Google Reader Adds the Blogs You Follow in Blogger

Google Reader tests a new feature that automatically subscribes you to the "blogs you are following" in Blogger. "The blogs you follow in Blogger have been added as subscriptions in Google Reader. Subscriptions can be managed in Reader without affecting your following list in Blogger."

It's not very clear if "blogs you are following" is a new feature or a synonymous for blogroll, since Google Reader links to a non-existent page that is supposed to reveal more information. A thread from Google Reader Group shows that the new feature was accidentally added and then removed.

"Google Reader automatically added a "Blogs I'm Following" folder on my Reader. I've already got my Reader set up the way I want it and this folder is superfluous and annoying," says Vanessa. "It would be nice if they gave us the option of using it before they just took it over that way! There is no mention of it in any of their help files either, this is just ridiculous," mentions Jackie.

The following screenshot, courtesy of "The Other Drummer", shows the new folder automatically added by Google Reader:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.blogger/following.


In other Google Reader news, the iPhone version started to reformat the linked web pages for mobile browser, but this can be changed in the settings. "For users with Nokia and other AppleWebKit-enabled phones, soon your phones won't automatically choose the iPhone version of Google Reader," says a Google employee.

{ Thanks, hlpPy. }

Better Comment Moderation in Blogger

Blogger doesn't do too much to prevent comment spam. You can enable word verification and annoy your readers, moderate the comments and remove the instant feedback or disable the comments. Until recently, I didn't use any of these options and I manually deleted spam comments one by one, but this becomes excruciating when you have to delete hundreds of comments. So I enabled CAPTCHAs and made it more difficult to post comments.

If you decided that moderating comments is the best way to deal with spam, there's a new option to enable comment moderation only for old posts. I'm not sure if Blogger's default value of 14 days is the best option, but you can change it to any other number. This way your readers will be able to comment on the recent posts without moderation, while the visitors who find older posts using search engines or links from other sites will need to wait until you approve their comments.

Blogger > Settings > Comments

Moderating comments (Blogger can't detect identical comments)

I still think that Blogger needs better tools to filter comment spam and I'm surprised to see that Google can't come up with a real solution like Akismet. The spam filter could also be used in Google Groups, orkut and other community sites.

Major Update for Google's Blogger

It's raining with features in the experimental version of Blogger, available at http://draft.blogger.com. To try these new features, it's a good idea to visit Draft Blogger and temporarily enable "Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard" at the top of the page.

Probably the most important new feature is the inline commenting system, that lets you post comments without opening a new page. This year, I tried using a pop-up window for the comment form, but it's still inconvenient to post comments. The new option, which can be added in the Draft Blogger by going to Settings > Comments > Comment Form Placement, uses an iframe to display a textarea and a list of authentication options:

<iframe allowtransparency="true" id="comment-editor" src="http://www.blogger.com/comment-iframe.g?blogID=BLOGID&postID=POSTID" scrolling="auto" width="100%" frameborder="0" height="275"></iframe>


I added the inline comment form to the template, so you can try it. For now, you can't preview the comment before posting it and I haven't figured out how to add the option to delete your comment.

Another extremely useful new feature lets you import and export your posts and comments. "Now you can export all of your posts and comments into a single, Atom-formatted XML file for easy backup. You can then import the posts back into Blogger, either into an existing blog or into a new one." The option is available in the Draft Blogger by going to Settings > Basic. Please note that the exported XML file can be quite large: for example, this blog's entire archive has 10.2 MB.


Blogger has a new post editor that borrows a lot of new tricks from Google Page Creator. You can move the images inside a post and dynamically choose between different sizes of the image. The new editor is smart enough to no longer replace newlines with <br> tags when you add tables, lists, styles, scripts and objects. There's also an improved preview option that uses your template to style your content. Unfortunately, the new editor lacks many features currently available: auto-save, spell checking, video upload and the toolbar for editing HTML.


Blogs that use the new layouts can add star ratings to get feedback from readers, but I'm not sure if this is a useful feature. There's also an option that integrates Blogger with Google Webmaster Central: you can automatically add all your Blogger blogs with a single click.

This is one of the biggest updates to Blogger and many of the new features are long overdue. If everything goes well, all these features will soon be available in the standard Blogger interface.

