Showing posts with label Blogger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogger. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Well that's neat. Blogger's post editor is now showing a visual makeover, much like the Pages and Stats sections.

Seems like the formatting and such is all still here, but it's a refreshed design.

Sunday, May 3, 2020

Shocking things: when you see Blogger UI refreshed with a small bit of Material coat, and wonder what when was the last time someone actually pushed a change to the "Main", or heck, even the "Draft" version.

And there's now a "Back to classic Blogger" under the menu. For some reason the default view has shifted to the Stats entry, which was the last thing to get a face lift. The Posts entry now has faster card like elements instead of a dense list of text, and there's a floating + button; operations that were in the over the top Gmail-esque menu bar are either gone, or relegated to buttons over the card view.

If I didn't know better, I would think someone at Google actually cared :-o.

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Passing thoughts:

  1. Sometime this year, I'm liable to have 3,000 posts stored here.
  2. This totals all the journal entries when I used Livejournal, my migration to Blogger, and my return to it in the post-G+ life.
  3. I don't think I want to know how many G+ posts are in my backup, but not here.

It does kind of perturb me that more than six years of my journal entries aren't in the system. But at the same time, writing code to transbliterate my data dump into the a format Blogger supports, is not exactly convenient. But I probably should get around to it someday, 'cuz Blogger's export format is more widely accepted than G+'s.

Monday, July 8, 2019

Note to self

Google Photos show up in Blogger's photos UI under "From your phone" regardless of source. Probably. Or at least when I use my tablet.

Saturday, June 15, 2019

RSS updates

For quite a while now my RSS feed configuration was like this:

    G+ -> pluss.aiiane.com -> Feedburner

Since G+ is no longer, I have updated my feedburner back to pointing at the normal Blogger feed. Although I doubt anyone really still monitors that feed, if it makes your aggregator angry, I do apologize :P.

I expect that my Feedburner settings have been about the same since Google Plus and the pluss turner-arounder were young, or at least as far back as my journal's migration to G+.

Friday, October 26, 2018

Rumblings of fhe Future

I find it curious. The last time I updated this blog was noting my journal would be moving to Google+.

With Google giving G+ the Swift kick, one of the things I've had on my mind of late is whether or not I would start using this place again or go all in on Diaspora. I suppose that only time will tell tell.

Friday, May 11, 2012

I have decided to in fact move my journal to Google Plus. I can be found HERE Those using RSS should be minimally impacted.


The address blog.spidey01.com may at sometime be made to link to a custom setup that pretty prints my Google Plus data via API, and perhaps other stuffs. As a side effect of the move over to Google Plus, this means those relying on my RSS news feed should review their feed next week. If you are using RSS, there should be no problem but if in doubt insure your reader is pointing directly to my feedburner.


Sometime after adapting Blogger, I had set things up with Feed Burner. My RSS feed via feed burner for this blog is here. Thus Blogger is setup to redirect spidey01.blogspot.com feed stuff to this address. Making it an alias of the feed burner. I assume that I should be able to keep this and point my feed burner to a new feed, completing the daisy chain. Soon I will try updating my feed burner to point through GPlusRSS pluss to my Google Plus entries. EDIT: Had an issue with GPlusRSS so I've used pluss—and the feed is active on feed burner!

Those who rely on my RSS feed being re-syndicated on my Facebook and Twitter accounts should see business as usual with the exception that it will direct you to Google Plus rather than Blogger, and it still stands that you'll be silently ignored if you comment via Facebook instead of clicking through the link. This is an advantage of dereferencing the pointer's in the right sequence lol.

Content that isn't suitable for G+ will likely reside in cloud storage and be attached to the entry. This is actually an evolution, because in the past, I've usually made a document in text or an HTML'able markup in my ~/Documents/, and then posted it to Live Journal/Blogger as applicable. Now I won't have to manually sync updates, hehehehehe.



Set course, second star to the right, and straight on till morning. Engage.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Well, updates to the previous; and a little numerical data:

G+ posts since my last Blogger post: 16.

In thinking more thoroughly about the subject, G+ has one large-scale lacking: no pre-formatted code blocks. While I can live with the available formatting capabilities otherwise, ahem, I tend to post a lot of formatted examples: source code, program output, etc. A fair bit of semi-formatted output such as quotations and lyrics as well.

The simple fact remains, however that my G+ is apart of my journal.



