New Blogger Feature: Stats

If there is one thing I like about the new blogger interface (check it out yourself if you happen to have a blogger account with a blog at drafts.blogger.com) it is most likely the site stats feature.


By leveraging the power of Google Analytics, and automatically tracking your blog (without you having to do any work by adding a code to your blog or something) I think blogger has created a tool that many people will find useful.

As you can see from the screenshots below, the tool by default shows several statistics that most people would care about in a much more relevant way. For instance, instead of showing the page that gets the most hits, it shows a post that gets the most hits, and even displays the number of comments for that post. It provides an overview, a breakdown of visitors by posts, a snapshot of traffic sources, and reader statistics like browsers, countries and operating systems.

The graphs provided by the tool seem to be rather relevant to most bloggers. At least, for those bloggers that care to find out who their readers are by seeing details such as geographic locations, times with the most activity and so on.

Although Blogger Stats may provide far less statistics about your blog than a full fledged tracking service, it seems like a nice way to give casual bloggers a chance to know who's reading their blog.

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My Blogger Wish List

Hi Blogger team,

I hope you don’t mind reading this blogger wish list, but sometime soon I’d really like to see all the things in this list on blogger. I’ve been wanting these features since 3 years ago, but I’ve never seen any features like this yet, which is why I’ve decided to put up this post. Please try to implement these features as soon as possible, because that would really make my blogging life so much easier. I’m aware that blogger is probably the most biggest blogging platform in the world and hosts billions of blogs, but nevertheless, I think it has potential to become even better!

Furthermore, I would like to say that some of these suggestions are mere rip-offs of Wordpress ideas. But I think that blogger will become a much better platform if the blogger team at least tries to implement some of the Wordpress features.

1. A feature that allows you to do more instead of just upload pictures. I mean, a feature like the one in wordpress where you can actually select a caption for the image, choose its size and orientation, and add an ‘Alt’ tag. The ability to browse through the gallery of already uploaded pictures would also be great. Moreover, the ability to add effects to the image (like the options to add reflections, shadows and borders in Windows Live Writer) would ensure Blogger’s spot as one of the best blogging platforms.


2. The ability to create better hyperlinks - Again, I think that wordpress has a better hyperlinking feature where you can add a title, choose the target, and even add a custom class to the hyperlink.


3. The ability to create a ‘more’ tag. So far, I’ve been using the ‘span’ class hack, but I find it that it’s just too bothersome to keep adding tags all the time, and it’d be a great thing if blogger just has a ‘more’ button that I can click on.


4. A feature that allows everyone to comment with their website address and name. I realize that blogger has finally come to their senses and created an inbuilt comment form but I think they should allow the authors of the blog to choose what fields the author would like to have in their comment form.


5. Faster load times and less ‘We’re sorry your request could not be completed’ messages. Although, it’s not really high on my ‘this thing bugs me’ list, it is something the blogger team should look into.


6. The ability to post from any browser would also be great. For example, when I try to use Safari to put up a post, it creates several weird random div tags around things, has a weird text box on the posting page and other sorts of weird things going on.

Finally, after all this ranting, I think that blogger so far has been a great platform. Especially the things like the sidebar gadgets, have been wonderful, but I think they should really concentrate on making their posting interface a bit more beautiful and easy to use to help people blog... a bit more than helping people display their flickr images in the sidebar.

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Using OpenOffice Writer as my Blogging Application

I don't know how many people are actually aware that you can actually use Microsoft Word as a blogging client, but apparently, you can also use OpenOffice as a weblog client when you use a little extension called Sun Weblog Publisher.

All you need to do is download the extension from Sun's website at : http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/extensions.jsp#weblog

Then, once its on your hard drive, open it, agree to the liscence (after reading it of course) and install it. Then when you open OpenOffice Writer the next time, you'll see two new buttons as shown below:

Pretty cool huh? All this, for the price of 0 dollars – FREE!.

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A new easier way to back up your Blogger Blog

Today, while flipping through the settings page, I just noticed that Blogger has added a new option that allows you to back-up your posts. A while ago, I'd written about a little application for windows that allowed you to do the same. But now, thanks to blogger, there's no need for that. And, now, I can also backup my blog from my Mac.

Apparently, all you need to do now, is go to the Settings tab and click on Export Blog to save your blog posts to a file on your desktop. Then, if you want to restore a back-up to your blog all you do is click on 'Import files' on the same Settings page and choose the file from your desktop when Blogger asks you which file you want to backup.

