Useful tips and stuff that matters » blogger

Blogger Finally Responded My Request to Restore My Old Blog

angelchen1111 — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 23:46:19 +0000

Today blogger’s support finally restored my old blog angelchen1111.blogspot.com to me. It took me five days to actually get a response! I had to say something like “I emailed blogger support like thousands of time and there’s still no response” in order to get them reply to me. It also said that it doesn’t guarantee that they will restore the deleted blogs to us. So never ever delete your blogger’s blogs because there are always spammers watching for them!

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Forgot to Take Back the Blog I Deleted Yesterday

angelchen1111 — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 10:02:00 +0000

I forgot to take back the blog angelchen1111.blogspot.com that I deleted it yesterday. Now somebody took it over and is spamming with it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now I see the “check computer now” spam when i go to technorati, and when I type in angelchen1111.blogspot.com it will redirect to a “check computer now” spam page! I reported that to google and hopefully they will take care of it. Google should do something to stop it! People are spamming by taking advantage of deleted blogs.

Blogger blocked again in china?! (not anymore)

angelchen1111 — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 02:49:04 +0000

Today I asked some of my friends in China to open my Blogger’s blog, surprisingly nobody could open it while I could, then I though maybe Blogger is blocked again. After that I searched “blogspot blocked china” in google and found many recent blog posts that said they can’t open blogger’s blog recently and blogger is probably blocked in china again. Fortunately I moved my blog from blogger to WordPress a month earlier, so now this blog is still accessible worldwide.
update: it’s unblocked on 11/21/06 or earlier.

How to add social bookmarking in wordpress

angelchen1111 — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 05:56:15 +0000

In the entry Let Your Blog Be Social nongeek talked about the advantage of social bookmarking and how to add bookmark area in blogger’s template. You can also do that in wordpress too, using the same way he said in that post, but substitute Blogger’s template tags with wordpress’s tags. For example, if you want a “Submit to del.icio.us” line you should add

Submit to: del.icio.us

instead of

Submit to: >del.icio.us

to your template’s php file before or after the line depending on if you want it to appear before or after the posts.

If you want to submit to Digg there’s a great WordPress plugin called Digg This for WordPress Reloaded that lets you to add a very cool “Digg This button” like the one I have in the posts, without changing the template’s codes. It also comes with a Complete admin interface with options for many customizations, like positioning the button, what pages to show the button, the style of the button , and many others.

My former Blogger’s blog doesn’t update in technorati

angelchen1111 — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 06:56:35 +0000

My former blog angelchen1111.blogspot.com doesn’t update in technorati at all, except for the links. The last date I updated it was Saturday, October 21, 2006. but in technorati it says it was updated 67 days ago, the exact day I created that blog in Blogger. I don’t know why, I only have problem with that blog, I don’t have problem with other blogs like this blog and the other blog from Blogger.

How to flip sidebar to left and post body to right in Blogger

angelchen1111 — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 05:56:00 +0000

In Blogger Beta you can move the widgets up and down, but you can’t flip the post body to the right or left of the sidebar. Here’s an easy way to do that without widgets.

To move the sidebar to the left find the section main or main-wrapper and change float:left to float:right, then find the section sidebar or sidebar-wrapper and change float:right to float:left. To move the sidebar to the right just do the opposite, change float:right to float:left and float:left to float:right.

After flipping them you might want to flip the backgrounds as well, and fine tune the layouts to make your blog look well.

Here’s the picture of the template TicTac Blue with the sidebar on the left:

Today I switched my blog to Blogger Beta

angelchen1111 — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 17:20:00 +0000

Today I finally switched my blog to beta after the link to switch is available. After switching since I kept the old template unchanged, because of this the only change I could see is an improved Navbar, nothing else seemed to change. I have other beta blog with the new template that looks very cool, I wanted to upgrade this blog’s template to a new one too, so that I can organize my posts by putting labels for each posts and separate them into different categories. But my old template had too many customizations that won’t work well in new templates, especially putting the ads right after the posts, if I put the ad codes right after the post body the scripts between will be gone. I have to hang on until beta improves more before using new template.
I liked the new Navbar very much, now on its right side you can see your email, make new post and customize your blog. The Navbar’s codes are also friendlier for the search engines and other content targeting programs like adsense since it’s loaded inside the iframe, and it doesn’t have any hidden texts like “Notify Blogger about objectionable content. What does this mean? Blogger · Send As SMS” that confuses the search engine. Next time when I google my blog the result’s description will show the contents of my blog instead of those hidden texts.

trivia: There’s a little extra “g” in my blog that I just upgraded in the “manage your blogs” section.

