/mosaic
• Sidebar: http://internetbestsecrets.com/view/sidebar
• Snapshot: http://internetbestsecrets.com/view/snapshot
• Timeslide: http://internetbestsecrets.com/view/timeslide

Blogger may have been left untouched for a very long time. But it now seems Google is really committed to making it better than ever. For what is worth... I sincerely appreciate it, as this is truly the blogging platform I've loved since I've first tried it.

Better Blogger for 2011

It's no secret I've always been a Blogger/Blogspot fan. Ever since the idea of creating a blog crossed my mind, I instantly knew Blogger would be "the one" for me.

Sure, it is not perfect. Sure, it lacks several things. Sure, it has its own quirks, and the dev team sometimes seems to be "out of their heads" and add/remove features that completely drive me (and lots others) crazy.
But, just like in any other relantionship, things have ups and downs - and I wouldn't trade blogger for any other blogging platform in the world (which might not sound much to you; but considering I indeed already had some offers to switch... it means a lot to me.)

But finally, Google seems to be devoting Blogger the attention it really deserves, and 2011 is a  year that will present us a completely new and impoved blogger interface!

It was about time! Here's to blogger and the amazing team behind it!

Mobile Templates for Blogger

Just the other day I was talking to some friends, regarding the lack of easy to use mobile template in blogger/blogspot, when today, as I logged in to my account, I'm surprised with the following announcement:

Yes, it's true: Blogger now has Mobile templates!

You just need to head into your blogspot/blogger blog settings, and enable the mobile template. It's that easy.

Whenever you access your blog via a mobile device, you get a simplified version of your site:

And at any time, you can still access the full web version, by cliking a link in the bottom of the page.

Great job by the blogger team! We all appreciate it!

Blogger Photo Upload Crashes Chrome

Dear blogger,

I do love your blogging platform and appreciate everything you're doing to improve it and make it even better; however, one does wonder how can you -sometimes- do such haphazardly things like the one I'm complaining about today.

The issue is: photo uploading is not working properly in Blogger.

Even worse, not only it isn't working... it's also causing a full Chrome crash (guess process isolation and separation for tabs and plugins is something requiring a bit/lot more work?).

Worse still - I can't imagine how you've managed to put an experimental "blogger in draft" upload method into production (regular blogger), leaving us no alternative way to upload photos if this method fails.

I have had this issues before, when you first did this - then you reverted it because of our complaints - and later on the method seemed to be working as expected... But now we're back into those first days of crashing issues, like nothing was done since then.

I even went as far as starting IE for the first time in my computer in order to try it out and see if it made any difference... It did'nt: photo uploading still hangs - although it didn't completely crash the browser as it does on Chrome.

Please, please fix this problem in this essential part of your blogging platform.
Your's truly,
Carlos
(blogger lover)