July 11th, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
I spent last week in Boston. However, before I left I went to an Ottmar Liebert concert at the Saratoga Mountain Winery, the beautiful venue pictured above. In addition to playing some amazing music, Ottmar is supremely *with it* Free Culture style. (This came as no surprise of course since it was Eric Case that turned me on to his acoustic stylings and geektastic leanings.) Ottmar is blogging, he's podcasting, and he's released his music under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. Here's what he said to much applause at the end of strong set at the winery:
"I decided that copyright, it sort of seemed like everybody was holding on to everything. So as an artist I thought, "What can I do?" Open the hand. So what we're doing is releasing the album with a Creative Commons license. It's a sampling plus license."
If you get a chance to go to one of Ottmar's concerts, I highly recommend it. If you can't make it to a live show then listen to his music online or buy his current release. It's good stuff.
July 11th, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
photo credit: Graham Waldon (who also writes our Blogger Hacks articles)
Got a photo of Blogger cavorting in an exotic locale? .
July 8th, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
We've re-enabled post counts on the dashboard. But remember, it's quality not quantity.
July 1st, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
Via BoingBoing comes this post at The Republic of Geektronica: The Strange World of Blogspot Spamblogs, which points out a new kind of spam on Blog*Spot. People are creating seemingly legitimate news blogs which contain spam links cleverly hidden by CSS. Geektronica, you rock. Thanks for finding this sneaky spam. We're hoping to leverage more of this kind of help from the community in the future.
But wait! There are a few things I'd like to address in the Geektronica post. The post states that Blogspot "apparently does not have a policy against" spam but our Terms of Service states that we will terminate spam (and we do). It also says "Blogspot now requires CAPTCHA authentication to start a new account." We require CAPTCHA authentication to create new blogs, not new accounts. There's a big difference there because one account can have many blogs. While we're on the subject of CAPTCHA let me say that we never thought it would "fix the problem" of spam. CAPTCHA has had an impact but also has accessibility drawbacks that prevent it from being a complete solution.
The braintrust here at Google has lots of experience dealing with spam and the Blogger crew is actively leveraging this talent to find new ways to combat the problem. Kudos to The Republic of Geektronica for taking note of this new wrinkle and yes, we are working hard against spamblogs.
June 29th, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
And Blogger users get a special discounted rate. I went to the last one and it was great. This time, the BBS is being held in a palace. An actual palace. The Palace in San Francisco, to be precise. Publish and Prosper August 17-19, 2005.
June 29th, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
We have a fix for Blogger users experiencing template woes due to our recent update. First, I'd like to explain what the issue was.
In order to provide the layout options in our newly released Blogger Images we had to wrap all posts in a
tag. For some users this resulted in template formatting issues (even without uploading images). So today we introduced a new setting to suppress that markup.
Please note that suppressing the markup will result in layout problems when using left or right alignment for images. You should only change this setting if you are currently having trouble with normal posts.
-
How To Use The Setting
- Sign in to your Blogger Dashboard
- Click the "Change Settings" icon next to your blog
- Click "Formatting" under the Settings tab
- Choose "No" on "Enable float alignment"
That should do the trick. Thanks for being so patient while we got this figured out and implemented.
June 28th, 2005 | Published in Google Adwords API
We made a small change to the AdWords API WSDL files today, changing the declared type of KeywordId from int (32 bit) to long (64 bit). The server has treated keyword IDs as longs since our launch, and the online docs declared them as such. Only the WSDL was in error.
Existing client code should see no effect of this. If you regenerate proxy code from the WSDL the type will change, and you may get some minor compile time errors about type conversions. We also are updating the new Java client library and this update will be available shortly.
Many thanks to our user Sabina for pointing out the discrepancy.
-- Nelson Minar, Software Engineer
June 27th, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
Update#2: There is a way to fix the layout problem without using any special code. It is now just a setting in Blogger: Read all about it.
Update: We've got a solution that provides users an easy way to disable the markup that is causing them some layout glitches with their blog. It will allow those who have custom templates and certain older templates to fix their blog up right proper. We're building and testing the solution now and we'll let you know when it is ready.
As mentioned on our status blog, recent updates to Blogger are causing annoying layout problems for some of our users. We are working on the bigger solution for this but in the meantime we've got a quick workaround for what appears to be one of the biggest culprits--the big space at the top of your blog, most notably blogs using the Bluebird template. This workaround requires that you modify your template. Here's how to do it:
Just below the line that says
or
try adding this:
#main #menu {
position: absolute;
right: 21px;
}
Then save and republish. This should help with the big space issue. Some modified templates might not respond to this. We'll continue to work on this but let us know (
[email protected]) if this doesn't work for you. Remember to copy and save your template in a text editor before you make any changes and for more information about editing templates visit our Help site.
