Success, finally

After multiple attempts and another new error message, I was finally able to publish my last two blog posts.

We'll see how this one goes.

-- Jack Krupansky

"There were errors"

That's the message I got publishing my previous post: "There were errors." Clicking on the "Details" link gave me this enlightening message: "001 java.io.IOException: EOF while reading from control connection".

Next up, Blogger's answer to AOL: "You've got errors!"

-- Jack Krupansky

Another REALLY BAD day with Blogger

This is ridiculous. Besides that fact that email posting is now a solid no-op (they get returned many hours later with a crypric, non-user friendly "Mail Delivery System" error), Blogger has been unable to fully post a number of my posts. I was able to create the posts using Blogger's post editor, but then clicking the "Publish Post" button would simply present me with various error screens, including some advising me that "the engineers" have been notified. After restarting Blogger and navigating to the "Edit Posts" screen I can see that my new posts have in fact been captured and are in fact sitting there, but they simply have not been actually "published" so that they appear on my blog or my blog feed.

I fully recognize that Blogger (and Google) are going through teething pains and a heavy demand, but I do have to truthfully report what I actually experience here. If you have an urgent business need to start a blog, right now you'll have to do it elsewhere, such as TypePad. I'm going to stick with Blogger fow now, since I expect they'll upgrade their systems fairly shortly, and I don't really want to change my blog or feed URLs.

-- Jack Krupansky

Gaming Google page ranking by Wordpress

Here's an interesting post about the gaming of Google page ranking by WordPress. WordPress is a popular blogging software package, and evidently there is some default linking of a blog authored with that software to the Wordpress web site. The part about posting thousands of sponsored articles solely to boost page ranking is a bit of an eye-opener. I'm not personally much of a fan of artificial SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In any case, the post and comments are an interesting discussion.

-- Jack Krupansky

A little progress with Blogger

I actually successfully posted on three of my other blogs today, but encountered a few delays and strange error messages along the way. But, I made it. After yesterday, I consider that a victory of sorts.

Two email posts from around 2:00 p.m. yesterday finally bounced back (with cryptic "Mail Delivery System" errors, no less), one at 4:00 a.m., and the other at 9:00 a.m.

-- Jack Krupansky

What a bad day, but some progress anyway

Today was my absolute worst day (so far) blogging. Blogger was extremely uncooperative. It's bad enough that I can't email post reliably, but it was extremely difficult even to make normal posts through the Blogger web interface. There were several points I had wanted to make throughout the day, but Blogger simply got in the way and now the thoughts are gone.

At least Bloglines was much more cooperative, although I couldn't test it as much as I wished since I was unable to make timely posts to Blogger.

The other good news is that I continue to expand my blog feed list. It's up to 106 feeds, and these only only feeds that I've hand selected and most at least appear to have a technical relevance. You can access my list at Bloglines. I meant to put that link over on the right side of my blogs. Maybe tomorrow.

-- Jack Krupansky

Blogger posting very slow

For some reason, posting messages in Blogger is very, very slow today.  This is another reason why I would like to do asynchronous email posting, if they ever get it working reliably.  I suspect that their systems as swamped, but with all of Google's resources behind them, it's quite baffling that they are having so much difficulty with such a simple application.  Oh well, welcome to the 21st "Who Needs Experienced Software Professionals" Century.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Blogger is so slow

I know that Blogger is popular, but this is getting rather ridiculous. I submitted an email post to this blog over two hours ago and there's no sign of it. I submitted two posts to another blog and they also are nowhere to be seen, yet.

I almost had to submit this post itself via email since Blogger was having difficulty even getting to the post editor page.

-- Jack Krupansky

ProBlogger - helping bloggers earn money

You might want to check out the ProBlogger blog authored by Darren Rowse. It's billed as an effort to assist bloggers in maximizing the revenue potential of their blogs, focusing on Google's AdSense program. Even if you're not focused on making money from your blogs, his tips for better blogging may help you and your readers achieve a higher level of satisfaction.

-- Jack Krupansky

Bloglines now updating for my blogs

Good news... as of this morning, Bloglines is finally reporting updates for my blogs and other Blogger blogs that I subscribed to in Bloglines. It took two email exchanges with Bloglines to get here, but it looks like the problem has been fixed, at least for now.

