bloggertech
January 26, 2002
Pro Tips #5
Posting to the future and the past: type a post, then click the Options... button, check Set post date/time, and enter a date and time in the future, then post or post & publish. The post will go to your Future tab, and wait until the next time you publish after that date and time, when it will be published. Eh. Now if it automatically published after that date and time, it would really be useful: you could post a couple of days worth of posts, and then go off on a bender with nobody the wiser. Setting the date to the past would be equally useful ("What do you mean I forgot your birthday? I posted a birthday poem on my blog, and you never said a word about it. Just look!"), but, at least at the moment, it doesn't seem to work. A post with a date/time set to the past just gets the current time. Rats. <edit>Actually, posting to the past does work: I was just foolishly using the example for how to format the date and time in the Options... popup, which says MM/DD/YY HH:MM:SS (as in 01/20/02 13:15:00), when in fact it seems to want the same format that it displays: 1/20/2002 1:15:00 PM. Or at least it takes that, if you post with a changed date that it doesn't like, then edit the post and change to date that it gives you in that format... I'll get it figured out one of these days.</edit>
Posting to the future and the past: type a post, then click the Options... button, check Set post date/time, and enter a date and time in the future, then post or post & publish. The post will go to your Future tab, and wait until the next time you publish after that date and time, when it will be published. Eh. Now if it automatically published after that date and time, it would really be useful: you could post a couple of days worth of posts, and then go off on a bender with nobody the wiser. Setting the date to the past would be equally useful ("What do you mean I forgot your birthday? I posted a birthday poem on my blog, and you never said a word about it. Just look!"), but, at least at the moment, it doesn't seem to work. A post with a date/time set to the past just gets the current time. Rats. <edit>Actually, posting to the past does work: I was just foolishly using the example for how to format the date and time in the Options... popup, which says MM/DD/YY HH:MM:SS (as in 01/20/02 13:15:00), when in fact it seems to want the same format that it displays: 1/20/2002 1:15:00 PM. Or at least it takes that, if you post with a changed date that it doesn't like, then edit the post and change to date that it gives you in that format... I'll get it figured out one of these days.</edit>
Pro Tips #4
Once I get the hang of Drafts, I think it will be quite useful, though I fear that it will be a lot like todo lists are for me: out of sight, out of mind. Drafts in a nutshell: it has always been possible to use "Post" as a sort of draft, to save a post in progress, as long as you are the only person on the blog (so nobody else publishes while you are just drafting), and you don't decide to publish another post before you finish with the first one. Drafts let you file away your half-baked posts until you decide that they are ready for the light of day. To make a post a draft, click the Options... button, and in the popup select the Mark as Draft (do not publish) box and click OK and then click the Post button. Mark as Draft doesn't save it, you still have to Post before you wander off. Once you mark a post as a draft, it will wait patiently behind your Drafts tab until you finally decide to edit it, and undraft it by clicking the Options... button and unchecking Mark as Draft. At that point Set post date/time will be selected, with the date and time that you originally posted. If you are slow and lazy, like me, that will probably be days ago, where nobody will ever see the post, so you will probably want to uncheck it to set the current date/time. Unless you need to show up your friends, by having posted about the latest meme long before they did...
Once I get the hang of Drafts, I think it will be quite useful, though I fear that it will be a lot like todo lists are for me: out of sight, out of mind. Drafts in a nutshell: it has always been possible to use "Post" as a sort of draft, to save a post in progress, as long as you are the only person on the blog (so nobody else publishes while you are just drafting), and you don't decide to publish another post before you finish with the first one. Drafts let you file away your half-baked posts until you decide that they are ready for the light of day. To make a post a draft, click the Options... button, and in the popup select the Mark as Draft (do not publish) box and click OK and then click the Post button. Mark as Draft doesn't save it, you still have to Post before you wander off. Once you mark a post as a draft, it will wait patiently behind your Drafts tab until you finally decide to edit it, and undraft it by clicking the Options... button and unchecking Mark as Draft. At that point Set post date/time will be selected, with the date and time that you originally posted. If you are slow and lazy, like me, that will probably be days ago, where nobody will ever see the post, so you will probably want to uncheck it to set the current date/time. Unless you need to show up your friends, by having posted about the latest meme long before they did...
Pro Tips #3
Ah. At last we have post titles in Blogger. Here are the fun things you can do with them: [this space intentionally left blank].
To use the new title field, go to the Settings page, Formatting tab (gotta find an easier way to say that), and change "Show Title Field" to "Yes" and save changes. When you go back to the posting page, there will be a Title input field above the posting textarea. To display the title, in your template, between <Blogger> and </Blogger>, include:
Ah. At last we have post titles in Blogger. Here are the fun things you can do with them: [this space intentionally left blank].