{ Thanks, Brad Linder. }

FeedBurner FeedFlare for Blogger Comments

Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, it makes sense to integrate with other Google services. One of the most requested features, a FeedFlare that shows the number of comments for each post from a Blogger blog, has been recently added. The FeedFlare links to Blogger's (ugly) comments page so you can easily add a comment if you read the post in a feed reader. Note that the comment feed has to be enabled in Blogger's settings page.

FeedBurner offers a FeedFlare API, but you need to do some server-side coding to create dynamic FeedFlares like the one that shows the comment count.



{ Thanks, Pat Hawks. }

Don't Talk About Blogger's Comments

(Based on a real song/movie/book.)

And you open the page and you step inside. It's an interesting post from a Blogger blog. After reading it, you want to post a comment and share your opinion, but there's no contact form. A strange link invites readers to "post a comment" and you reluctantly click on it. The link sends you to a web page from a different domain where you are supposed to enter your comment, but the comment form is too small and you can no longer see the original post unless you click on a barely visible link. For some reason, Blogger asks you to log in and it's not obvious that you can post a comment without having a Google account. Oh, and there's a difficult to read CAPTCHA you need to solve before clicking on "Publish your comment".

After all this trouble, the comment has been finally posted. Blogger forgot to auto-link your URLs, but that's no longer your problem. The big question is how to get back to the post. You want to give up and close the tab, but you notice a subtle message: "Your comment has been saved. It may take a moment for your comment to appear on the site at the original post." The last three words are linked so maybe clicking on the link will send you back to the original post.

Congratulations! You've managed to post a comment on Blogger. If this your first comment, it's likely it will also be the last one. "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are all a part of the same compost. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

Top Commentators for a Blogger Blog

While Blogger doesn't encourage comments and communities, it's still interesting to see who comments on your blog more frequently. This information can be obtained from Blogger's comment feeds, but you need a tool for processing feeds.

Yahoo Pipes is probably the best way to combine, sort, filter and modify feeds. Inspired by this Yahoo Pipe, I created a pipe that shows the top 50 commentators from a Blogger blog, based on the most recent 5,000 comments. You can enter the URL of your blog and the number of top commentators, but the list is not generated instantaneously since Yahoo Pipe must fetch and process at most 10 GData feeds (Blogger's API doesn't include more than 500 comments in a single feed). The pipe could also be used to add the list of top commentators to the blog, using the JSON code generated by Yahoo.

Depending on the number of comments from your blog, the list may not be very meaningful. For example, if your posts get an average of 500 comments, this list will only reflect the hierarchy for the last 10 posts. To see the total number of comments from your blog, open this feed: http://BLOGNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default (replace BLOGNAME with the proper subdomain), view the page's source and search for "openSearch:totalResults". Google Operating System has 15,217 comments and the most recent 5,000 comments corresponding to the last 5 months.

Update. Here's some JavaScript code that uses Yahoo's JSON output. This could be easily added in a HTML/JavaScript page element from Blogger.

<script type="text/javascript">
function pipeCallback(obj) {
document.write("<ol>");
var i;
for (i = 0; i < obj.count ; i++)
{
var href = "'" + obj.value.items[i].link + "'";
var item = "<li>" + "<a href=" + href + ">" + obj.value.items[i].title + "</a> </li>";
document.write(item);
}
document.write("</ol>");
}
</script>
<script src= "http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_render=json&_callback=pipeCallback&
_id=c92ac21897d8b56e61cfa85930dd89a1&url=http%3A%2F%2FBLOGNAME.blogspot.com&num=10" type="text/javascript"></script>

(merge the last two lines and replace BLOGNAME with your blog's subdomain name).

Publish Blogger Posts to Future Dates

Sometimes you want to take a week off from your blog, but it's difficult to stop posting and keep your readers and search engine bots waiting for new posts. One way to handle this is to write a number of posts in advance that are automatically posted while you are away.

Blogger didn't offer this feature, so the only workaround was to use a service that schedules email delivery (like LetterMeLater) and Mail-to-Blogger. But Blogger constantly improve and adds a lot of interesting features, especially lately. Blogger in Draft tests a scheduled posts feature that changes the way Blogger publishes posts: if you publish a post with a future date, Blogger will delay the publishing until that date.