I'll continue using both Bloglines and NewsGator, but I'll try to stick with Bloglines for updating my feed list.

-- Jack Krupansky

The missing fifth email post

Well, all but one of my nine attempts to email a certain post to this blog yesterday eventually did get through. The fifth post mysteriously disappeared. Finally, at 1:33 a.m. today, eight hours after I emailed it, I received a cryptic message from "Mail Delivery System" (which is really MAILER-DAEMON@blogger.com) that starts with the line "This is the Postfix program at host blogger.com." and ends with the error report from Blogger: "Command died with status 1: "IFS=' '&&exec /home/bloggermail/processmail2exit 75 #bloggermail"."

I suspect that this is simply a convoluted way of saying "system busy."

Personally, I don't think that any user should ever be told that some portion of the software "died." One would think that here in the 21st Century, with 50 years of software engineering behind us that we would have the infrastructure in place to completely automate the buffering and delivery of simple email messages... but such an assumption is clearly false, at this time.

-- Jack Krupansky

Set default font for rich text posting from Outlook Express

[Ninth attempt to email this post!]

It looks like all I had to do was change the default font in Microsoft Outlook Express to "Times New Roman" and the font size to "12" and OE formats the message without any font tags.  Cool!

 

If this works, I can have my cake and eat it too... at least when Blogger is posting my emailed posts in a timely manner.  FWIW, I had to send my last post twice to get it to appear, so it might pop up again a few days from now.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Set default font for rich text posting from Outlook Express

[Eighth attempt to email this post!]

It looks like all I had to do was change the default font in Microsoft Outlook Express to "Times New Roman" and the font size to "12" and OE formats the message without any font tags.  Cool!

 

If this works, I can have my cake and eat it too... at least when Blogger is posting my emailed posts in a timely manner.  FWIW, I had to send my last post twice to get it to appear, so it might pop up again a few days from now.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Set default font for rich text posting from Outlook Express

[Seventh attempt to email this post!]

It looks like all I had to do was change the default font in Microsoft Outlook Express to "Times New Roman" and the font size to "12" and OE formats the message without any font tags.  Cool!

 

If this works, I can have my cake and eat it too... at least when Blogger is posting my emailed posts in a timely manner.  FWIW, I had to send my last post twice to get it to appear, so it might pop up again a few days from now.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Set default font for rich text posting from Outlook Express

[Sixth attempt to email this post!]

It looks like all I had to do was change the default font in Microsoft Outlook Express to "Times New Roman" and the font size to "12" and OE formats the message without any font tags.  Cool!

 

If this works, I can have my cake and eat it too... at least when Blogger is posting my emailed posts in a timely manner.  FWIW, I had to send my last post twice to get it to appear, so it might pop up again a few days from now.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Set default font for rich text posting from Outlook Express

[Fourth attempt to email this post!]

It looks like all I had to do was change the default font in Microsoft Outlook Express to "Times New Roman" and the font size to "12" and OE formats the message without any font tags.  Cool!

 

If this works, I can have my cake and eat it too... at least when Blogger is posting my emailed posts in a timely manner.  FWIW, I had to send my last post twice to get it to appear, so it might pop up again a few days from now.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Set default font for rich text posting from Outlook Express

It looks like all I had to do was change the default font in Microsoft Outlook Express to "Times New Roman" and the font size to "12" and OE formats the message without any font tags.  Cool!

 

If this works, I can have my cake and eat it too... at least when Blogger is posting my emailed posts in a timely manner.  FWIW, I had to send my last post twice to get it to appear, so it might pop up again a few days from now.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Set default font for rich text posting from Outlook Express

[Third attempt to email this post!]

It looks like all I had to do was change the default font in Microsoft Outlook Express to "Times New Roman" and the font size to "12" and OE formats the message without any font tags.  Cool!

