Blogging

GMail SmartLabels not setup correctly for Google Apps

Update 04/11/11 – Google has fixed both of these issues mentioned below. It appears that they fixed it by upgrading the Google Apps version of GMail to the version that free GMail already had.

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Google recently rolled out a nifty new feature for GMail Labs called SmartLabels. Since they are in the Labs section, you have to go in and activate it in order to make it work. Be forewarned, however, that the SmartLabels function in any GMail account that is attached to Google Apps is missing some key pieces that are essential if it’s going to work right. We’ll highlight that in a moment.

According to Google, SmartLabels will help classify your incoming email for you, somewhat like the Priority Inbox does. While the Priority Inbox highlights email in your inbox that it feels is more important, SmartLabels takes incoming email and classifies it as “Bulk”, for things like advertisements, “Forums”, for forum or mailing list email, and “Notifications” for things like announcements. It then moves those emails under those labels for later reading.

Right out of the box, SmartLabels makes some pretty good guesses, and Google tells us that we can filter around it and notify them of misclassified email. That right there is the problem with GMail accounts attached to Google Apps. Even though you can activate SmartLabels in a GMail account attached to Google apps, both of these pieces are missing.

Read more…

Blogger Buzz: Introducing the Blogger Android App

Blogger Buzz: Introducing Blogger Android App

I finally got around to trying out the Blogger Android App, It became available in the Android Market recently. After trying  a few test posts on a test blog that I have, I have to say it’s a useful tool for those on the run.

The things I like:

1. Being able to switch easily between accounts and blogs. I  only have two Google accounts and the both share the same blogs, but someone with a setup that’s more complex would find this easy to use.
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2. Nice large buttons for publishing, savings as a draft or deleting
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3. It’s nicely integrated with the camera in the phone, so you can take a picture and immediately post it to your blog.
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4. It’s also nicely integrated with the my Android phone’s built in browser. Anytime you’re browsing and something on a page catches your eye, just go to the menu and find the share option and and you are ready to type up that post that you know that everyone wants to read.
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5. It’s very easy to view all of your posts, whether they are published or still in draft form.
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6. Last but but not least, the app is smooth and responsive. That makes it a real pleasure to use.

Once again – you can get it at the Android Market. Try it! I think you will like it.

Why I stopped using Blogger – Redux

As I posted on 3/29,  I had finally come to the conclusion that Google’s Blogger service was seriously broken.

Since that time, I’ve continued to read the Blogger help forums (it’s actually like not being able to look away from a car accident),  and searching blogs continues not working.

Additionally, it appears that if any appreciable change is made to a blog, such as changing from the generic blogspot domain to a custom domain, for example, you get treated to having your comments disappear. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t.

The one issue that bothers me the most, is that blogs continue to be deleted as spam blogs, when they aren’t. It’s been said by Google and some of their unofficial support staff that this happens because the spammers are just too good and that in a lot of cases they are scraping legit blogs which makes it difficult for Google’s automated spam checker to tell which is spam and which is legit.

I think it’s more of a case that Google just doesn’t have their act together. I’m seeing more and more cases of private blogs (not visible to the public) getting whacked by their spam checker. Here is a case of a poor soul with what he thought was a blog visible only to him getting deleted as a spam blog:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=5197024060933acb&hl=en

Shoddy operation, Google, just plain shoddy. Obviously, this content can’t be scraped by spammers, and if the content is not available to the public, why is Google scanning it?

It just amazes me that Google can be so good at something like GMail, and yet so entirely bad with something like Blogger or Google Groups, which is a subject for another day.

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• When Google Bans Its Own Discussion Group (googlesystem.blogspot.com)

Why I stopped using Blogger

I first joined Blogger back in 2004. I didn’t start blogging in earnest until last year. The nice thing about Blogger is that it’s free. Unfortunately, the bad thing about Blogger is that it’s free.

That may seem to be a contradiction, but it’s true. Blogger is free and there are a lot of great tools that they give you. This also attracts a lot of people who attempt to use Blogger as a spamming tool. Blogger is a huge operation and they use automated tools to try and stop the spammers.

While using Blogger, I was a frequent reader of their help forums. I learned  a lot just by reading the questions and answers that were being given. It was there that I found out that I was not alone with not being able to search my blog posts. This problem has gone unsolved by Google since last July. This was my first reason for not using Blogger any more.

Over time, I saw an increase in people complaining about there blogs being deleted as spam blogs. I started looking at the cached version of their blogs on Google search.

I found that in a lot of cases, the blogs being deleted did not appear to be spam blogs. Of course, a lot of them appeared to be just that, spam blogs.

Read more…

Centering Sidebar Titles in Blogger

After making the switch back to Blogger as my host (even though they still haven’t fixed the blog search!), I used the same template that I had used before. It’s the Grey Blogger Theme from lawnydesigns.com . I didn’t like the default color, so I had changed that some time back.

Once I was moved back in, I decided that I didn’t like that the titles for the widgets in the sidebar were all left justified. I wanted them all to be centered, as I thought that would be a cleaner look.

I went to Edit HTML in the Layout section and looked through the code and found that the side bar widgets could be surrounded with a div expression:

The picture shows how it looked in my case. All I did was look for “sidebar” in the code. Your template may have a different design, but I think it could be made to work just the same.

Update:

I’ve switched to one of the new Template Designer templates that Blogger came out with on 3/11. I don’t know at this time whether I’ll keep it or not. (03/15/10)

Update 2:

I’ve switched back to my web hosting account and WordPress.  What I mentioned above still works for Blogger templates, though. (03/17/10)

Google Buzz

Google appears to be getting serious about social networking. According to Google “Buzz” is for “starting conversations about the things you find interesting. Share updates, photos, videos and more with your friends.”

It seems like Buzz is tied to your GMail account, and from what I can see, it appears to be a combination of Facebook and Twitter. I’ll admit to not being a big social networking guy (although I do Facebook and Twitter) so I don’t know how successful this will be.

Facebook and Twitter do have a large head start, and I can’t help but think that having it tied to GMail is not going to help. I can say for certainty that most of the people I know from Facebook are not going to want to open a new email account to use Buzz.

Buzz appeared on my GMail account this morning, so I’ll have to experiment and see what else Buzz can do.

Test Post

This is from iGoogle. Let’s see how it works.

(originally published at http://azb.blogspot.com)

Test post from a Blackberry

This picture of a Meerkat was taken with my Blackberry Curve on 5/29/08 at the Peoria Zoo.

(originally published at http://azb.blogspot.com)

Another test post by email

Just testing how to post by email. This should be pretty easy to do.