An Open Letter to Blogger

Dear Blogger,

When I couldn't blog for two days due to technical problems on your end and suffered the kind of withdrawals that people would normally take Methadone for, I forgave you. I wrote my blogs in Word and sat it out. Despite the fact the problem took longer to resolve than rewatching an entire season of True Blood,  I forgave you and continued to herald Blogger as the best free blogging platform in the galaxy. Yes this mostly due to the fact that I was temporarily placated by how hot Alexander Skarsgaard is, but also because I was trying to be patient and understanding.

Now my patience has run out. After writing a blog post on the literature behind Star Wars that took about 4 hours of forcing my brain to think about more than eating cheesecake (or Alexander Skarsgaard shirtless), my "Save Now" feature wouldn't save. Later I would get an error message about posting in a language I didn't even recognise and I, like C3PO am fluent in many forms of communication including Korean, French, English, Arabic, Tagalog, Japanese, Mandarin, and  many offensive hand gestures - all of which I aimed directly at the computer screen while your logo - which looks like a sideways deformed ass btw - mocked me unapologetically.

I do not think myself above being mocked, however I do think given that I have been extremely vocal about how great I think Blogger and by extension Google - despite the fact I secretly believe one day your search algorithm will become sentient and take over the world - that this is bullshit.

You owe me all the little tidbits I added to my blog post that I personally believe elevated it from being great to being nearly as awesome as the first time I saw Star Wars. If I were a Wookie I'd get on a plane, rent a car, drive to your offices, and rip your arms off.

When a company or entity has such a dominant presence in anything, nevermind the 24/7 culture of the Internet you have a responsibility to your clients. Yes most of Google's services are free, but please don't add insult to injury by allowing glitches to occur on your free blogging platform and not on your ad revenue moneymaking search engine.

Sincerely,

____ - ______   __________


P.S.

In case you're more visual.

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The Rumble in the Social Networking Jungle

In the midst of the controversey surrounding Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's admission that they hired PR consultants to smear Google in a whisper campaign that included forcing newspapers like USA Today to write nasty op-ed pieces, Google must be doubly upset by the problems they experienced this week with their blogging platform Blogger if only because we can assume Mark Zuckerberg is enjoying their woes.

But let's get to the more juicy stuff. For example, how scared is Zuckerberg and his FB minions of Google's social networking platform Social Circle? Having already won the race from his dorm room I would assume Zuckerberg, who has often said he doesn't care about what he's worth (and I mean this in a literal and figurative way), wouldn't care about losing millions in revenues to Google. But obviously he does. What I don't get really is why FB would fess up to being shady so easily.

The reality is with people accessing webpages more and more often through social networking sites like Facebook, it's Google who should be scared. Their recent efforts to scan books and offer them online was met with lawsuits. Their Google art project received very tepid applause. Like golf claps tepid. As one of my friends so artfully put it, "it's pretty fucking useless". But then again this friend in particular has the means to stomp about the globe visiting museums and art in person. In the current economy not that many people can afford the luxury. And these are just recent muck ups. Google failed to buy Friendster or to launch their own social networking platform even though their original social networking platform launched one whole month before "The Facebook".

I simply don't believe that Facebook is the underdog in this situation, although there are those (yes I mean you senior writer for Wired) who disagree with me and believe in the end that with all their fingers in their many, many pies that Google is the Goliath and that Zuckerberg is going to need a much bigger and better slingshot if Facebook is going to keep their share of the market.

But Facebook does have one advantage and that is that their users don't seem to care for the most part what stunts they pull because they're not going to stop using Facebook. And why would we? Even I as a somewhat disgruntled user spend most of my day on Facebook communicating with my friends and not just my friend who is Papua New Guinea or my friends in Argentina. I communicate with my friends who happen to live just an hour away on Facebook. It's pathetic really but Facebook has become the Soma of the our brave new world.

Just take a look at this image that visualises Facebook connections around the world...

Sure I still use Google's Gmail to check my email and Google is my preferred search engine (I honestly don't think Google should be worrying about Bing at all, it's a horrible search engine), I log on for 20-30 minutes a day on Gmail. Today I've already been on Facebook for a solid 12 hours. With that kind of competition, no wonder Google is trying so hard to give us, the user, what we don't even know we want.

