Blogger

The Ideal way: Migrating from Blogger to WordPress

Many people start the blog on a free blogging platform like blogger and WordPress. And after 6 months or 1 or 2 years time, if the person keeps on blogging, then he is almost certain to start feeling that he did a mistake! Mistake of starting the blog on a free blogging platform.

But do not think it as a mistake anymore. While starting a self hosted blog is a smart idea, but we know the fact that many blogs die within 1 to 6 months, so its good to start a blog on these blogging platform and invest some time to figure out whether blogging is for you or not. And it will be a good thing to learn the most basic things using those blogging platforms and then move or start a new self hosted blog.

Many people may advice to have a self hosted blog from day one, and we respect that idea too. If you can dedicate more time to learn and if you are commented enough for your blog and blogging, then either way you can start your blog.

Installing a self hosted WordPress is very easy and only takes minutes.

If you have a blog at blogger and want to transfer to your own self hosted WordPress blog, then here is a resource which will help you through the process.

For the text version of this tutorial you can follow this link labnol.org
And to be on safer side, do not forget to tell Google that you are moving your blog, at webmasters tool.

Your blogger blog template search ends here!

Antonio Lupetti an Engineer, Pro Blogger, Mac user, Musician, Web Addicted from ROME – ITALY has released a wonderful blogger template. Actually he is a master of that template, as he himself use the template on his blog. That means, he has tested it, used it so long that he has almost cleared all the bugs in it.

I had always loved his blog template and hesitated to ask for the source code(to modify, without violating the copy rights). But to my surprise and Antonio Lupetti’s goodness, he has finally released his template source code to the public.

woork-blogspot-template-released-to-public

He has actually released the HTML version rather than XML source code, because HTML is more common than XML and we can easily modify the HTML codes using many software.
Just copy and paste the HTML codes and it will work. Many people think that, they must use only XML in blogger templates, but that’s not true, you can also use valid HTML codes.

The template looks so professional. The template supports easy integration of third-party advertisements (both AdSense or any other ad network and custom 125×125 banners), the best part for people trying to make more money is — you can integrate ads within post(look at the individual post page),Twitter, Job board, Flickr pictures, delicious bookmarks, and you may also embed RSS feeds via the FeedBurner service. And more importantly, I love the comment section of the template. It looks great. But the fact that, blogger platform doesn’t allow for user friendly commenting, we need to migrate to some other page to comment. Hope its done for spam controlling purpose!

And I think this theme works with old Blogspot users also, who haven’t migrated from the Classic HTML template yet, because this is a HTML source code, and theoretically it must work. I haven’t tried it practically, and I am waiting for someone to clear this doubt.

I was very excited to write a post about customizing the template, but Antonio Lupetti himself has done the job and he has explained the customization part of the template from Top to Bottom. Its great article and a must read if you are a blogspot user.
He explains- Adding Blog Logo, Adding tab on the navigation bar, Search field, Customizing Home Page, Your name below each post title, Adding sections on the sidebar, About me section, Recent Post*, Categories on the sidebar, etc. If you have any problem with the template, you can always contact Antonio Lupetti or do a Google Search(if its a general blogger problem).
Happy Blogging 🙂

Blogging Made Easy by "Windows Live Writer" – A Small Review

This is my first post in Technotip.org about Windows Live Writer(WLW) and I am now writing this article using “WLW” itself. I have previously used it to write articles for my blogger blog.

Why we thought about an alternate editor, when we have a simple and good editors(Visual & HTML) in WordPress ?

As always, we wanted some more features to write articles and we use to face some problem while using default WordPress editors.

Problems that we had faced in default WordPress editor:

1. We had problem with adding and aligning the images. Each time we added a image to our article, consumed lot of time.

2. Sometimes when we open the old posts and save it again, we noticed that some irrelevant “Category” got added to it automatically from our “Categories” list.(Hope this is a typical problem only with us!)

3. Loading time….(I agree that, loading time has been improved a lot with new versions of WordPress, but WLW loads superfast as it is an Desktop application.

4. Problem inserting “tables” :- There is no option to insert a table in WordPress editors. This surprises me!

We need to have “insert table” feature that will be of use many times. We know that, using tables may slow down the page loading time, and its good to use CSS/DIV to get the tables, but everybody using WordPress are not programmers or geek’s to do that. And many blogger’s don’t have patience and time to do it.