One possible solution:

  • Program blog.spidey01.com to point to a "Special" page.
    • Display posts from G+ and link to the entry for commenting/etc.
    • Display posts from Blogger and link to the entry for commenting/etc.
    • Similar technology could be used (and maybe marketed, hehe) for Twitter/Facebook crap, if people wanted to pay or write it.
  • Update spidey01.blogspot.com with a note to such effect.
    • Redirect tech might even be leveragable for this, given the domain stuff already in use.
  • Write a custom client for updating Blogger, with an automated reshare to G+ or a demon that auto-shares my blog posts.
That would achieve the same end goal, more or less.

Monday, April 16, 2012

My Journal (blogs) future

Lately I've been using Google+ more and more, and more, and unlike the times where Facebook was apart of my routine, things focus more on G+. In fact, I use G+ enough that I'm considering turning off commenting here and modifying things to direct people to Google+.


That leads me to also thinking about what directions I want to go in. For the short term, nothing will change, except people should probably look at my G+ more than here, perhaps.


Three possibilities for the future years:
  • Migration to G+ 
  • Retention of Blogger 
  • Migration to a custom solution hosted at Cyb3Web.

The Google Plus solution has some merits. It really is convenient for me, and it integrates well with my data flow. Because it meshes with other data, in my stream. It's so neat. That's one of the good things about Facebook too, even if their filtering stuff took to damn long. The primary concerns I have with the G+ solution is data access and navigation. It can be hard enough to find things again that I have posted on Blogger or Live Journal, because at best I need to do a site: search in Google or know approximately what time period I posted it in. Tagging has proven some use in narrowing the results down but is only as good as ones tagging discipline and yields to many results!

Pro's for a switch to G+:
  • Convenience.
  • Even better and growing integration with Google services.
  • Much better privacy controls.
  • Search Plus Your World may make it easier to find things again.
Con's for a switch to G+:
  • Commenter's would need G+.
  • Finding crap again might not be fun +3 years later, even by the current standard of blogging.
  • I'm dependent on Google for features/data issues. They tend to do Good at releases but they tend to do Slow at making new features available. But hey, at least things are well tested...
  • Limited data access via API \o/.
Those who would just say use Facebook, will have their heads beaten in. Yes, I mean it. Fuck you. Just like you may choose Facebook as a hub, I choose Google Plus.


Unlike Twitter but like Blogger, G+ handles larger, "Blog" style posts pretty well. I like it. Some gripes like the limited control over formatting but I can probably live with that, heck it already has more formatting than I strictly need.


Getting data out of Google Plus is not bad. Seems to offer HTML or JSON. I've just downloaded my Stream content in JSON format. Something that would be very good for data munging. I cannot exactly say that Facebook can win at control over my data here, and their track record not so good at the completeness part IMHO.



The Blogger solution is what I already am doing really. The only thing I have to complain about with Blogger, is API side effects. Blogger integrates into exterior services better than G+, and more importantly does so better than Blogger integrates into G+! I have to manually share things to Google Plus, where as the process of sending it to RSS, Twitter, and Facebook, is fairly good. Except that getting people to respond HERE instead of e.g. on Facebook, took some stern wall posts, on top of the whole signature saying so... lol

It is much easier to build up infrastructure around Blogger than G+ right now, even for custom shit. The problemo is integrating anything with G+ is a bitch at the automata level. Thanks to whoever wanted to protect us for all those shitty Facebook apps I guess. Don't remember who posted it.

Some possibilities exist with custom client-side code perhaps but that is what I really am missng I guess. I love Blogger but it doesn't mate with G+ good enough for me, nor does G+ really mesh with anything outside it yet.

Pro's of Blogger:
  • Already in use, 85%-90% of my journal data is here in some form.
    • The rest is on G+ or in private text files.
  • Ease of integration with custom tools and third party services.
  • Nice formatting controls that blend ease of use and pure power, for those of us who know HTML :).
Con's of Blogger:
  • Sharing to G+ is manual.
  • Can't make "Comments" system just link to a G+ entry.
  • Have to change web pages to view other content that belongs in m y stream.
Notice that non of those cons are really Blogger's fault! Google+ seriously needs better integration services, ffs!!!!


The custom solution has it's merits. I've got the web setup and programming skills to cook up something, and I frequently do hack out tools to scratch itches. But I also know canned solutions have great value. Going custom, I get full control: over data, tools, etc. And I have a great web host :-). Doing some custom code isn't a big issue here, so much as ROI of going Blogger -> Custom instead of Blogger -> G+.


