Posts tagged "Google"

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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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…

Google Voice

I got my Google Voice invitation the other day. As part of the sign up, you are able to pick your own phone number. In my case, I was able to get a phone number in my area code, with an exchange located in my town and the last four numbers match my home address!

Google bought the old Grand Central system and has contracted with Level 3 for the phone numbers. I’m excited about this as Google’s system allows you to route all your phone calls, home, mobile, work, etc., through one phone number.

You can access Google Voice with a mobile app and read your voice mails on line., because Google actually transcribes your voice mails. of course, you can listen to them, just like any other voice mail system. The service I’m looking forward to is call screening and blocking.

http://google.com/voice

Google Apps

Around May 6th, I changed the email over on this domain to Google Apps. I now access my azb.com email through a GMail interface. I have to say that I have been pleasantly surprised. As I have been a GMail user since it first came out back in 2005, it was an easy transition. I’m using the free version, which is more than adequate for me.

As with GMail itself, you can set up your domain to be accessed through a POP or IMAP client such as Thunderbird. Since I’ve owned the domain since 1998 and have been using it for email just as long, there is a butt-load of junk mail that comes in everyday. When I first set up the domain under Apps, I turned on the “catch all” in order to see what email came in. If you have a “catch all” turned on, you will receive every email that ends with your domain name.

The result was just as I expected. The first few days, there were several hundred emails every day to just about every made up azb.com email address that the spammers have been using for years. I turned that feature off and just have the one email address that I’ve used since 1998. What’s nice is that Google allows you to alias that one address in case you want to use another email address. All of this mail goes into one email box under the free version of Apps. Since I turned of the catch all, I only receive about 75-100 junk emails a day, which GMail catches and throws in the trash for me. Since I can archive all my email locally through an IMAP client, I have the best of both worlds. Access to my email everywhere, even through the Gmail Blackberry application, and a copy of all emails stored locally on one of my computers at home. Highly recommended.

http://google.com/a

Test Post

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

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