5. Each time we see the preview of the article it even loads the advertisements. This will make our own impressions on those advertisements. Those impressions will be OK, if they are less in number, but I don’t want any advertisers to pay me for my own impressions on my own blog.

6. We had problem with italicizing the words. When we press the Italicize button, the selected word would be in Bold!

We use to insert <i> </i> tags in html mode to get the results.

7. And the <code> </code> was not working!

(Hope many problems listed above are topically problems only faced by us. Because we have never seen anybody else reporting these problems).

Actually I like the new WordPress editors for many reasons, but the above mentioned points make me to use WLW.

Actually, I write articles in WLW and then save it directly to my WordPress draft and then again modify it there if necessary.

Why we like “Windows Live Writer” ?

This is the actual reason to write this article..

1. Many features, and many tools/plugins to make blogging much more easy.

2. Offline blogging. This will really help a lot. Just try this for 1 week and you will know the power and impact of offline blogging.

No distraction from Chatting buddies, emails etc. In the beginning I got irritated, as there was no Internet connection, but now I am getting used to it and my articles are now more focused. And actually I have installed “WLW” in my laptop and I can now start blogging from almost any place I love.

And more importantly, I can now keep blogging, even when there is problem with my “ISP”(Internet Service Provider), and I can publish the posts by taking my laptop to my friends home, who are using someother ISP.

3. Lot of options to play with images I insert into my articles now. We can revert the image in one click, we can contrast, sharpen etc.

4. Faster loading..Saves lot of time, over time.

5. Publish to most major blog services: Including Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger and many others.

6. Insert photos and videos, maps, tags and lots of other cool content, all in a snap. Powerful editing features include tables, spell checker, and quick hyperlinks.

7. We can write for multiple blogs using the same “WLW” :

Just add another weblog account and you can start writing for both blogs.

8. All the other options which is present in WordPress are also present in “WLW”.

There are many advantages of using Windows Live Writer and We recommend everybody to give it a try. Mac users can try Ecto. And for people who want to use simple and neat interface can try blogdesk.

Whatever you use and try, but don’t forget to give a try to “Windows Live Writer“, it has been improved a lot over time, and its latest release will really impress you, by the way it works.

Here are some screen shots of installing “WLW”:-

Select the software you want to install from the list and sit back and do whatever you want to do. Internet connection needed!

After installing “WLW”, click on the shortcut and configuration window opens- See Below screenshot, to configure your weblog account.

Weblog Homepage URL: Put your blogs homepage. Ex:- http://technotip.org

And in the username and Password section, type the username and password of your account(Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger or any other, that you use as your blogging platform.)

After successful installation and configuring, you can just test the power of “Windows Live Writer”.

WLW is a must use tool for bloggers using blogspot.com(bloger.com). Blogger(Blogspot) editor seems to be too bad(my personal opinion), using WLW helped get rid of all silly problems and now blogging has become more friendly.

What’s your opinion about “WLW” ? Which editor do you use ? Do you still use the default WordPress/blogger editors ?

Tips,Tricks and hack for blogger blogs

Today’s post is dedicated to all those people using blogger.com. Its a great service which offers free web hosting. I wonder how much bandwidth blogger would provide!
Before trying any of the below mentioned tips/tricks, backup your theme — Goto “Layout” -> “Edit HTML” and click on “Download Full Template”..

Today’s post is dedicated to all those people using blogger.com. Its a great service which offers free web hosting. I wonder how much bandwidth blogger would provide!

Before trying any of the below mentioned tips/tricks, backup your theme — Goto “Layout” -> “Edit HTML” and click on “Download Full Template”..
This article is only for education purpose and I am not an expert in coding blogger templates, so try at your own risk. By changing the default behavior of the blogger blogs, you may be violating their policy. So we make it clear that, this article is only for education/learning purpose.

1. To insert Meta tags:-
Place

<meta NAME='description' expr:content='data:blog.pageTitle + ",Put in your common description tags here "'/>

in between <head> </head> tags.

In the above code expr:content= ‘data:blog.pageTitle’ gets replaced by the title of your current page. So when combined with the common description tags, the description tag becomes unique for each page. Also do not forget to replace “Put in your common description tags here” with some description of your website(this will be common for all pages of your website.)