Most of things contra for keeping Blogger, extent to rolling a custom solution. The only difference is the amount of control: if it's humanly possible to achieve, I can. With Blogger, I have to rely on Google engineers and super system admins.

The real pro's are also similar, but larger. Namely I can leverage the extra power to do things like automatically copy post data to an offsite data store: like Dropbox or BOX, on top of having backups with my web host.

Another possibility is that since there is an API for reading data out of G+, my "Custom" solution could really just be a way to pretty print my G+ content, and link back to allow commenting/resharing services. What I am not so sure of, is the affordability of that on my wallet. Maybe it's a good thing that my site doesn't get hundreds of thousands of views a month.



What I am going to do is experiment with the following issues with G+:
  • Finding things again.
    • result: beats Blogger to shit.
  • API access to G+.
  • Experiments with scripting G+.

Oh, and while I can see people might have issues about e.g. control over visual matters being a big blurb for something like what I am contemplating, it is not for me. I usually find Google has reasonable taste and I prefer content over wizbang themes.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Things will likely be odd for a bit with the site style as I transition my journal from a customized modern/traditional template to the new dynamic views.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

This entry is just to test the share to g+ thingy; if you haven't converted from Blogger profiles to G+ ones yet, you ought to :-).

I just wish it was automatic or could be made to work with something like twitterfeed.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

In the future, journal entries should now be syndicated via RSS, Facebook, and Twitter. Commentators using Facebook rather than Blogger, will be LARTed. 






When Google+ integrates better with Blogger, we'll see what happens, hehe. It is rapidly becoming my preferred media but Blogger is better suited for longer stuff. Give us more API Googlers, more API!

Sunday, March 27, 2011

It is done! -> This Journal Moved To Blogger

Right, I've just finished something that has taken me almost two years to finish by hand, since the available tools couldn't keep up with the content. Hmm, makes me think of a line from one of my favourite films! But at long last, and vastly overdue—my journal is now totally under the Blogger roof. 2009-12-05, I posted on LJ and Blogger, that I had moved things here. Well, 2011-03-27, it seems to finally be complete. Even noticed half a months extra posts after I was finished lol. Since beginning with Live Journal back on 2011-09-09, I've made 2,039 entries, assuming that I have not missed any of the 1,537 entries that I was supposed to import >_>.

In honour of completion, I think I'll post the stats of that count to date, something I originally planned to do at 2,000 entries, along with a little celebration, but hey, I didn't expect to notice my two-thousandth post anyway lol. Right, anyway here is the table!





2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

January


12


26


61


46


16


0

February


15


26


40


33


27


0

March


28


23


69


55


26


0

April


0


48


68


62


20


0

May


0


108


47


41


20


0

June


0


69


49


28


16


0

July


0


58


43


49


25


0

August


0


37


46


50


28


0

September


0


26


45


62


24


24

October


0


26


23


45


23


4

November


0


26


40


44


31


17

December


0


16


32


52


42


18

Total


55


489


563


567


298


63


This shows that until getting into the whole job thing, the trend has been for my level of blogging to stay fairly steady. I would say an average of 1 1/2 entries per day at its height. Generally, I've been most active during the first half of the year. 2011 and 2006 being very slow, as one is when I started and one is little more than 25% into it, inverse-respectively.


One thing I really do hope for, is that after this move is sorted, I'll have more time to update my journal more frequently than I have these past few months. I really don't update things here about my present line of work (as a matter of personal policy), and anything interesting really is the subject domain of my notes anyway.



One thing I do know, it's better to have a journal than nothing but memory. And that's saying something, since 2008-2009 are still pretty much in my `recent` memory, and my trail of memories largely go back to the early 1990s!

Thursday, August 12, 2010

I've just managed to import my journal entries from October 2009, that should just leave the majority of September, than my transition from Live Journal to Blogger, should 'technically' be complete once and for all!

Give or take 10-20some entries, I would say I'm approaching 1800 posts since I started keeping a journal back in '06. Planning to celebrate my 2000th entry, if I ever notice it's passing :-o.