 

If this works, I can have my cake and eat it too... at least when Blogger is posting my emailed posts in a timely manner.  FWIW, I had to send my last post twice to get it to appear, so it might pop up again a few days from now.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Set default font for rich text posting from Outlook Express

It looks like all I had to do was change the default font in Microsoft Outlook Express to "Times New Roman" and the font size to "12" and OE formats the message without any font tags.  Cool!

 

If this works, I can have my cake and eat it too... at least when Blogger is posting my emailed posts in a timely manner.  FWIW, I had to send my last post twice to get it to appear, so it might pop up again a few days from now.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

Ongoing delays in Blogger email posting

I've tried to send a new post to this blog via email seven times now and not one has gotten through yet.

I've emailed from the same account to my Gmail account and that message went through immediately, so it's not some global net issue or my ISP or even Google overall. Blogger desperately needs to update their computing infrastructure. Who knows, maybe they're battling the spammers.

-- Jack Krupansky

Rich text from Outlook Express without a font override

This post was composed in Microsoft Outlook Express in rich text mode so that I could have formatting and hyperlinks, but prevent OE from setting the font so that Blogger can set a default font based on the currently selected blog template that will not overridden by OE.

 

I did it by composing the message and then manually going into "Source" (HTML) edit mode and stripping out the <font> tags.  What a pain, but I wanted to see if it works as the theory suggests.

 

Blogger got back to me on my query on this issue and suggested that maybe I could figure out a way to cause OE to not set an explicit font in rich text mode.  So far, I haven't found a way to tell OE to not set a default font in rich text messages.

 

-- Jack Krupansky

My Bloglines feed list

For reference, here is my Bloglines public feed list is human readable form, and as an OPML URL that can be imported into another feed reader such as NewsGator or Feedster.

I can see now that Bloglines has an outer-level folder called "Subscriptions", so that's my NewsGator treats my list as a folder rather than as simply a list.

-- Jack Krupansky

Still using Bloglines for maintaining feed list

Although NewsGator seems a little better, particularly for showing updates for Blogger blog feeds, I'm still using Bloglines for maintaining my feed list. I can add a new feed and not have to worry about the distinction between "subscription" and "my feeds" that NewsGator annoys me with.

BTW, I have gotten a mail message from Bloglines about the updating problem, but they still haven't resolved it yet. It appears related to Blogger and Atom feeds. I'll continue to work with them on this.
-- Jack Krupansky

Blogger templates, Google ads

One nice feature of Blogger is that it has quite a library of page layout and design templates that you can choose from. Unfortunately, there are variations in how the templates are constructed, so it was a pain for me to try to figure out how to add Google ads to the various templates that my blogs used. So, I switched all of my blogs so that they all use the same template. The only difference between them now is that I have the Google ads assigned to distinct tracking "channels", which are represented as a numeric code in the script snippet that brings the ads up.

-- Jack Krupansky

Online feed aggregators

Just to be clear, so far I've limited my experimentation to online feed aggregators as opposed to those that are software that you need to download and install on your local PC.

Maybe I'll go the download route later, depending on my experiences with the aggregation.

-- Jack Krupansky

Folder confusion in NewsGator

The good news is that I've imported my entire set of feeds to NewsGator via OPML and also via clicking on "+ newsgator" buttons on my blogs, but they end up in different folders. The OPML [is that pronounced oapmeal??] feeds ended up in a folder titled "Subscriptions" but the other blogs ended up in the "My Feeds" folder. Sure, I can go in and move them around, but it's a bit confusing and unclear which origanization is "best".

I clicked on the Subscriptions folder and then selected to move the contents to the "My Feeds" folder, but it gave me a cryptic error message about trying to move the folder itself. I then clicked twice on the Subscriptions folder and that had the effect of selecting all feeds within the folder, but de-selected the folder itself, finally allowing me to move to contents to "My Feeds". I then deleted the Subscriptions folder itself. It all seems to work fine.

-- Jack Krupansky

Newsgator seems to be updating my blogs

I'm seen some preliminary evidence that NewsGator is detecting updates to my blogs.

Meanwhile, Bloglines still has not detected a single update of any of my blogs.

