NetworkedBlogs: Syndications errors …

Hello.

I've been using NetworkedBlogs to syndicate posts on this blog to Facebook and Twitter. I set it up about a year ago I think. It has been working just fine up until last week.

I don't know what went wrong, but I've been receiving syndication failure notification emails from NetworkedBlogs. This happens with almost every other post on this blog. Some posts get through just fine. That makes me think that I've actually not messed up the feed settings and am thinking it could be a something went wrong on their side.

When I visit NetworkedBlogs and go to syndication page, it tells me:

Authentication error blocked publishing recent posts!
This error is resolved now, and future posts will publish as usual. It's listed for reference only. No further action required.
When you change your Facebook password or permissions settings, Facebook may revoke publishing permissions, which causes syndication to stop. Visiting this page renews these permissions, so you're all set. This error message will disappear after the next post gets published successfully.

But surely it didn't get resolved, and my posts are not being published successfully.

Has anyone of you been experiencing this with NetworkedBlogs lately? Did you manage to fix it? If so, please let me know. Thanks.

Laterx.

Contemplating Disqus comment system ...

Hello.

Just a quick note to tell you that, I'm contemplating installing Disqus commenting system on this blog. It seems, Blogger is not showing up comments as it should, there are signing in problems, and I've been told by people on twitter that they have tried commenting on this blog, but the comments just disappear after submission. Well, that is not good. Not good at all!

Disqus seems like a good alternative anti lets you manage comments from multiple blogs in one central location. This is going to be a real time saver. The one killer feature Blogger lacks is the ability to reply to comments from the admin panel. Disqus lets me do this and lot more. Also, I have been hearing a lot of good things about Disqus lately, a lot of high profile people are implementing Disqus commenting system on their blogs. I take this as a good sign, I don't want to make the switch and learn that the service is going away soon.

Disqus is importing all my Blogger comments to its database as I write this post. Check out the blog, see if you like the new commenting area, leave a comment, tell me what you think.

The one caveat I have with Disqus is that, it is trying to do more than what is necessary, too many features, and the commenting area looks a lot busier than what I am used to. Distraction?

Anyway, let us see how it goes.

Laterx.

Blogger, where is my "Edit HTML" button ???

Hello.

So have you noticed the new Blogger dashboard lately? It looks really polished and more organized, don't you think? I like it.

If you have been following this blog, you'd have noticed that it keeps changing every now and then. Nothing wrong with that, right? Well, it keeps changing mainly because I keep messing with it all the time. It seems I can't make my mind up on what I want this blog to look like. I even tried learning some basic HTML just to mess with this blog. As you can tell, that didn't go as planned.

Anyways, few days ago, I was thinking about widening the blog post area a bit to better display the images in the blog. I got some time today, logged on to Blogger, and guess what, I couldn't for the life of me find the good old "Edit HTML" button anywhere on my Blogger dashboard. Well, that sucked. 

So, naturally, I did some googling and it seems the new blogger in draft doesn't have the "Edit HTML" button anymore. Google also told me there is a clever way to bring it back if you really wanted to.

Here is how. I can confirm it works for now.

- Log on to Blogger and got to Layout option.

- Notice the highlighted are in the URL? Now edit the URL, instead of "blogger.g" change it to "html". Hit return.

- There you go, you have the good old familiar layout with "Edit HTML" button.

Now you can play around with your blog as much as you want, but back up the old one, just in case. Hope that was helpful. Happy HTML editing. Blog away.

Laterx.

Blogger: Turning on Mobile Templates …

Hello.

Today, I logged on to Blogger to see a pop-up asking me to turn on mobile templates. I did not know what it was exactly, at the time, and I was in a hurry to get something done. I clicked cancel, and moved on.

Later, when I thought about it, turning on mobile templates sounded like a pretty good idea. Especially since I get occasional visits on my blog from mobile devices like iPhones.

So what does mobile templates do? Well, not much. It simply optimizes the blog to display it better on mobile devices with smaller screens. Apparently, when using mobile templates, pages will load faster because of minimalistic design with less graphics, and use less data, a good thing when surfing the web on an a cellular connection.

When I came back to Blogger to turn mobile templates on, I had to drill down a bit in settings to find the option. To save some of you a few minutes, here is how to do it.

From Blogger Dashboard, go to 'Settings' tab and find 'Email & mobile' menu. Under the 'Mobile Template' part, click 'Yes. On mobile devices, show the mobile version of my template.'. Scroll down and click 'Save settings'. If you want to have quick look at how your blog would look like in mobile view, you can preview it before saving the settings.

Hope this helps someone out there who uses Blogger/Blogspot.

Laterx.