New Fonty Goodness

Vollkorn, by Friedrich Althausen

Just a quick update to note that I’ve changed this blog’s header and title to use Vollkorn, a new font from the Google Font Directory.

Installation on Blogger is straightforward if you’re up for Edit HTML (and the consequences of forking your template). It would be pretty silly, though, if we didn’t make it a bit easier one of these days…

Blogging from iPad: Edit HTML, BlogPress, but not Pages

The iPad is certainly a much better reading/watching device than an authoring one, at least in these early days. Still, its impressive portability makes me want to see how suitable it is for blogging. After all, the best blogging client is the one you have with you, and all that.

Also, I like to play with it. Magic space tablet from the future, take me away!

I wrote my last post in the Blogger editor (copying in bits that were written in iTunes), which was workable, but hardly ideal. Mobile Safari does not support rich text editing in HTML with contenteditable, so I had to settle for Edit HTML mode over Compose.

I'm happy to say that the toolbar works when you select text, so I didn't have to type in the bold or link tags myself. Scrolling, however, was pretty painful: though iPad often allows scrolling of overflow: auto elements using a two-finger scroll, this does not appear to work on a <textarea>. My only recourse was to drag-and-hold the insertion point at the top or the bottom and wait for the painfully slow scrolling to show me what I wanted.

The new editor's Edit HTML also lacks photo insertion, though with the lack of upload support in the browser I couldn't have done more than pick from Picasa Web Albums.

In all, the post editor is there, but you'd likely be happier e-mailing a post using Mail-to-Blogger unless you were really committed to a bit of formatting, linking, or adding an After the Jump marker.

I’m Totally Into My Blog Again

There are a few clichés about blogs. One is that they all have “musings,” “ramblings,” or “random thoughts” in the title or description. (Have more confidence, people!) Another is that the very last post on any blog will be the author’s resolution to start blogging some more.

I’m here to put a spin on that last one: this blog will continue because I have been blogging more.

I think I can trace this renewed — shall we say — fervor to a few recent events:

• The Blogger template designer shipped, which freed up my available nights and weekend significantly, both to blog and to do a few things that are perhaps worth blogging about.
• I got into a bit of social gaming after SXSW, which got me a bit into Facebook, and that, coupled with increased Google Buzz adoption among my contacts has made me want to blog and comment on my friends’ blogs and get comments in return.
• Health care reform passed, so the polictical blogs are getting a bit dull. Rather than scrape around for stuff to read, I might as well be constructive and write something of my own.
• It’s March Madness, so board gaming with Cait is more limited, as is using the TV for console games. I haven’t built up the resolve to go back into Ferelden, so, apart Alpha Centauri and reading, I’m looking for entertainment.
• The Blogger template designer shipped, so I could play around with this blog’s template in a bunch of fun ways. What does my writing have to do with washing machines? The answer is irrelevant. I like the colors. And I’m happy to be able to chuck the labels and archives bits down into a multi-column footer, leaving maximum exposure for my blogroll and gaming badges. For the good of the product, I hope that other folks have similar experiences: happiness with the template leads to happiness with the blog leads to moar posting.

Somewhat ironically, my rekindled interest in blogging comes just as I’m leaving the Blogger team after a total of five years working on it, which have been by definition the best, worst, and only five years of my professional career. Perhaps being A User will give me perspective on the service, or maybe being A Former Engineer will just make me tolerant of its quirks. (Regardless, I’m not entirely done with it yet. I have a templates to finish documenting and a community to try and support.)

I’m curious about how “social media” ties into and supports personal blogging. I assume that most of my direct traffic will continue to come from search engines, as my posts are not frequent or consistent enough in topic to build up a following of anyone who would check back regularly. But the thought that people who actually know me will be presented with these posts in a convenient place is motivating.

If you are reading this post on Buzz or Facebook (not FriendFeed, though; I deleted that account after it tacodumped my entire Netflix queue into my FB news feed), click through to the post and check out the template. It has washing machines.

Then go start a blog, cuz you can’t make your Facebook or Gmail inbox this laundromat-o-licious. You can always link that blog so that it posts back to Buzz and Facebook. Gotta follow the readers, after all.

New iPhone to Blog Workflow Using Picasa Web Albums

Picking a photo out of the “Drop Box” album

While writing my last post about tactical card games I wanted to include my own photos of the cards to illustrate things. My iPhone was the handiest camera, but finding a cable and plugging it in and waiting for the sync and using Image Capture and then uploading via the web would be a bit annoying. But, since Blogger in Draft now has Picasa Web Albums integration, I was able to use a simpler flow:

1. Take photo with iPhone
2. E-mail it to my Picasa Web Albums address (learn more)
3. Open the image picker on Blogger in Draft
4. Pick the photo out of the “Drop Box” album

Surprisingly quick, easy (after setting up the address, which I suppose was also easy), and 100% wireless.