But there is hope for Google, who may just be the real underdog here. While I spend 12 hours a day on Facebook I have never once clicked on any of their ads. With the last violation of my privacy I make it a weekly mission to make sure none of my private information is being shared. It makes me wonder how many Facebook users are like me and don't click on ads either. It's hard to imagine that it doesn't affect Facebook's bottom line if not now some day in the distant future and that might just be where and how Google will win this rumble in the social networking jungle. I mean Foreman was pretty fantastic and all, but Ali still won in the end didn't he?



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Stumble of the Day

Now that I've decided to blog not just because I have a helluva lot of things I want to say, but also as a writing tool (whether it's to keep me writing even when I'm blocked on my oeuvre or able to be used later when I'm *crossed fingers* published) I've been paying a lot more attention to the Internet in general, mostly because I've decided to be more a part of it then leaving comments on my friends Facebook pages.

No one starts a blog bcause they don't want someone to read it. Right?

So I troll the World Wide Web via StumbleUpon. Partly because I can select what I'm interested in seeing and partly because when I tried to stumble around Blogger in a similarly haphazard fashion I kept getting blogs about Jesus or blogs written by extremely patriotic Vietnamese teenagers. StumbleUpon is convenient and allows me to like stuff I can sort through later to see if I want to read or research something I was for the 10 seconds I glanced at it, extremely interested in. I'd like to become one of those nifty people who reads blogs all the time so StumbleUpon helps me discover blogs I might not otherwise because my desires have yet to supercede my ability to be really, really lazy.

Which leads me to the Stumble of the Day!!! Today's Stumble is brought to you by The Wondrous and if you visit the site right this minute you will be treated to a bevvy of bikini clad babes bearing bare bellies*. So hurry or just search their site for bikini babes via their search function. It's wondrous.

*I just love alliteration, don't you?

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Geek Out - How to show summaries of posts in Blogger

I'm only posting this because A) I couldn't find where Blogger put the thing where you can chose to summarise posts (I tend to be long-winded, so I wanted to be able to show just a certain amount of each posts) and B) It's so simple and can be slightly modified easily. If Blogger has this available somewhere and I'm not just remembering it from my days as a Wordpress user (sorry WP but w/Blogger you don't have to do your own SEO). If it's available on Blogger please leave me a comment as to where, because I couldn't find it.

If you like the look of the summary of my posts, here is what you do:

1. Go to New Post > Edit HTML
2. Find " /head. Highlight it.
3. Cut and paste the following:

<script type='text/javascript'>
var thumbnail_mode = &quot;float&quot; ;
summary_noimg = 230;
summary_img = 140;
img_thumb_height = 100;
img_thumb_width = 100;
</script>
<script src='http://blogergadgets.googlecode.com/files/excerpt.js' type='text/javascript'/>
</head>

4. Find

<data:post.body/>

5. Replace with the following:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<data:post.body/>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;static_page&quot;'>
<data:post.body/>
<b:else/>
<div expr:id='&quot;summary&quot; + data:post.id'>
<data:post.body/>
</div>
<script type='text/javascript'>
createSummaryAndThumb(&quot;summary<data:post.id/>&quot;);
</script>
<div style='clear: both;'/>
<span style='padding-top:5px;;float:right;text-align:right;'><a expr:href='data:post.url' rel='bookmark'><b>Read more >></b></a></span>
</b:if>
</b:if>

6. Now to edit the number of characters you show in the summary PC users Control-F 230.

7. You should find 230 within this code:

summary_noimg = 230;
summary_img = 140;
img_thumb_height = 100;
img_thumb_width = 100;

8. If you want to edit how much text shows in the summar play with the noimg (meaning summaries for posts with no images) and img (meaning summaries for posts with images) numbers. The img_thumb_height/width= will allow you to adjust the size of the thumbnails that will show in the summary with posts that contain images

Things I haven't figured out - if/how the thumbnails will work for the summaries if there are multiple images in the post, how to make it possible to change the font for the "read more" link, how to keep the breaks and other font formatting in the summary bit as they are in the original post. Also I'm not sure how it impacts site satistics (but I am sure that I don't really care). If I discover any of this stuff out or any of the other little bits for this, I'll update

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