-- Jack Krupansky

Strange error in Feedster

If I click on "+ Today's Posts" on the MyFeedster page, It puts up a spearate page with the red error message "Error: You Do Not Have Any Feeds. Please subscribe to some feeds and then try again.", which makes no sense since I clearly have a lot of feeds that Feedster does allow me to view via the "+ All Feeds" button.

-- Jack Krupansky

Up on Feedster, sort of

I'm at least partially running on Feedster now. I say partially because the user interface is so bad that I'm unable to tell what some operations are really doing.

I have added a "Sub Feedster" button to this blog and it seems to work, but it may take a few hours to see if it really does update properly. In fact, Feedster refused to accept my blog feed URL even though it had confirmed that I had added the feed properly. It did note that I may have to wait a few hours, for my feed to be included in their update cycle. I had to enter somebody else's feed URL and then edit it manually after Feedster gave me the HTML snippet for the button.

I tried to do an "Export Feeds" and the XML had all sorts of random feeds and not some of my own.

So far, I'm not terribly impressed and am exhausted by all of the effort required to set up the software to perform simple tasks. It's as if none of the software designers has learned anything from the past 50 years of computing history.

-- Jack Krupansky

Up on NewsGator

I opened a NewsGator account and imported my list of Bloglines feeds using OPML. The only real annoyance was that there was no "mark all feeds as read" button in NewsGator as there is in Bloglines. As a result, I had to manually click the feed folder about 20 times to incrementally mark each batch of 50 posts as read.

You can access the OPML for my list of feeds.

You'll notice that I added the "+ newsgator" button down on the right of this blog.

-- Jack Krupansky

Bloglines annoyance

I still haven't seen any updates in Bloglines for by own blogs that I subscribed to. I sent a query to Bloglines, but got no response, not even a "thank you for your interest" blow-off. As a result, I'm going to start looking at some other blog aggegators, starting with NewsGator.

-- Jack Krupansky

Firefox doesn't like ads on my blogs

I just tried viewing my blogs in Firefox and it really screws up the page layout, probably due to the Google ads, but they look fine in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Maybe some charitable soul will clue me in how to tweak my Blogger blog templates so that they'll work for both IE and FF.

Sorry.

-- Jack Krupansky

Workaround for bug

I noted a bug in a prior post. This post demonstrates a workaround, by shifting a word off the second line of the quote text. You won't see the "fixed" bug unless you click on the permalink for this post to see it on a page without the post that triggers the bug.

With the internet, the web, blogging, and grassroots activist citizen-journalists, what possible ... value do Barron's and WSJ have anymore?

-- Jack Krupansky

Bug

I kid you not! The second line of the quote causes Microsoft Internet explorer to draw that stupid looking white bar to the right of the box surrounding these posts. Evidently, IE has trouble with the hyphenated word "citizen-journalists".

With the internet, the web, blogging, and grassroots activist citizen-journalists, what possible value do Barron's and WSJ have anymore?

-- Jack Krupansky

Google AdSense ads on a Blogger blog

I finally got up the nerve to slog through the HTML template swamp to put Google AdSense ads on my Blogger blog -- and I'm sure that you readers are thrilled about it, too. I've been using AdSense adds on my main web sites for quite some time and Blogger has advertised that they're available on Blogger blogs, but gave no instructions for how to add them to the HTML template. Sure, it's easy to use Google's web tools to get the ad script snippet that you need to insert, but figuring out how to insert it in the Blogger HTML template is not so easy. I know a fair amount about HTML, but not enough about style sheets to be very confident.

I'm not completely satisfied that I've found the magic solution to do Blogger ads in the optimal manner, but it works well enough. You're welcome to view the source text for my blog and figure out where the ad script is placed. Please note that you need to sign up with Google's AdSense program to run ads on your own blog.

I will make the point that the job would have been much easier if I had used a small "Ad Links unit" on the right side of the page, but I was determined to use the "wasted" space on the left rather than move any of the useful info on the right side any further down.

-- Jack Krupansky

Adding an XML feed button to your Blogger blog

After much searching around for where to get the "right" button graphic for the XML "feed" button for this blog, I stumbled across some interesting HTML code to do a feed button without needing a graphic image at all. It looks as good as the typical .GIF image, but also give you the flexibility of editing the button label and monkeying with the size and other attributes any time you want. That's really cool, especially for the graphically-challenged such as yours truly.