"Publishing a post in the future is pretty simple: in the post editor, reveal the Date and Time fields using the Post Options toggle and enter a post date and time that is in the future. When you then click the Publish button, your post will become scheduled. When the date and time of the post arrive, your post will be automatically published to your blog." This only works from Blogger in Draft, but the feature will soon be available from the regular interface. For those who want to see all the new Blogger features before they're released to everyone, there's a Greasemonkey script that redirects you to Blogger in Draft.

Add a Blogroll to Blogger

Blogger in Draft (a pre-release version of Blogger) added an interesting widget that lets you display the latest posts from your favorite blogs. It's an enhanced blogroll that displays the recently updated blogs and snippets from the most recent posts.

You can manually add the blogs by entering their URLs or you can select from your Google Reader subscriptions. To add the widget to a Blogger blog, you need to go to Blogger in Draft, click on the Layout section corresponding to the blog and add the "Blog List" page element. You can't add the widget for blogs that still use the classic templates, like this blog.

Google Reader already lets you create a blogroll from any public tag, but Blogger's widget is more customizable.



In other Blogger-related news, the comment page make it more obvious that you can sign in using an OpenID and Blogger enabled pagination for posts with more than 200 comments.

Blogger Becomes an OpenID Provider

After allowing you to authenticate your comments using an OpenID, Blogger is now an OpenID provider. To use any of your blogs as an OpenID identity, you need to check "Enable OpenID for blogs" in your Blogger profile (the feature is still experimental, so it's not added in the public release yet) and save the settings.


Blogger inserts this line in the head section of your template:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />

so now you can use any of your blogs as an OpenID. Some simple things you can do with your OpenID are to claim your blog at Technorati (you still need a Technorati account), sign in using your OpenID at Plaxo, Zoomr or post comments in a LiveJournal blog, like Brad Fitzpatrick's blog. A small inconvenience is that Blogger uses the subdomain of your blog instead of your name.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced it will support OpenID 2.0 (Blogger is a provider for OpenID 1.1), so the future is bright for this authentication system.

Post Blogger Comments Using Your Own Domain

Blogger has recently added support for posting comments by authenticating with OpenID. The integration is now live for all Blogger blogs and that means you no longer have to show your identity by using a Google account. You already have an OpenID if you have an account at AOL, WordPress, LiveJournal or at one of the other OpenID providers. You can be your own OpenID provider, but this is a little more complicated.

A simple way to use your own domain as an OpenID is to delegate it to another OpenID provider. That means you should get an OpenID from a site like MyOpenID and add these two lines in the head section of your homepage (you should replace http://NAME.myopenid.com with the real OpenID):

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://NAME.myopenid.com/" />

Now you can use your domain or subdomain everywhere you're allowed to enter an OpenID. To post a Blogger comment, select "Any OpenID" from the drop-down and enter your URL. You'll be redirected to the OpenID provider to enter your password.



Google removed the option to enter your URL when you don't sign up with a Google account, but you can still show the URL if you use OpenID.

Update: Blogger brought back the option to enter a URL when post unauthenticated comments.

Google Starts to Index Images Uploaded to Blogger

Even if this sounds hard to believe, Google Image Search started to index images uploaded to Blogger in December 2007. Until this month, all the images were prevented from being indexed by search engines for unknown reasons. This move is closely related to the fact that the images hosted at Picasa Web Albums started to be indexed by Google.

The chart from Google Analytics shows the number of referrals from images.google.com for this blog:


... and here are some results from Google Image Search:


The images uploaded from Blogger's interface are hosted at Picasa Web Albums, but they're also available at subdomains like bpX.blogger.com, where X is a digit. Another Blogger oddity, inherited from Picasa Web, is that you can't directly link to an image (if you click on a link to one of the two images uploaded above, you'll see a dialog that asks you to download the image). Blogger even has a workaround for this silly restriction: it automatically creates web pages that include the pictures (here's a link to the same image, but this time the image is included in a web page).


Images uploaded before August last year, when Blogger launched the latest major upgrade, are still not crawlable.

Blogger Tests OpenID Support

Blogger in Draft (a pre-release version of Blogger) added the option to comment using an OpenID. According to Wikipedia, OpenID is a "decentralized single sign-on system. Using OpenID-enabled sites, web users do not need to remember traditional authentication tokens such as username and password. Instead, they only need to be previously registered on a website with an OpenID "identity provider" (IdP). Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can employ OpenID software as a way for users to sign in; OpenID solves the problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity."

