Tag: Blog

Off to a good start with the new blog

Yesterday I switched the blog server from Blogger to WordPress. Everything still seems already. Yesterday, just a few hours after the switch I had already received 4 or 5 spam-comments. Not a great start from that perspective, but luckily moderation is turned on and I quickly marked them as spam. I might consider adding some CAPTCHA or similar, let’s see how the trend goes.
Continue reading “Off to a good start with the new blog” →

From Blogger to WordPress, finally!

Welcome to my new, old blog.

After using Blogger for more than 5 years and after developing WordPress plugins and sites for others, I thought it was time for me to jump on board. A lot of people are leaving WordPress, focusing on Twitter, or using new tools like Posterous and Tumblr. I like to be old school sometimes, and I like this blog and the history it holds.

So welcome to the same old thing. 🙂

Streaming video on the mobile

I thought I had posted about this, but apparently I did not.
Steve has started a blog a few months ago about video streaming on the mobile. It has a very noble scope, share his experience, exchange views with other developers and eventually provide to the WURFL project the information collected.

Steve did a very good job describing his test environment, encoding configurations and server configuration explanations. He worked hard on this and certainly needs some more attention. Hopefully this post can bring some more attention.

Check out mvstreaming.

Blogger pains

Mike Rowehl has commented negatively about Blogger (and my blog being here) more than once. Anyway he’s not the only one, of course.

I have noticed myself more than once, lately, that the site is very often slow and sometimes returns an internal error. Reloading solves the thing most of the times. It seems like some server clusters might have some problems.

The commenting system is not so very well designed. I found myself more than once not being able to publish a comment because there was an error in my message, but the alert was so tiny that I hadn’t even noticed it.

I had to hack some widgets and take inspiration from other programmers that built their own widgets such as the tag-blob and the comments widget.

I have considered moving to WordPress, but when the tags were added to the Blogger, I did not feel the need so much. I think the skins are too limited in their variety (they are mostly color variations), but I can leave with that.

Playing around with RSS has sometimes generated some problems to RSS readers and yesterday has been the latest demonstration of these problems. I added some tags here and there on old posts. Their date has remained 2005 or 2006, but they appear in the RSS as very recent posts (while they are not).

I’m sorry about this, and if you have any formal complaints, please, direct them to the blogger dev-team. 🙂

mobile web, make your own standards

Two days ago I posted about MS IEMobile and commented about the features they promote that are not based on any standard, but only on their own ideas and technologies.

Thanks to Jérôme, I found a link on Six Apart that promotes an alternative way to advertize mobile versions of sites. Specifically of blogs (as that’s their very own business).

If you read the article down to the bottom of the page, you will discover that actually this “technology” was already agreed to become a standard!
So 5 guys get together, agree on something and HEY, that’s a standard!

I didn’t think it would be so easy to make a standard. I wonder what the W3C (I know they don’t make standards but recommendations, but what’s the difference?), IETF, ETSI and other organizations are here to do. 🙂

Blogger Beta wounds

I’m pretty happy of the move to the new Beta of Blogger. Nothing to regret.

It’s just sad that my Safari browser crashes when visiting the articles. First time I got a javascript error, when reloaded the same article that was supposed to have a new comment, Safari crashed. 😦

I’m still waiting for the editing aids for Safari. It should not be so hard to add the bold and italic buttons for Safari. That’s plain javascript, isn’t it?

Anyway, I just love the ability of moving blocks up and down dragging blocks within the browser. Sometimes this makes me think of when we used to write pages with notepad with HTML 3.2, gray backgrounds, <hr> to separate sections and that was it.
Very nice the ability to edit links to external pages with a guided menu.
All these features were really needed!

Labels are added manually, filling an text field. After you have at least once, while typing you get suggestions. Very useful to avoid typos!
How much do I love suggestions while typing? A LOT!

Blogger Beta

Recently Google/Blogger launched a new Beta version.

All long due update, IMHO, infact I was considering to move to WordPress. After a few tests (a smooth import of the contents) a little customization and a chat with my girlfriend… I decided to stay here.
It looks like Google was scared to lose me and all the hits that I bring, because they added most of the features that I was looking for, such as labels and better templates.
I am still missing some statistics. Would be good to know who reads what and so on, but anyway this is already a big step ahead and hopefully more features will come soon.
Would also be good to have a better integration with other sites such as Technorati and Company, but maybe the Google guys are not so keen at integrating with competing engines… Can you blame them?

So this is my first post with a label.