The annoying thing is that you have to hand-edit your blog template (in Blogger' template editor), and that means you'll lose these edits if you later decide to change templates. So, make sure you save your changes in an external text file.

I made a serious attempt to show you the HTML code right here in this post, but Blogger simply would not cooperate. That will be the subject of another post, but for now, all I can say is that you'll have to use your browser to "view source" for this web page and look for the text "powered-by" and "Powered by Blogger" and you'll find the custom HTML for the my XML, Yahoo, and Bloglines buttons a few lines back. My XML button code starts with the HTML comment "XML feed button code" and ends with the HTML comment "End of XML feed button code". You'll have to find the "Powered by Blogger" text in the HTML template for your own web page before inserting the button code snippets. You'll also have to change my blog name ("jackkonblog") to your blog name.

You can play around with the text (e.g., change "XML Feed" to just "XML" or "Feed" or "Atom", or even "RSS" or "RSS Feed"). You can change the "padding" around the text, the color, etc.

You can insert the "+ My Yahoo" and "Bloglines" buttons in a similar manner, but you really need to go to My Yahoo and Bloglines and use their interactive web pages to automatically generate the HTML code snippets that you will then have to manually insert before the "Powered by Blogger" entry.

This is not my idea of an "easy" button, but this is what works.

-- Jack Krupansky

PubSub notification service

I just ran across PubSub, which is an online service that notifies you of new information as it becomes available on a zillion different feeds that PubSub monitors. As their web site says:

PubSub is a matching service that instantly notifies you when new content is created that matches your subscription. Using a proprietary Matching Engine, PubSub is able to read millions of data sources on your behalf and notify you instantly whenever a match is made.

The heart of the PubSub service is a powerful, proprietary Matching Engine that makes it possible, for the first time, to match millions of search queries against thousands of new pieces of information every second.

Traditional search stores data and then allows you to find documents within that store of data. PubSub operates by first storing your subscription query, and then watching for new information that matches it. Your query will be checked against every piece of new information passing through our Matching Engine.

I haven't used the service myself, but it does seem interesting, especially as a way to both monitor lots of feeds and to filter the feeds for topics of interest.

-- Jack Krupansky

Off topic

If there's one thing that really annoys me as a business blog reader it's "off topic" posts, even if (or especially if) the post is labeled as being "off topic". I simply see it as unprofessional and it gives business blogging a bad name. My advice if you're doing a serious, business-oriented blog and feel the urge to go "off topic": don't do it. Everybody should have their own personal blog and web site where they can let off steam and explore their personal "off topic" interests (which are then by definition not "off topic") to their heart's content, but a business blog is the wrong place to do it.

-- Jack Krupansky

Test email posting

This post was submitted via email using Microsoft Outlook Express.

It saves you from having to log into the web-based Blogger post editor.

And notice how the font is a little odd. I could "fix" it by going into Blogger's post editor and changing the font from "Arial" to "Font".

-- Jack Krupansky

Beginners' Guide to Corporate Blogging

There's an easy to read 16-page white paper entitled "Beginners' Guide to Corporate Blogging" on the Corporate Blogging blog. It's definitely not a step-by-step "how-to" guide, but is is a nice executive-level summary about this minefield (swamp?) called "corporate blogging".

-- Jack Krupansky

Gmail once again not yet available?

Although a lot of the excitement about Google Gmail has died down, there are still lots of people itching to get a Gmail account, and I was one of them. Unfortunately, Google had only allowed a limited number of people to sign up initially, and told the rest of us that we'd have to wait for the test period to be over.

Imagine my surprise when last Thursday morning (March 17, 2004), I brought up the Google main search page and there was a little message announcing that Gmail was "New" and inviting me to sign up. I thought it was too good to be true, so I signed up as quickly as I could. It all works like a charm, including reading gmail messages via POP3 in Microsoft Outlook Express.

