So you want to start your own blog. One of the first things you'll have to do is decide which blogging application you want to use. There are a ton of options, ranging from the incredibly simple (LiveJournal), to the infinitely customizable (WordPress). But one of the easiest blogging clients around is Google's Blogger.
Blogger is not as easy to customize as WordPress, but Blogger's simplicity also makes the process of setting up a blog a lot less daunting. You can literally start blogging within minutes of signing up for a Blogger account. Google will also host your blog for free, which means you don't need to pay for domain registration or web hosting. WordPress does also offer free hosting, but WordPress doesn't allow free account holders to include advertising. Blogger does. So if you have dreams of quitting your day job, but don't want to pay a few bucks a month for web hosting, Blogger provides a good way to test the waters.
But while Google offers a handful of widgets for customizing your blog, if you really want to make your web site your own, you're going to have to get your hands dirty editing your blog template and adding some HTML and JavaScript code. Fortunately, you don't have to know much about HTML or CSS to implement the tweaks in this guide. As long as you're handy with the copy and paste keys, you should be all set. So let's get started.
BlogBackupOnline plans to end its public beta next week with the launch of version 1.5. Most existing users won't notice much difference. BlogBackupOnline will continue to scan your site daily and perform a complete backup of your Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, or other blog for free. But some customers with larger blogs will be prompted to sign up for a paid subscription.
The cutoff point is 5MB. While this might not sound like a lot, in our tests, we managed to backup nearly 400 blog posts while using less than 4MB. Users who need more storage space will have the option of purchasing 50MB for $49.95 per year or 1GB for $99.95 per year.
Users who haven't hit the 5MB point yet will be upgraded to BlogBackupOnline 1.5 automatically when the new version is launched. Anyone who's already over the 5MB limit will get a 6 week grace period to decide whether to upgrade.
Looking for an invite to Google's GrandCentral? The service has been in private beta since Google bought internet telephony company last year. While the private beta label hasn't exactly come off just yet, Google is making it a lot easier for anyone who wants a GrandCentral account to sign up for one.
Today Google posted a little note on Blogger Buzz letting users of the company's Blogger service know that they could sign up for GrandCentral accounts immediately. As far as we can tell, that link should work whether you have a Blogger account or not. But if it doesn't work for you, all you have to do is sign up for a Blogger account. They're free.
Once you have a GrandCentral account, you will be assigned a phone number that you can link with a number of real world phones. Whenever someone calls your GrandCentral number, the call can ring through to your work, home, or cellphones. You can listen to your voicemail from the web. Or you can set rules for how calls from various numbers will be treated.
What's the Blogger connection? You can also use GrandCentral's WebCall feature to add a "Call Me" button to your web page. Visitors can click the button, and GrandCentral will connect their cellphone to your number without ever showing them your phone number. You can either take the call or send all calls directly to voicemail which you can access from the web. You can even post voicemail messages to your blog using GrandCentral's embeddable audio player.
What's your first thought when you hit a Blogspot blog that slaps this warning screen in front of your face?
Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog's content is objectionable. In general, Google does not review nor do we endorse the content of this or any blog. For more information about our content policies, please visit the Blogger Terms of Service
My first thought is, "splog." Followed, as a close second, by, "threats of violence." In any event, it gives every indication that previous readers thought the site was problematic and flagged it.
While Google's Blogger service offers just a fraction of the features you'll find from a more robust blog client like WordPress, it looks like Google is playing catch up. Just the other day we reminded you that you can check out draft.blogger.com for a variety of beta features and widgets that aren't available via the regular Blogger site. And now it looks like Google has added a feature do Blogger in Draft that it should have had years ago: the ability to schedule posts.
Previously, once you hit the publish button in Blogger, your post would go live. Even if you set the date for tomorrow or next year, a post would still go live as soon as you hit publish. This comes in handy if you want an easy way to pin a post to the top or bottom of the page (just set the date for the year 3017 or 1999). But if you plan on taking a vacation and you want to schedule a new post every day while you're out, you've had to resort to third party services, like writing blog posts via email and using an email scheduler like LetterMeLater.