OpenID is great because it allows you to use a single account to sign in to multiple sites without worrying about passwords. The system has been developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal (Brad now works at Google).

Some important companies and sites that provide OpenIDs: AOL, Orange, WordPress, Six Apart and others. If you have an account at any of these sites, you also have an OpenID. Unfortunately, very few important sites lets you authenticate using an OpenID.

To enable the OpenID integration in Blogger, you need to visit draft.blogger.com, edit the Settings for your blog, choose the Comments tab and select "Anyone" (allows anonymous comments) or "Registered users". I enabled OpenID for this blog, as you can notice if you try to post a comment.


Hopefully, this is a small step for a full integration with Google's authentication system.

Email Notifications for Blogger Comments

Here's a good tip for those who leave comments on an old post from a Blogger blog: now you can get email notifications if someone posts a new comment. Just check "Email follow-up comments to my Google account address".

Blogger also provides feeds for each post's comments, but not many people use feed readers and those who use one don't want to increase the number of subscriptions with "weird" feeds that are useful for a limited time.

Offline Blogger

To anticipate an email from Google, I must say that Blogger didn't launch a version that works offline, so the tool described in this post is only an example of what you can do using the recently-launched Blogger JavaScript library. The new library lets you create applications that interact with the account of a Blogger user: retrieve his blogs, edit existing posts, or create new posts. Basically, you can create a different Blogger editor by only writing JavaScript code.

Blog.gears is an example of Blogger editor that uses Google Gears to make it work offline. You're able to create blog posts and edit one of the recent posts even if you don't have an Internet connection. As soon as you go back online, Blog.gears synchronizes the data stored offline with the data from Blogger's servers. There's nothing fancy about the editor (no rich-text editor, you can't add images or preview the post), but it's a cool preview of what we can expect from a new version of Blogger that will be offline-enabled.

A more advanced blog editor that works offline and it's not restricted to Blogger is Windows Live Writer. "Writer synchronizes drafts on your blog with changes you make when you're offline, so you don't have to worry about reconciling different versions."

Visualizing Photos Recently Uploaded to Blogger

Blogger launched a new feature that shows the latest uploaded photos in a never-ending slideshow. Blogger Play is addictive, like many other real-time visualization tools, and could be a pretty good screensaver. The slideshow leaves out vulgar pictures, so the screensaver would be safe-for-work. "Blogger Play is (...) a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now" and it expands the stream of recently-updated blogs from Blogger's homepage.

To create a screensaver from a web page, you can use RunSaver for Windows and IdleWeb for Mac (both are free, but there are more polished commercial alternatives).

Blogger Play was developed two years ago, but it remained a cool toy for Google employees. "Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn't stop watching. Over the years we've kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs."

Technorati has recently launched a real-time visualization of the most recent posts from the blogosphere, but it only shows posts from popular blogs. Now that Google indexes web pages really fast, it would be interesting to search for something and see the new web pages added at the top of the search results as soon as they're indexed.

Blogger Adds Trendy Search and Other Widgets

If you liked the way Google implemented search in most of their official blogs, now you can get something similar without writing complicated code. Blogger blogs that migrated to layouts can include a search widget that shows results from the blog, its blogroll, the pages linked from the blog and the web. The feature uses the AJAX Search API and Google Custom Search, so the search results are loaded at the top of the current post, without reloading the page.

The widget is available at Blogger in Draft, the place where Blogger showcases experimental features.


The widget may show sponsored links, but you can't earn money from them. In fact, Google doesn't earn money from the ads either and includes them for free. "Ads in the AJAX Search API are basically an experiment still. We are trying to figure out if ads are useful in this model, and how do our customers want to use the ads and benefit from the ads? We don't know the answers yet. Yeah, Google is not benefiting from these ads, because advertisers are not being charged for them. The only guys that actually benefit, to be honest with you here, are the advertisers. They are basically getting free impressions," explained in an interview Mark Lucovsky.

Blogger also added a poll widget and enclosures for podcasts and videocasts. "Enclosure links let you turn your blog into a podcast. If you've uploaded your audio or video to the web, you can link to it as an enclosure so that your readers can subscribe and download it using iTunes or another podcatcher."