Now, it turns out that Google has shut the door almost as quickly as they opened it. Gmail is no longer listed as one of Google's widely available services and the Gmail web page informs you that "We're currently only offering Gmail as part of a preview release and limited test. We don't have details on when Gmail will be made more widely available, as that depends in part on the results of the test." But, my new account still works, so I think I really did get lucky, for once.

I notice that my Gmail web page has a little box labeled "Invite a friend" and "50 left", suggesting that I can in fact give away 50 Gmail accounts to whomever I want. Hmmm... that also sounds too good to be true.

There's a whole discussion entitled "Gmail Goes Public" over on Slashdot. There is some suggestion that the invite on Google's web page appears randomly or for selected users. Sounds like I really did get lucky.

In any case, Gmail does seem well-suited for blogs, especially if you happen to strike gold (or a nerve) and get bombarded with a zillion emails. Google can file them all away and quickly search through them as you wish.

-- Jack Krupansky

Bloglines slow to update

So far, Bloglines has been rather slow to update for changed blogs. In fact, it hasn't yet detected any changes for my five blogs even though I've made numerous posts. Maybe there is some extra delay for new blogs that aren't yet in its database and may need to get approved before they are included in the regular update cycle. We'll see.

-- Jack Krupansky

Bloglines for aggregating zillions of blog feeds

Now that I'm monitoring several dozen blog feeds, it's out of the question to manually go visit even the "important" ones. The solution is to use an "aggregator". There are many available, but to start out easy I chose Bloglines which lets you enter and organize any number of blog feeds.

I especially appreciate the "Show only updated feeds" options which displays only the names of my selected feeds that have recent updates, as well as how many recent updates are available for each feed. Once you read the posts for that feed, it falls off the update list until it has new updates. Nice and simple. Maximal gain for minimal pain.

I've only been using Bloglines for a few hours, but it seems to fit my current needs nicely.

BTW, you can view or even copy my "public blogroll".

-- Jack Krupansky

Using default font on email posts to Blogger

One minor but annoying issue that I've run into with email posting to Blogger blogs is that I haven't been able to figure out what to set the font to in Outlook Express so that Blogger will treat it is the "default" font so that the blog post will take on the default font for the selected blog template.

Blogger does a great job of giving you a bunch on well-designed blog presentation templates and one of the features is that your blog post will be reformatted with an appropriate font for that template style. It all works great, but it requires that you choose the default "Font" in the web-based blog post editor. Unfortunately, any font I choose in Outlook Express overrides the default, thus overriding the font chosen by the presentation template.

The "workaround" is to submit the post via email and then manually edit the post in Blogger's editor to set the font back to the default "Font".

Oh well.

-- Jack Krupansky

Delayed posting of emailed blog posts

One of the main problems that I've had with Blogger is that blog posts that are submitted via email are frequently not posted in a timely manner. Usually they appear within a few minutes, but I seen them take over a day or in some cases over a week to post. I would say that about 1 in 3 times a significant delay occurs.

Sometimes the email post will bounce back with a cryptic "alias" error message, or sometimes with a "mailer" error even too cryptic to explain at all.

Blogger does know about these email-related problems and they say that they are working on them, but it's a real pain, especially since posting via email is such a joy when it really works.

-- Jack Krupansky

Blogger

I'm presently using Google's Blogger for my five blogs. Mostly I like the fact that it's free, and that helps me turn a blind eye to its current deficiencies.

Overall, I'm fairly pleased with Blogger, pleased enough that I'm not currently seeked to switch to any other blog-hosting service or self-hosting software.

I'll do my best to be fair to Blogger, noting that with their acquisition by Google and the explosive interest in blogging that focuses intensely on such a "free" service there are bound to be growing pains. On the other hand, I will be brutally honest about problems that I encounter.

-- Jack Krupansky

Hello

I'm relatively new to blogging, having started my first blog only a few weeks ago. I now have four blogs with quite a few posts. I've actually been doing web sites since around 1996. This blog is dedicated to a discussion of my interests in blogging itself.

For reference, my current blogs include:

• Base Technology - my main computer software business and technology interests
• Agtivity - my interests in software agent technology
• Finaxyz - my interests in finance and stock market investment
• EntEngr - my interests in entrepreneurial engineering

-- Jack Krupansky