June 27th, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
The reponse to Blogger Images has been huge! There's LOTS of images being posted and we're psyched. Some users did experience a template issue which I just posted about here and we're working that out now. (Keep an eye on the status blog for that.) Otherwise, post 'em if you got 'em. Like so:
Portabella's are $5.00 a pound. How about that?
June 23rd, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
As you can see by this screenshot of the Blogger.com front page featuring my cat, we have launched Blogger Images. Now you can put a photo (or any JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF or BMP format image) into your blog posts easily and for free. From your hard drive or from the Web. How do you like that? Also, since I can just click a button, here is a photo I took earlier today:
I'm pretty sure local laws require a doctor to be on-site wherever deep fried twinkies are being sold. (If they don't, they should.)
June 21st, 2005 | Published in Google Adwords API
Hi AdWords API Developers,
We’re happy to announce that we released two new items today: Creative IDs in reports and a Java Client library.
Over the last few months, many of you posted to the Developer Forum stressing the usefulness of Keyword IDs in reports, but wondered why we don’t provide Creative IDs. Based largely on this feedback, you can now schedule a CustomReport with Creative IDs. With Creative IDs, developers can get a full snapshot of their account activity by scheduling a single report. This should improve syncing your local systems with AdWords - enabling more efficient management of your quota.
The Java client library makes it easier to write Java clients. We know that getting started with your AdWords applications can be challenging, so we hope this client library will simplify your Java development process. The client library is provided in a single jar file that contains all the necessary Axis jars and pre-compiled stub classes. More details can be found at the Java Client Library page. As always, please post your thoughts on the Developer Forum . If many of you find client libraries useful, we will work with the community to provide access to more such resources.
Look forward to hearing from you on the Developer Forum.
Regards,
Nelson Minar, Software Engineer
Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager
June 21st, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
Found via BoingBoing is this blog called Squattercity about squatters and squatter cities around the world. The blogger, Robert Neuwirth, is a writer who spent two years living in squatter communities on four continents and has published a new book called Shadow Cities in an attempt to humanize these maligned settlements.
Survey Says
June 20th, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
MIT's running a Weblog Survey, if you've got a few spare minutes.
June 20th, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
Jason Mulgrew, is named one of the "50 Hottest Bachelors" of 2005 by
People magazine because of his blog, Everything Is Wrong with Me. His blog posts are funny:
When she first asked me, I immediately thought, "This girl wants me to go to a five-hour open bar with her and then we're staying in a hotel room. We are going to have a baby."
He posted the page from the magazine here.
People asked him, Why Blog? to which he responded, "I'm better in print than in person." Good stuff.
June 17th, 2005 | Published in Google Blogger Buzz
Here's five links I spotted recently rounded up for your clicking pleasure (in case you didn't spend all week reading blogs).
- A trans-siberian train journey blog
- India to accredit bloggers as journalists
- Steve Jobs' commencement address at Stanford
- 50 tools to help you in writing
- How to blog according to Trae
In other news, I hope to see Batman Begins tonight. Hope it's okay-ish. Goldman seemed to like it but he was hopped up on Reece's Pieces and something he calls "cheery icee" which might be French, I'm not sure.
Previously
May 11, 2012
by Allison Sommer | Read | No Comments
As of June 12, 2012, AdWords Editor versions 9.0 and prior will be sunset. After this date, changes made via these versions will not be implemented in your AdWords account. Please download the latest version (9.7.1.) at your earliest convenience, but…
May 11, 2012
by Lat Long Blog | Read | No Comments
Do you have a spreadsheet of locations that you’d like to see on a map? Here on the Google Earth Outreach team we talk to many nonprofits who use Google Earth and Maps to tell their stories and visualize their data. Often the data is in spreadsheets,…
May 11, 2012
by Allison Sommer | Read | No Comments
When we launched bid simulator in 2009, we wanted to make it easy for you to understand the impact of bids on your advertising results. Until now, you’ve been able to access bid simulator at the keyword and ad group level.To allow you to more easily …
May 11, 2012
How Nissan Uses Ecommerce Tracking Without Directly Selling Online
by Google Analytics team | Read | No Comments
This post originally appeared on the Google Analytics Japan blog.Google Analytics’ e-commerce tracking allows online merchants to measure items sold and tie those results back to their digital marketing activities. But did you know that it can also b…
May 10, 2012
by Blog | Read | No Comments
Every day, many interesting discussions arise on our Orkut communities. Whenever we wantto join them, we have to access each of our communities and search for the most recentlycreated topics. With so much content, sometimes an interesting topic is over…
May 10, 2012
by Michelle | Read | No Comments
Posted by: Nicole Ravlin, Co-founder of People Making Good Editor’s Note: Today’s guest blogger is Nicole Ravlin, Co-founder of People Making Good, a public relations company based in Burlington, Vermont. People Making Good is a public relations a…