Blogger Introduces Auto Future Publishing

Blogger has finally gotten the feature that we wanted most! Auto Publish.
Now you can enter your post in Blogger and set the date when you want to publish.

For some of us who write ahead and want to schedule posts this is a very welcome addition.
Thanks Blogger!

Blogger, You're Fired!

That's right, we're firing you Blogger. Frankly, you should take note of this post. For sites that have complex custom blog templates and are using Blogger custom FTP, the issues with blog post publishing are getting so bad that we are migrating many of our clients to WordPress.

Here's a real world example:

Stern Environmental Group has a complex blog design. It is done in compliant CSS and using Blogger to FTP the posts to the www.SternEnvironmental.com/blog. In the last two months we have had nothing but trouble since our client's new template was installed.

At first, we thought it was an issue of too many labels. One of our blog writers created a new label for nearly every post. We took time to clean up the labels and instituted a new procedure where labels were predefined for the writer. Still we had publishing problems and they were getting progressively worse.

This past week, even after Blogger had fessed up that their new update had impacted sites like this one with complex templates, and that they said they had corrected the problem a post from Wednesday did not appear until Friday. On top of that a post from Friday did not appear on the blog until Sunday. Mind you, I had been in to the control panel numerous times during this period trying to get Blogger to publish the posts.

In fact the problem was so bad, that the Friday morning post arrived to me via email via Feedburner, and the link to view the post online was broken; as Blogger had still not gotten its act together to publish the post. Good grief!

So, Blogger, you're fired. Stern Environmental Group is moving to WordPress.

Blog From Microsoft Word in Office 2007

Blogger had originally released a download for this in 2005, but just couldn't get it to work. Now Office 2007 is supposed to let you be able to do that. I do not have Office 2007, but will soon and will let you know after I take it for a whirl.

I don't typically use Word to compose my blogs, but some do. I prefer the Blogger control panel, but I do know of clients and our own ghost blogger who would really prefer to blog in Word.

Currently if you write your blog in Word and then try to paste it into the Blogger interface, you get funny characters, spacing problems, and headaches that you have to correct in the HTML of the post.

It will be interesting to see if this new Office 2007 add on will solve those problems.

New Blogger Labels

If you are using the new beta Blogger, well not beta anymore, then you know that you can add the widget that adds labels to your template with nearly one click. How very nice!

If you are using FTP and the Blogger platform, then you know just what a headache it is especially if you are using a custom designed template to add labels to your own blog template.

I tried over the weekend to do this dynamically on my blog Web-World Watch. I followed three different sets of instructions struggling to find a way that would work to dynamically create the label list. I tried adding the new mime type to the .htaccess file, adding a PHP include and several versions of scripts. At the end of several hours, I just had to simply give up. I added the "popular labels" using plain HTML manually to my template so that users can access my labels. I won't be able to add more dynamically, but at least I have tried out several approaches that I have found on the Web.

If you find an easy work around to add labels to an FTP blog, let me know, I am all ears.

New Blogger Publishing Speed

Wow, I just have to click back in and say that the new blogging platform using Blogspot with a custom domain feature has the fastest publishing that I have seen. It is nearly instantaneous.

If you have used FTP blogging or the old Blogger interface, you know that publishing used to be an excruciating process. Didn't you just hate that old blinking publishing icon that regularly got stuck in a cycle.

No more! Instant publishing is a new feature with the new Blogger using custom domains!

Welcome to Blog-World Watch

Welcome to my newest blog for McCord Web Design. In this blog I will be checking out the implementation settings and custom domain settings for the new Blogger.com.

This blog is set up using the new widget templates for Blogger and is also using the custom domain setting.

I am not sure how this will work for search engines, but I'll soon find out. Keep you posted!