Also took some time to move one of my older projects to github. Really, it's kind of cool: I sat down and read about 1500 out of 2300+ lines of perl code and could still understand it nearly a year later. Paged through the remaining ~800LOC, which was mostly trivial elements. Someday I need to get the 'uncommitted' test suite committed and work on some cleanup, but it reads easily enough. I don't claim to be a genius, but hell, most of peoples maintainability comments about Perl are either due to Perl 4 experiences or shotty programmers if you ask me. Sure, I enjoy an occasional game of golf, but I like writing code that tends to explain itself.

Perl, the worst thing I can say about it is autovivification isn't all it's cracked up to be, and you quickly learn how to skip reading error messages and just go proof read your syntax. That's kind of a downside of perl, to track down errors in Perl code, you kind of need to learn proof reading ;).

I like using my brain more than a debugger, but kind of like compilers that report useful info. I ain't met many that actually do.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Since I haven't much to do right now, aside from cursing at portmaster and dealing with libintl problems >_>, I've spent a bit of time importing my journal entries from Aug '09. Now that I look at it, I actually began the move from Live Journal to Blogger back in December, and I've still got two months worth of entries to go before all is done :-S.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Well, this is a wee bit of progress on my task list: July 2009 is finally imported from Live Journal to Blogger. I've only got August, (most of) September, and October left to go, and then my Jounral will have completed the transition!!! I've over 1500 entries from the LJ days, plus out of the ~1460 entries here on Blogger, this would be about the 142nd entry for 2010 alone.

I've noticed that I tend to average, around 40 entries a month, and 20 during 'slow' seasons. Hmm, just think how many log files I've saved on these past four years...

Thursday, April 8, 2010

A little fun with RSS

In a bit of experimentation, I've been thinking about ways to improve the way a certain popular web platform plays with the services I utilise. So, today I began playing with two new toys: FeedBurner and Yahoo! Pipes.

Feed burner offers a bit better control over ones RSS feeds, than most web services that I've encountered do; in particular, much better than both Live Journal and Blogger. For what it's worth, I've converted my blogger feed over to the burner, allowing me to trivially add a few things to the feeds without disturbing any existing subscribers. The main difference, is now I can tweak things for stuff that I feed my journals RSS into, hehehe.

One downside of FeedBurner, is that its ability to merge feeds with the "Link Spicer" feature is quite limited. In particular, it's little value beyond a limited set of common services. Enter Yahoo! Pipes: using it, I was able to (trivially) munge together several of my service feeds into a singular one, e.g. combing several photo album steams into one pipe. I've created several feeds, that I doubt anyone will be interested in; but allow me to route selected information sources into RSS aware entities.


Although Really Simple Syndication has been around for more or less, a solid decade: few people understand it's true value. Properly managed, web feeds whether built on RSS or not, can achieve part of that interoperability that certain keyword jugglers puddle about with XML, and it's been here for years. If you want to cram steams of data somewhere, odds are you should be looking to see if some type of web feed will fit the bill, rather then throwing together yet another obscure XML format to juggle. Bonus points include that decent libraries are already available, which can save some time and make easier to read web app code later ^_^.

Sunday, February 7, 2010

Journal make over

If anyone notices very strange occurrences here, don't worry—it's the result of developing a custom theme ;).

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Last night I took the liberty of configuring Blogger to notify me by E-mail whenever comments are made here, dang, Live Journal did spoil me with all the notification features! Blogger however seems a smoother platform to rely on, my only real complaint is the site templates. One of these days I've gotta take some time and create the look / feel site design I want, which is much easier to do here (for free) then paying Live Journal for their equivalent level of control.

After being notified of a comment made today on one of last weeks entries, I also searched through a few pages of posts just to make sure I haven't missed anything. My apologies if I've missed any comments left between 2010-01-30 and 2009-11-13. It's rare anyone actually leaves a comment lol.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Been in/out all morning, but finally woke up around 11:15R, from a dream best described as interesting but alarming :-S. Less then ten minutes passed before the aggravatory pouncing began, and it was less then 15 minutes before I was officially enlisted for slave duty again :-(.

It's like everyones a big bird with radar...



On the upside, I've managed to transfer all the Live Journal entries from January 2009 into Blogger. Really, I hope to have everything transferred before 2010, lol, but we'll just have to wait and see. I've made about 36 posts on Blogger since the beginning, not counting the moved posting. Live Journal says I've made 1537 entries (counting that one), and blogger gives my grand total here as 1,076 posts. So, there is about 498 posts to transfer over, Feb-Oct 2009 and part of Nov. 2009.

After that, the new roost will be ready for a party, muahuhauaha!