Well, I think all the heavy lifting is done. I have a few more ideas to add to my new blog site here on blogger, but they will wait. Since I know there will be a few non-blogger.com bloggers reading my blog, I will post what I used to cobble together everything.
Before details on the site, I want to point out that blogger.com is not a blog utopia. It is very nice, and for the most part easy to use, but it is plagued with spammers and people trying to make a buck off google ads. Worse, some blogs are just to get rankings in search engines for other sites. A really cool feature is the "next blog" button you see at the top right, but in a few clicks you'll wind up on something like
this. If you leave your comments wide open, the spammers will even invade your personal blog. Imagine blogger is like MySpace, only instead of 16 year old sex starved high schoolers invading your blog, spammers are.
Now on to the details:
I picked a default template and only modified a few things. To combat the spammers I enabled word verification - that little image where you have to type in the letters to post. This seems like a nice solution, though I've seen many bloggers use
HaloScan to filter spam without the need for the little image. I choose not to use haloscan for my blog, but I'm keeping it in mind to check out further if and when I get over 100 comments a day. Yeah... as if.
Blogger is owned by google, and as such works with some nifty google tools; namely
Picasa and
Hello. Picasa is a program used to manage your photos on your home PC (it's not a website). Hello is google's IM client, even though they try to make it not sound like they aren't making an IM client. (On a side note, if any
Gaim developers are reading this, Hello support would be great when you get a chance, thanks). With both installed, you can upload images and photos straight to your blog on blogger. It's darn nifty I tell ya.
While Hello is only worth the connection to blogger and Picasa, Picasa is worth it on it's own. It is an amazing little piece of software that makes managing images a piece of cake. Were talking a nice piece too, like a
Bavarian cream. It has several easy to use effects, including red eye reduction. Picasa never alters your original image, instead it always makes a new file for the changes. Add the photos you want to blog to your "tray", click the big blogger button, and up pops Hello to send the images.
Hello will handle the resizing for you, don't even worry about it. It will also allow you to add a caption to each photo before sending. Now it will let you post more than one photo in a blog post, but how to do this isn't obvious. End your comment with a double pipe, or "||" (found on most keyboards above the "\" key). This will chain that image with the last. You can string together as many photos as you like. Now there is one major complaint I have: the post created is created "live" and there is no way to "create as draft." After posting, I log on to my blogger account and mark the post as a draft, hiding it until I can add the text I wish to add. Hopefully the many people complaining about the lack of this feature will get it addressed in the next release.
So that's great if you have a few photos to blog about, but not if you have a whole collection to show off. One could start a second blog as I did for my poetry and prose, but that is far from ideal. Never fear,
flickr is here.
Flickr will boast to you about its support of blogs, but I found it pales in comparison to Picasa. The "flickr upholdr" program is extremely basic, and doesn't even do resizing for you. We do have Picasa, so the best thing I found was to select the photos in Picasa, export them with a resize, and then drag the resulting set of images into the Uploadr. Once on flickr, the photos can be added to a set and tagged. Unless you want to spend some cash on your collection, you are only allowed three sets. Tags are not limited, so go crazy with them because you can link to page of all photos with a tag. (If the word "tag" has you scratching your head, think keyword instead: you can add keywords to your photos). Flickr has room for comments to your images, tracks views and who marked your photo as a favorite making it much better than a blog of photos.
Flickr has a neat little thing called a badge you can put on your website. See mine to the right there? Ultra sexy huh? I know... you want one too... well after you get your photos on flickr, just click the badge link on your page and follow the wizard, then cut and paste the code to your site. Simple as that. I was also able to make the direct link to photo collections using sets or tags.
Last thing to note is
blogrolling.com. A blog roll is nothing more than a list of links, normally to your friends blogs, but it can link to anything. Setup of an account is quick, and you can add a bookmark to the "add link" page to add the page you are currently on to your roll. Then a short one-liner of JavaScript and you will no longer need to edit your template and rebuid your site every time a link is added or changed. Blog Roller has a page you can use to see who has updated their blogs, but this only works for small number of sites they must be hosted on. (If you need to keep up with several blogs in one place, I like
bloglines.com)
If you know of any cool blog tools I should check them out, leave me a note in comments. Also, if you have a question about any of the above, leave a comment or email me and I'll answer if I can.
Happy blogging!
Posted By Mike On Saturday, August 27, 2005
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