Google’s server really sucks, downs too often.

angelchen1111 — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 04:56:00 +0000

Google’s server is down quite too often since I use blogger, on Friday Blogspot.com is down all the morning, yesterday adsense maintenance, today still down for a while, maybe other services are often down, as I know that picasa disconnects once in a while since I installed it last week and when I use Performancing to edit blogs I often get connection error.

Blogger’s bug of switching back to publishing on blogspot.com after publishing on ftp

angelchen1111 — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 00:24:00 +0000

Today in the morning Blogger was down, but I thought blogspot.com was also down(in reality it didn’t). Because of this an idea of publishing on ftp came up to my mind. So I changed the setting to publish over ftp and published the blog to my own computer. Surprisingly when I switch I didn’t get any warning about I might lose my hosting in the current Blog*Spot Address when I changed the setting.
After a while I realized that blogspot.com is not down and doing OK I regretted that decision and tried to switch back to Blog*Spot Address. Here comes the problem, now I can’t get my angelchen1111.blogspot.com back when I switch back, it said it’s already in use although it isn’t. I checked it and still see my blog there, nobody took it over. After that I tried to make a new blog with angelchen1111 and even tried a new account with angelchen111.blogspot.com, all those doesn’t take it back. I read the help file and now understood that my host is supposed to be released after switching to ftp and I can take it back if nobody took it over. But the host didn’t seem to be released and nobody could take it. I got tired of this and slept thinking about I might need to get a new name.blogspot.com and update all links .
After I wake up the solution comes, I tried to publish on Blog*Spot Address with name other than angelchen1111 and hit publish, after publishing I changed the Blog*Spot Address back to angelchen1111 and published again, Bingo! Now it worked and I finally took angelchen1111.blogspot.com back. Warning, this might not work for everybody, please don’t try it with your Blog*Spot Address that you really want to keep or you might lose it, I made a new account to do the same thing again and it FAILED, it couldn’t take back the Blog*Spot Address. Try this only if you want your Blog*Spot Address back after switching to ftp or sftp.

Here I warn you people again not to switching back and forth the method of publishing, because sometimes some strange bugs might come out and screw up your post. Think over before you switch to ftp or sftp, you might not be able to get your Blog*Spot Address back after you switch.

Something about Blogger’s template format and tips to show html code in posts

angelchen1111 — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 21:20:00 +0000

Did you know that Blogger.com’s template is just a special HTML file with some special template tags in between? That means you can customize your blog just like editing a web page.

That gives you the maximum flexibility to customize the blog’s design. You can add and change anything you want from top to bottom. To learn more about the template tags and what they do please visit http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42095.

I found it useful to put ”> into your template’s section, so that search engines will show your website’s description in their result instead of some stupid message like “Notify Blogger about objectionable content. What does this mean? Blogger · Send As SMS · Get your own blog · Flag Blog · Next blog” if you have NavBar on.

If you want to put HTML codes in your blog to let others copy you can’t paste them directly in the Edit Posts window, it will give you some error message, here’s a way to get around it:

Copy the codes you want to paste into the post and paste it into a HTML editor (like FrontPage)’s design section.

Check the source code of the contents you just pasted, you will notice that the symbols “<”, “>”, or others became &??; now you can copy those codes with &??; and paste them in the posts, although you still see &??; now, when you published your post the &??; will become the appropriate symbol again when it show in the blog.

Note: You can’t get away with it by putting the unmodified codes inside the text box, Blogger’s editor still won’t let you save it even if you do that.

Blogspot.com unblocked in China.

angelchen1111 — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 17:29:14 +0000

Keso reports that blogspot is unblocked in China. However, people can never tell know how long it would last (zh). I had it working since Friday, and I heard that people say that it worked since August 10. It’s been blocked for abot 3 years I hope it’s not going to be blocked again.