But now if you use the Blogger in Draft page, you can schedule posts just by setting the time for a future date and then clicking Publish. A message should pop up telling you that your post is now scheduled. Keep in mind, this only works if you write your posts using draft.blogger.com. If you use the main Blogger page, posts will go live as soon as you hit publish.
Yesterday we gave you a few pointers on pimping out your WordPress blog. So today we figured it was time to point out a couple of quick and easy ways to make your Blogspot site look a bit less like you ripped a page out of Blogging for Dummies.
As you may be aware, part of the reason Google's Blogger service is so popular is that it's incredibly easy to use. All files are hosted on Google's server, and all you have to do is pick a template and start writing. You can also add widgets to your site by choosing from a list of options in the layout tab of Blogger. If you really know what you're doing you can customize the HTML for your page layout or add custom widgets to your sidebar.
But even if you don't know a lick about HTML, Blogger has a few hidden tricks up its sleeve. If you go to draft.blogger.com instead of www.blogger.com, you can access a bunch of experimental widgets that Google has decided aren't ready for mainstream consumption just yet.
If your blog client of choice is Google's Blogger, odds are you've banged your head against a wall at least a few times wondering why Blogger can't be a bit more like WordPress or TypePad. While Blogger is incredibly easy to use, it's a bit more difficult to customize. But with a bit of work, you can tweak your Blogger site to near-perfection.
For example, while Google doesn't offer a "recent comments" widget, Blogger buster has created a simple widget generator that lets you build and add a recent comments section to your sidebar. You can customize how comments appear by choosing how many comments to display, whether to show the date or post titles, and how many characters to include in the preview.
Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!
This edition covers:
Google TV ads to let advertisers bid for shows
Blogger is infused with three more languages
Accessing Google Docs offline
Google TV to let advertisers bid for shows
Instead of purchasing airtime based on time slots or demographics, Google Adword's TV ads will let advertisers bid for specific shows. From the looks of it, this will give advertisers a lot more flexibility when setting up budgets for television advertising. Blogger is infused with three more languages
Blogger has added support for three more languages, bringing its total number of supported languages up to 40. The new languages available are Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew, and are fully fleshed out with right-to-left features such as right-to-left templates, as well as bi-directional input to give users flexibility in how they want their posts to appear. If you would like to use these new languages on your Blogger blog (or any of the other languages for that matter) you change the language settings from the dashboard.
Accessing Google Docs offline
Google Blogoscoped gave Google Gears a shot to see what kind of offline functionality could be had with Google Docs. Unfortunately, from the looks of it, offline capabilities are capped to renaming and starring files - viewing and editing is not possible at this point in time. So although the ability to "access" your Google Docs files offline is there, it is going to need a little more work before it's going to become standard fare for Google Docs users.
And other bits of Google we tracked since the last issue:
Google Reader adds timestamp - For those that do not enjoy the wait between the time it takes for a published post to update, the timestamp in Google Reader will let you at least know just how large the discrepancies are.
Google adds new search result views - If you're feeling adventurous and want to experience what it's like to be on the cutting edge of search, Google has just released three new experimental search views for you to play around with - map view, timeline view, and info view.
Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google!
This edition covers:
Google reworks Adsense, again... and again
Blogger users can use Blogger url as OpenID
Google still bidding for the 700 Mhz spectrum in FCC auction
Google reworks Adsense, again... and again Much commotion ensued after Google Adsense decided that publishers who send referrals from outside of North America, Latin America, or Japan would be retired. This in addition to announcing that several referral bonuses were to be discontinued made for quite a bit of a storm in the blogosphere. Google, hearing the outcry of the community, quickly made some amendments: as long as the referral is located within North America, Latin America, or Japan, it does not matter where the publisher is located. But still, no more bonuses.
Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging platform have dramatically increased the online file storage capacity for free WordPress.com blogs. How dramatically? Well bloggers used to get 50MB of space for images and documents. Now they can upload up to 3GB. For free.
If 3GB still isn't enough, you can upgrade to 5GB for $20/year, 15GB for $50/year or 25GB for $90/year.