Simple enough, but that still doesn't take care of backing-up pictures that I post to the blog. I suppose that's probably because Blogger now uses Picasa web. But nevertheless, my article on downloading PicasaWeb Pictures(and in the process... backing up Picasa web pictures) should be enough for backing up the pics on my Picasa account.

Nevertheless, I still find that blogger has several features that have been missing for centuries, because the Blogger team has paid no attention whatsoever to them. Most of them deal with the posting interface. And I'll be sure to rant about that in a later post. But for now, I'll just stop here and savour this moment.

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Why do I get a blogger error when I publish a post?

It's been hapenning for the past few weeks. Every time I publish a post, a window pops up and tells me that there has been an error. The post seems to turn out fine, and its published without any problems. Yet, blogger somehow seems to manage to confuse itself everytime.

Speaking of which, reminds me how blogger sometimes feels like Windows now. It has less, improperly developed features to that of other blogging systems like Wordpress and even Typepad. It can barely even format the tags right, and the most scariest of all -- It's owned by Google and Google doesn't seem to be doing much with it right now.

To be honest, I think someone at blogger needs to realize that they've been using the same darn pages for the last 3 years, and I cna barely notice any changes in the design. They do seem to tweak the 'dashboard' page every fortnight though, but it's pretty much useless in terms of improving and enhancing the publishing process. I mean, even Windows Live Writer has more features... surely Blogger must be doing someting wrong.

And then there's the question of support. In the past when I used to try to publish from Safari, it'd tell me that there was no support for Safari. Now, there's no message, and there's still no support for Safari. Assuming that most people who love blogging, or alteast even a small fraction of the bloggers out there would be owning a mac, can't they atleast add some support? Honestly though, talking about all this is making me want to switch to Wordpress.

Back to the errors: Are the errors occurring for anyone else out there? Am I doing something wrong here?

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Manage the pictures you upload to Blogger

Luckily, it's not as hard as Facebook to get your pictures off Blogger so you can make space for some new ones. If you've upgraded to the new Blogger every picture that you'll ever upload to blogger after the upgrade will actually be uploaded to Picasa (Picasa Web technically) in an album Blogger creates for your blog. Although Picasa has a limit of 1000 MB per account, if you optimize the pictures for the web the sizes will be relatively small.

So, all you need to do if you ever cross the limit or if you really want to delete a picture, just go to your Picasa (Picasa Web) account > Log in with your Google credentials and then do as you please.

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Back up your blogger / blogspot posts and blog

Blogger gives you a great free blog hosting facility, but unfortunately if something were to happen their servers, all the your carefully composed posts will perish along with it. Along with that, when something is offered free you never know when they are going to stop giving it away for free, so its best to always back up your blog - no matter which blogging/CMS system you use!

Hopefully since blogger is now owned by Google they'll continue to provide this service for blogging enthusiasts like me who like to share their knowledge and ask people questions. So how exactly can you back-up your blogger posts to your computer or may be even Gmail account?

The answer is quite simple. You can either copy every single blog post and save in a text file or word file (as cumbersome as it may seem this might actually work if you're like many who use word or text files to initially compose the rough draft of a post) or use an application like the blogger backup utility from CodePlex.

Just download the zip file, extract all the files inside it, install the application and start backing up the contents of your blog regularly. You can even save all the comments in your blog and specify the posts you want to back up. It'll save all the posts to your hard drive in XML format and restoring every single post in your blog is as easy as clicking the restore posts button.

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Go Google Go!

Wow, Its been like 5 months or something since I last blogged anything. I'm trying to set aside sometime to blog everyday and visit web-sites like tech-recipes.com and syschat.com and all that, but its getting harder every day.

But, recently I've been getting so many comments about articles that I wrote a long time ago. For example the blank e-mail in Outlook problem. And the Firefox blinking cursor problem and the Ipod shuffle problem. Its totally crazy to know that Beyond Tecknology is still very much alive sort of anyways.

Along with that I recently updated to blogger 2.0 and due to that I have some problems now. Basically before my blog had links to all kinds of feeds and what not, as well as about 500 comments on haloscan (I preferred haloscan since it gave me more control) but I figured that people comment more when you use blogger commenting. So yeah, I guess I need to provide links for 'Old Comments' as well as 'New Comments' at the same time. Phew. And along with that I need to make a better template for my website so that it can support the new 2.0 blogger things such as archives and labels and what not. Not to mention that now I have to re-tag all my hundreds of old posts so that people can use the labels feature.

I guess I'll do that later on.. much important things are left to be done right now (like work on my homework.. which is going to take me about 20 hours atleast :D ).

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