Saturday, January 13, 2007

Some Suggestions for Those Angry with Blogger

Some Suggestions For Those Angry With Blogger:

and not one suggestion to change blog host!!

Reading through my BlogLines this morning, there are several of my regular reads complaining about problems with blogger (OK, so what else is new?). Thought I would share a couple things that might make your life easier in the future: using a photo hosting site for your photos and simply inserting those into your blogger post; and using a desktop blog posting tool to compose your posts.


1. Judy noted that blogger was once again not processing photographs (Frieda made the same complaint). So she pointed us over to her account on Flickr to look at the pictures there.

You can insert your Flickr photos into your Blogger post.
In fact if you host photos on many sites you can insert the photo.

Here's how:

A. I have uploaded my photos to Flickr and want to put "Giant Storm Cloud" into this post. So I go to my account, find that photo and click on it; then click on "all sizes" and choose "medium" (it fits in the space). Just below that photo it says:

To link to this photo on other websites you can either:

1. Copy and paste this HTML into your webpage.
And THAT'S WHAT I DO. Copy their text, and paste it into my post. Voila! My Flickr photo is inserted in my Blogger post without having to upload the photo again. And yes, there is probably a similar option for other photo hosting sites.

B. Similar to "A" above, except that I use option 2: 2. Grab the photo's URL. Then I can click on the photo icon in Blogger and where it let's you add an image from the web, and paste that grabbed URL in. Or, yeah, I could write the HTML myself... but why try to remember something (a line of code) that I don't have to?

Either way I've inserted my photos into my post without having to deal with blogger's often iffy photo insertion program.

Now, a "work around" for Blogger Losing posts:
(and let's hope that those posts will show up as "drafts").

This is a different option. Yes, you can write your post in NotePad or WordPad or something (NOT a MS Word processing program. They add a lot of extra formatting that screws things up when you publish), then copy and paste into a blog post. Atleast this way the words are not lost.

A different option is to download a copy of blog publishing tool.

I use Performancing but there is also:
Bleezer (still having problems with the new blogger),
Chronicle,
ecto, and others.

With any of these tools, they reside on your computer and allow you completely compose a blogpost. You can set them up to log into your blog server and upload the post. Yes, if blogger is down it is still down. But atleast all your work isn't lost, too.

These programs let you insert photos, links, tags.. everything and more that you would do on the blogger compose page.

I'm just saying it's an option...

Edit Saturday afternoon: vicky left a great link in comments. I will be tagging all the links in this post, plus Vicky's and any other left in comments in my del.icio.us with "blogging" so we can all find them whenever we need to remember them.

Check out my other blog: Deb's Daily Distractions

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