Google's Blogger gives free users 1GB of online storage for media files for free, although you can upgrade to 10GB for just $20/year, while TypePad users would need to pay $300/year to get 3GB of space.
WordPress users who had previously paid for a 1GB upgrade will now automatically have their accounts boosted to 5GB for no additional fee. Free accounts still have some limits. For example, you're not allowed to post advertisements or sponsored posts on a WordPress.com web site. But for bloggers who are more interested in finding a platform for their voice than in making a buck, this upgrade should make WordPress an attractive alternative to other blog hosting sites like Blogger or LiveJournal.
We can think of plenty of reasons you might want to send a time-delayed email message. Perhaps you're sending an email to someone who usually has such a full inbox that you want to make sure they get it when they're sitting in front of their desk, not at 2am when you're writing the message. Or maybe you want to write a few happy birthday messages while you're looking at your calendar and schedule them to actually go out on the actual dates of your friends' and family members' birthdays.
But most web-based email services don't offer the option to schedule your email delivery. You click send, and it's gone. LetterMeLater is a handy email service that lets you schedule your emails any way you like. Best of all, it lets you use your usual email address. Your messages won't wind up in your Gmail, Yahoo!, or Hotmail sent messages folder, but your recipient will see your email address and be able to reply.
LetterMeLater also features a fairly powerful WYSIWYG HTML editor. That means in addition to sending emails with fancy formatting and embedded images, you can use LetterMeLater to write up blog posts if you use a blogging client that supports posting by email. Why does this matter? Say you use a service like Google's Blogger that doesn't let you schedule posts, but you're taking a week-long vacation and want to make sure there's still fresh content on your site every day. Just write up a few posts in LetterMeLater and mail them to yourself one at a time over the course of the week and nobody will know you're actually scuba diving.
It's a weekday, so we probably shouldn't be surprised to see a couple of updates from the Google camp. There are two new features in Google Reader. One could make your life a bit easier, while the other could do the same -- or it could become a huge time sink.
The first new feature is drag and drop feed organization. In other words, you don't need to use drop down menus to place feeds in a new folder, just click and drag it into the folder where it belongs.
The second feature is personalized feed recommendations. Google takes a look at your subscribed feeds and web search history and tries to find feeds that match your tastes. While this is great if you're always looking for new blogs to add to your feed list, if you're someone who already spends way too much of your day sifting through feeds in Google Reader, this feature could keep you from ever turning your computer off. Ever. Not that we speak from experience.
Google has also rolled out one significant update to Blogger today: you can now leave comments on blogs using OpenID. Up until now you needed a Blogger or Google account if you didn't want to leave an anonymous post.
Google's Blogger platform makes blogging about as simple as it gets. You can start writing your blog a few seconds after signing up for an account and choosing a template. But Blogger has long been a few steps behind other popular blog clients like WordPress and TypePad when it comes to enabling new features.
For example, Google has just added the ability to subscribe to post comments via email. Up until now, if you left a comment on a blog post and wanted to keep up on the conversation, you had to keep checking back with the page. While this might seem great if you're trying to generate more traffic for your site, the truth is most people will forget they ever left a comment and move on.
So it's great to see Google add this feature to Blogger. On the other hand, you can only subscribe to comments if you have a Google account. No Gmail? No e-mail notification for you.
Everybody loves a good slideshow, right? Sure, you can go to Flickr, type in a search term and watch the results scroll by. But after a while you might just wind up seeing the same images over and over.
Blogger Play guarantees you'll almost never see the same photos twice. That's because this photo slideshow shows only images that have been recently uploaded to Google's Blogger. And when we say recent, we mean pretty much the last 15 minutes or so.
Most of the tool was written about two years ago, shortly after Blogger added the ability to upload photos. But it was just a toy for in-house workers to see what people were uploading. Now, the team has added some controls that let you adjust the slide speed and move forward and backward. You can also click an image to see the original blog post, or click the "show info" button to see an excerpt from the blog post and the time it was written.
Blogger Play uses Google's SafeSearch to block out adult images, so it should be safe to use at work. If you have a Blogger page and you'd rather not have your images appear on Blogger Play, it looks like your only option is to remove your page from Blogger's listings.