Redirect Your Blogger Feed to FeedBurner

If you have a blog and start to use FeedBurner to manage your feed, you have to change the autodiscovery link in your template and redirect the old feed to FeedBurner, so you don't have to tell your readers to subscribe to the new feed. Until today, there wasn't option to redirect the feed in Blogger, but now you can simply go to Settings > Site Feed > Post Feed Redirect URL and add the address of your FeedBurner feed.


Blogger offers several feeds for blog posts:

(1) blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml - the old address for Blogger's ATOM feed
(2) blogname.blogspot.com/rss.xml - the address for Blogger's RSS feed
(3) blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default - the full feed
(4) blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary - the summary feed

... but Blogger only remembered about the first one. The other three don't redirect to the new feed, which is pretty strange, considering that the feed #3 is new Blogger's default feed.

FeedBurner's blog notes that "by redirecting your feed, you can get a true picture of how many subscribers you have. Some of you might even see a few more subscribers magically appear, though results will most certainly vary."

Even if Blogger mostly introduced this feature for FeedBurner, you can redirect your feed to any other address (for example, to a feed that mixes posts from all of your blogs).

Last week, FeedBurner started to offer its premium services for free and it's pretty clear that, unlike other Google acquisitions, FeedBurner really moves fast.

Tool for Backing Up a Blogger Blog

Blogger Backup is a small open-source Windows tool that, well, backups the posts and comments from a Blogger blog. You'll have to enter your Google credentials (and your only protection is that the software is open source and you can check the code), select the blog you want to backup and decide how many posts you want to save.

The format for exporting is Atom, so for each post you'll get two files: one for the actual content of the post and one for the comments. There's also the option to save all the posts in a big Atom file.

Once you have all these files on your computer, you could write a tool that imports them to a database or use Blogger's API to recreate the blog. In fact, this tool also uses Blogger's API to get the feeds.


Another way to backup your blog involves manually downloading a page that contains all your blog posts and using an extension to get the photos from these posts.

{ via Digital Inspiration }

Comment Spam in Blogger

"Hi, Added a new value add to my blog this weekend - a news widget from www.widgetmate.com. I always wanted to show latest news for my keywords in my sidebar. It was very easy with this widget. Just a small copy paste and it was done. Great indeed."

Blogger doesn't offer an option to detect spam comments. The only options you have are to add a captcha to prevent automated spam or to moderate the comments, but that takes away from the value of an instant feedback. Even if Blogger adds rel=nofollow to all the links from comments and you don't improve their ranking in the search engines, "bloggers" like Addison post the same spam comment every 5 minutes to promote some mediocre widget site. Because Addison posts the comments manually, he can enter the captcha correctly.

But Blogger could at least check if similar comments were posted to a single blog multiple times. Or use the Akismet model.

It's always surprising to see how a company that actively fights against web spam is defeated by some comment spammers that use cheap methods to promote their latest widgets.

Blogger Adds Video Uploading

Blogger has a place where you can test new experimental features: it's called Blogger in Draft and it's available at draft.blogger.com. Everything will look the same as the normal Blogger, but you may discover new features or new interfaces that aren't yet ready to be released to the general public. There's even a new blog that promises to keep us up-to-date with the new functionalities. "Features on Blogger in draft may be updated, changed, re-imagined, transmogrified, or removed at any time. Draft gives us the freedom to see what works and what doesn't before we turn a feature on for everyone, so expect us to make changes — hopefully you'll think they're for the better!"

The first feature added to Blogger's labs is video uploading: you're now able to upload videos directly from Blogger's editor. After you click on the video icon, you only need to select a video from your computer and to enter a title.


The video will be uploaded to Google, but until it's ready you'll see this nice placeholder:


You can continue to edit the post during the upload, but you can't publish it until the upload finishes. The video can be aligned and resized in the rich-text mode and that's a good idea since the initial size is very small.

Google hides the details of the implementation and includes this obscure code in your post that depends on some JavaScript to actually work:

<object id="BLOG_video-b1ce175e95d1aa16" class="BLOG_video_class" contentid="b1ce175e95d1aa16" height="255" width="291"></object>

The videos don't seem to be uploaded to Picasa Web Albums and they're not available at Google Video either, so it's unclear how you can reuse them or share them. Blogger mentions that "your videos are kept private and will not be included in Google Video search."

Update (August 24): the feature is now available at Blogger's main site.