2. Read more option (show only post Excerpt in the home page):-

Login to your account and click on the “Layout” tab. Then select “Edit HTML”. Check ” Expand Widget Templates”.
Now search for </b:skin> and paste the below code between </b:skin> and </head>


<!-- Style to implement "Read more.." link in all the posts (Start) -->
<style>
    <b :if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
        span.fullpost {display:inline;}
    <b :else/>
        span.fullpost {display:none;}
    </b>
</style>
<!-- Style to implement "Read more.." link in all the posts (End) -->

Now search for <data:post.body/> in the template HTML and paste the following piece of code after <data:post.body/>


<!-- Code to show "Read more.." Link (Begin) -->
          <b :if cond='data:blog.pageType != "item"'>
              <span>
                <a expr:href='data:post.url' 
style='color:#0000FF; 
text-align:right;
font-weight:bold; 
text-decoration:none' >
Read more..
</a>
             </span>
          </b>
          <!-- Code to show "Read more.." Link (End) -->

Save it. That’s all about coding part of the theme. To show only post excerpts on the homepage, you need to insert <span class="fullpost"> post excerpt.Remaining article will be shown after clicking on "Read more.." link.</span> . Now your articles and blog will look more professional.

3. Hide the Blogger navbar:-

Add this line #navbar-iframe {display: none !important;} before /* Variable definitions

Paste below code inbetween <style> </style> , before </head> .


<!--Code to remove blogger navbar-->
#b-navbar {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none
}
<!--End of code to remove blogger navbar-->

4. Post articles from email:-

Goto “Settings”, click on “Email” option. And set the email ID, and start posting articles from your email ID.
Its interesting to note that, you can post upto 10MB of images directly from your email.

5. Bulk image uploader(for firefox users only):-
Use “Drag Drop Uploader” FireFox Addon and upload as many images as you want.

6. Change the default favicon and put your favicon, great for branding purpose:-
Upload your favicon(an image of 16 x 16 pixels or 32 x 32 pixels with .png, .gif, or .ico extension. Use either 8-bit or 24-bit colours.)
Now paste below code between <head> </head> tags.


<link href='Uploaded favicons URL' rel='icon' type='image/gif'/>
<link href='Uploaded favicons URL' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/gif'/>

Book mark this article, as there is more to come, as we investigate and play with Blogger.
We thought of making this a serious post, but it would annoy visitors as they need to navigate to different pages to get what they want. So we decided to keep all things at one place. Hope this article is of some use for some of you. If this article helps you in anyway, then please share this story with as many people as possible.Thanks

Google face Lawsuit in India

hate-writing MUMBAI — An Indian, Mumbai-based Gremach Infrastructure Equipments & Projects Ltd Company is demanding that Google Inc. disclose the name of a person who used its blogging service, in a case that could change the way the Internet giant does business in India. The blogger known as “Toxic Writer,” is accused of attacking the Mumbai-based Gremach in what they are calling it as a “hate campaign.”

Many people just feel that, the decision by Indian Court is not fair, but think from the perspective of the company. If the so called “Hate Campaign” is being done by the company rivals or some anti-social elements ?

Indian court is not so foolish to give decision without reading what that guy has written in his blog. Ofcourse this decision will make many bloggers get scared, but don’t worry until you write somethink that has been written after some good research and thinking. Don’t just write to get the attention of others.

The only sad thing is, Google is being sued here. And as usual, Google need to give the private information of the blogger to the court! This will surly scare some of us. Previously we saw, how Google was forced to hand over complete YouTube user histories to Viacom, in a case of copyright issue.

The “Toxic Writer” blog was taken down, and Google’s Indian subsidiary is claiming they are not responsible for the Blogger.com service.

Google has been instructed to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger in a defamation lawsuit filed by an Indian construction company against them, reports the Wall Street Journal.

“One of the most common places for people to sue, because they will generally win, are nations that are or have formerly been part of the British Commonwealth, where there is no First Amendment, and the law looks more toward protecting the reputation of people than protecting the free speech of speakers,” Watson told Wired.com.

“Google which is an American corporation enjoys a great deal of protection here in the United States, but in the rest of the world, it’s subject to the laws of wherever these articles or communications are published,” he added.

What do you think about this issue? Will this be a blackmark on the “democracy of internet” or is this the perfect justice done? or do you think there is someother measures to solve such issues in future. And what would be the future of Google, if everyone and their dogs keep sueing them? Please share your thoughts in the comment section. And remember, people have been sued even for commenting hatred things or wrong point of view! — Does this scare you, yes/no, why is it so ?