To use the new title field, go to the Settings page, Formatting tab (gotta find an easier way to say that), and change "Show Title Field" to "Yes" and save changes. When you go back to the posting page, there will be a Title input field above the posting textarea. To display the title, in your template, between <Blogger> and </Blogger>, include:
<PostSubject><$BlogItemSubject$></PostSubject>
You can include any formatting tags (except <blink>) you like between <PostSubject> and </PostSubject>, because that whole section is only inserted in the post when you enter a title for the post. However, you cannot include other bloggerTags inside <PostSubject>, so no using the title for the permalink, and like other <$BlogItem... tags, <$BlogItemSubject$> only has meaning inside the <Blogger> to </Blogger> section, so you can't use it for an automatic index to posts (maybe once there is per-post archiving?).
Pro Tips #2
I can't remember if the old free version of the spellchecker let you add words or not, but the new version does: when you spellcheck a post with unusual words like "blog" in it, click "Add" to teach spellchecker.net that you didn't mean "bog" or "log" or even "oblong". (Note to spellchecking purveyors: it would be a good idea to add "spellchecker" to your dictionary: "speechmaker" is not an adequate option. Also, words that are important to your client should probably be added as well. Your client's name would be a great place to start. "Blogger", "Add". Thank you.)
I can't remember if the old free version of the spellchecker let you add words or not, but the new version does: when you spellcheck a post with unusual words like "blog" in it, click "Add" to teach spellchecker.net that you didn't mean "bog" or "log" or even "oblong". (Note to spellchecking purveyors: it would be a good idea to add "spellchecker" to your dictionary: "speechmaker" is not an adequate option. Also, words that are important to your client should probably be added as well. Your client's name would be a great place to start. "Blogger", "Add". Thank you.)
Pro Tips #1
First things first: go to the Settings page for each of your blogs, and at the bottom of the Publishing tab, change "Ping weblogs.com" to "Yes". Congratulations: you just became more popular. <edit>Note that you will be pinging with your Settings for Blog Title and Blog URL, so if you use Blog Title to affect the order that your blogs are listed in the dropdown in BlogThis (I have a blog titled AA and several ZZ... blogs) you will want to change the Blog Title before you start pinging.</edit>
First things first: go to the Settings page for each of your blogs, and at the bottom of the Publishing tab, change "Ping weblogs.com" to "Yes". Congratulations: you just became more popular. <edit>Note that you will be pinging with your Settings for Blog Title and Blog URL, so if you use Blog Title to affect the order that your blogs are listed in the dropdown in BlogThis (I have a blog titled AA and several ZZ... blogs) you will want to change the Blog Title before you start pinging.</edit>
January 23, 2002
What are the last six words any Blogger supporter wants to hear about Blogger Pro? The archive issues remain the same.
Dragging another crumb about Blogger Pro features back to my lair. Biz Stone, Genius:
Among the features I'm looking forward to: email posting and email publishing.I have to say I'm underwhelmed by email publishing so far (mostly the fault of Yahoo Groups, though), but email posting is another matter. And Biz? Permalinks don't take much genius, really. <edit>Apparently, what they take is coffee. Good to know.</edit>
January 22, 2002
Very odd routing: Robert Scoble's notes on the Blogger Pro demo, as posted on Dave Winer's Radio weblog
January 21, 2002
If you are interested in Blogger, and happen to be passing by the Dana Street Coffee House in Mountain View on the evening of January 22nd, you might want to stop in and see what's new.
January 20, 2002
My next favorite new toy?
By far the best thing about Radio is the integrated RSS feed reader. So in my innovative-once-somebody-else-does-it way, I thought "somebody should build me a free RSS reader with a builtin Blogger API client." Thanks to a link from Rogi, I see that someone did (well, is working on would be more accurate): Newz Crawler has had an API client for a couple of days now (and, um, it does work like it's two days old: last time I tried this post, it crashed and took the post with it, possibly because the API seems to be down right now). Right now it's just copy from the feed reader, paste to the API client, but I presume it will be more integrated as it settles in. I'll be watching.
By far the best thing about Radio is the integrated RSS feed reader. So in my innovative-once-somebody-else-does-it way, I thought "somebody should build me a free RSS reader with a builtin Blogger API client." Thanks to a link from Rogi, I see that someone did (well, is working on would be more accurate): Newz Crawler has had an API client for a couple of days now (and, um, it does work like it's two days old: last time I tried this post, it crashed and took the post with it, possibly because the API seems to be down right now). Right now it's just copy from the feed reader, paste to the API client, but I presume it will be more integrated as it settles in. I'll be watching.
Your thirty seconds of fame
Oh, this is bad. Really shameful. Want your thirty seconds of fame, being linked to by someone who wouldn't think of linking to you otherwise? Just find someone who is experimenting with the "Link Feedback" script from yaywastaken (you can find people using it by looking at who links to it on Daypop or Blogdex) and then post a link to them, and click the link. Voila, you're being linked to by Evhead, or not.so.soft, or Firda, or ...
Oh, this is bad. Really shameful. Want your thirty seconds of fame, being linked to by someone who wouldn't think of linking to you otherwise? Just find someone who is experimenting with the "Link Feedback" script from yaywastaken (you can find people using it by looking at who links to it on Daypop or Blogdex) and then post a link to them, and click the link. Voila, you're being linked to by Evhead, or not.so.soft, or Firda, or ...
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