Putting captioned images side-by-side in Blogger

Dealing with multiple images side-by-side is a long-standing and hopefully-someday-will-be-resolved feature request for Blogger, but you can do it pretty easily right now with Blogger in Draft and a tiny bit of playing with Edit HTML.

Here’s the result we’re going for:

Old design: Footer full of badges

New design: Footer full of blog stuff

Subtle Template Designer Feature: “overflow: hidden”

One thing that always annoyed me about Blogger’s old templates was the way that backgrounds and borders could look broken during page load:

Waiting for a sidebar widget to load…

Only now are the background and border complete.

This situation can arise when you have a widget that uses a <script> tag to pull in third-party data, especially if the site the JavaScript loads from is not particularly peppy. (Note that to make the above screenshots I inserted a blocking <script> tag from Steve Souders; I’m not blaming SocialVibe or calling it slow. It just happened to be the next thing in that blog’s sidebar.)

For the templates in the new Blogger template designer, we wanted everything to feel as fast as possible, even as the page loads. So, we fixed the problem. See how the border and background are in the right place even though the sidebar is incomplete:

The page background is consistent even as the sidebar loads.

This makes the page feel faster, since it looks more “finished” earlier in the load process. How did we do it? Boring technical explanation after the jump…

Blogger’s FTP Migration Plan: Tricky, Weird, But Effective

I was going to call this post “the worst FTP migration plan, except for all of the others,” but I was afraid that that would truncate poorly on Twitter. But that’s kind of where I’m coming from.

Blogger is turning off FTP publishing, which sucks in a lot of ways, but I think everyone will be better for it: bloggers will be happier with the performance and features of custom domains, and engineers will be happy not to have to support a creaky system that uses an even creakier protocol.

Though we’ve tried to put together a migration process that will work smoothly for everyone, I’m sure it won’t be perfect; there are too many moving parts in FTP publishing to guarantee that everyone will have a great experience. Nevertheless, I believe that our overall plan is sound, so I’d like to tell you about what we came up with, as well as some of the alternatives that we considered (and that might work better for you if you want to try them out).

Getting Bloggy With iPhone #1: BlogPressLite

Just a quick post to test out the new, free, semi-official iPhone app for Blogger, BlogPressLite [iTunes].


Set up's a bit confusing (bet you didn't know that you already have a PicasaWeb account if you're signed up for Blogger) but it beats Mail-to-Blogger for posting photos. Tip: tap a photo for size and alignment options.

Since the app is a birthday present, I thought I'd post a picture of our cake.

Since this is also a blog, here's a picture of my cat:




Edited from the iPhone version to remove some blank lines, add the iTunes link, and include this message.

Blogger Play is live!

I spent a fair bit of the last few weeks working on the UI for Blogger’s latest gizmo-distraction: Blogger Play!
Play is a rocked-up version of the old Blogger photoscroller, which has been kicking around in various public and not-quite-as-public places ever since there were Blogger photos. I wrote a bit more about that over at the Blogger Buzz.

This is an interesting example of doing something in HTML and JavaScript that could probably be much better done in Flash, but hey: it works on the iPhone. I actually felt a bit Apple-y getting the polish done on the UI. The fade timing and speed slider settings took hours to get right. I hope you like them.

Joseph did the visual design, so give him all the credit for that. I worked from his mocks. And of course Pong, who wrote the original scroller and several since, and did all the backend coding and plugging together for this version. Katie made this launchable by cleaning out very nearly almost all of the images that aren’t good to show to people.

Enjoy! Remember to stop watching and do productive things.

Safari 3 beta for Windows

I'm typing this with Safari 3 for Windows, which is showing the Blogger rich text editor. This is not supported and kinda not supposed to happen.

Image upload and autosave appear to be broken. :-P



Update: If you're following along at home, Safari 3 does not implicitly create a <head> element when you programmatically (e.g. with document.write(...)) set the contents of an IFrame. This causes an initialization error in the Blogger post editor because there's no place to stash the <style> tag for spellchecking, which throws off the autosave initialization.

Without autosave, image upload to draft posts doesn't work, since Blogger autosaves before showing the upload dialog.

Another update: Damn Safari 3 is speedy-quick. It is now a contender for browser-of-choice.

Blogger Dashboard Widget 1.0.1 now available

From the “about fracking time” department…

If you’ve still have the Blogger Mac OS X Dashboard widget running, you may have noticed it pop up a little message this evening.

Version 1.0.1 of the widget is finally available, featuring the following improvements:

• Copyright date updated to 2007
• “Publish Post” and “Save as Draft” buttons flipped to match the Blogger web interface
• Logging in and posting works
  

Apologies to everyone who was left waiting for me to update the widget to work with the new Blogger’s Google Accounts and Atom 1.0. Now that the dropped ball has been picked up, happy Dashboard-blogging!

If you can read this…

…then the DNS changes went through. Thanks to the new “Missing Files Host” feature, I can move from FTP to domain hosting without any (significant) problem!