Posts Tagged ‘Blogger’

Phoenix Reborn?

It most definitely was a Blizzardish soon, but there we go. A new post after a semester-long hiatus.

So, what happened to Altitis?

Real life, that’s what happened. While I don’t want to dwell on things too much (or turn this into a “fishing for sympathy” post), I went through a situation not unlike what Big Red Kitty went through. Oh, the circumstances were different, and WoW was a mere symptom of what had gone wrong in my life, but the background is similar.

Except in my case, I went a bridge too far, and almost failed to mend and amend what I once thought would be lasting for the rest of my life. My family was on the brink of dissolution, and I moved out for about six months, convinced it was the end. And while I used to qualify blogging as cathartic, I never found the strength to blog about that at all. That explains the long hiatus.

In the middle of it, I thought I would be able to resume blogging, but for some reason, I never managed to do so since that cryptic one-worder a few months back.

Against my pessimistic outlook six months ago, though, events took a turn for the better, and we finally worked things out.

This isn’t however a sob-story serving as the testimonial on how MMORPGs have ruined (or almost ruined) the life of yet another family. As I said, it was a mere symptom of things gone wrong – spending too long in the game, investing too much into the completely wrong thing. And it wasn’t just gaming either, my job had taken an overblown importance too. What happened is probably just one in a million similar stories, where the people change, the context changes, and the symptoms change, but to keep this short, where we went wrong was that my significant other and myself started to take each other for granted and stopped communicating on tiny issues at first, and then on bigger and bigger issues, and this almost brought our couple down.

So the only advice I can give to any gamer out there, in particular if you’re in a stable, long term relationship, and more so if you have kids: you may want, periodically, to examine your gaming habits and ask yourself if they are an innocuous hobby or have become escapism for you. If it’s the latter, it may be worth taking a honest look at your life,  figure out what you’re fleeing, and address the issue, because trust me, leaving your home while your 4-year old daughter starts asking “why is daddy taking his pillow with him?” is not an experience you will enjoy.

But that’s enough background already. This was then, and as I said, we finally worked it out a couple of weeks ago.

What is going to happen to Altitis?

Frankly, I don’t know really. When crap hit the fan, I jokingly remarked to my friend Adventsparky that at least I’d be able to play during raiding peak times. In reality, that never happened.

I continued playing WoW pretty casually for a while, first on my mage, and then I picked up my shammie and eventually reached level 80 with her.

At the same time, for the first time since joining in May 2005, I actually let my subscription run out, and didn’t notice for several weeks. And it happened a second time more recently – a few weeks ago, before moving back, I wanted to check out something in the game and found, again, that I could no longer do so.

I haven’t resubscribed since.

Interestingly enough, Adventsparky once asked me whether I was still playing the game, explaining that some evening this Spring he just logged out after a raid, and never logged back in. The heart isn’t in it anymore.

Oh, I read the cataclysm announcements, but they failed to raise any kind of enthusiasm. I think the only thought that entertained me was when reading about the split of the Barrens zone, I started wondering whether this would be the end of the Mankirk’s Wife jokes.

In reality, like many other commentators on the blogosphere, I now find myself playing various different games extremely casually, either purely single-player games, or trying out one of the several viable Free2Play MMOs out there: From Wizard101 to FreeRealms, over Jade Dynasty, World of Kung Fu and Runes of Magic. I’m currently exploring Dungeons and Dragons Online (which recently went Free2Play) a bit, when I have time. I’m not really far in the game.

World of Warcraft? A while ago, I pondered resubbing for the anniversary pet and the headless horseman event. I probably won’t do that any more. In reality, the Free2Play games out there, and their microtransaction schemes allowing you to buy and consume content at your leisure, represent simply much more entertainment value for my money than shelling out 15€ / month for WoW when I might play it for little more than a couple of hours at best, if at all.

And while I could definitely afford it, I also find that the subscription fee actually participates in generating a compulsion to play in me, at the exclusion of other games, becoming enough a narrow focus that it might again draw me in and provoke another spiral that may, next time around, no longer come with a happy ending.

So the future of Altitis is similar to what a few other former WoW bloggers have done – altitis no longer confined to one game, but offering, perhaps, comments, reviews but also broader thoughts on several games.

Or maybe not. Time will tell.

In the meantime, the tagline of the blog has changed (I actually changed it when I posted the “Soon” message already), it has now become “Seeking Better Worlds”.

It is a combination of Dr. Richard Bartle‘s continuous action to try and push developers and players alike to create and demand better, richer virtual worlds. At the same time, it is also a play on the fictional Weyland-Yutani (of the Alien movie series) corporate slogan, “Building better worlds”, as a reminder that the quest for better virtual worlds in itself may very well become perverted if it turns, again, into a threat to my real life.

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SEO Basics for the WoW Blogger

Following Yashima’s mishap with one of the scumbag gold-selling splogs we all hate, it struck me that some WoW Bloggers may have little notions on how to improve their search engine visibility.

This post will be focused on self-hosted WordPress blogs, but some elements may be applicable to other platforms as well.

First, what is SEO, and why would your WoW blog want it?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, a field of activity which covers an innumerable amount of methods to promote a website. These methods are in general roughly divided into so called white hat activities, considered fully legit by search engines, and black hat, which if caught will get your site blacklisted. While most search engines have different rules of what is black hat and what not, as a very rough rule of fist, anything which is devised to deceive a search engine or artificially inflate your search results is to be considered off-limits.

The purpose of starting to apply some SEO techniques is to boost your search engine traffic and ensure all the wonderful, smart, funny, witty, insightful posts you write are positioned properly.

A word of warning before we begin, though. No search engine has published how their indexing mechanisms work exactly, nor how they rate content internally.  As a consequence, the field of SEO theory has always been full of exploratory techniques which would turn out, later on, to be totally worthless. Fortunately, we’re going to focus on the basics and these are quite straightforward.

As to the question of whether it’s worth it, well, in the grand scheme of things Altitis is a very small blog. Before Wrath (and due to a low posting volume), my readership was in average below 150 visits a day. If you were to Google last Friday (when I started writing this post) and type “death knight macros” as the search term, though, I was sitting in 4th position with my post about the ghoul leap suppression. Ahead of scores of sites focused on macros, ahead of wowwiki, dedicated DK sites, and even the o-bards.

Since Wrath was released, my readership sits between 400 and 600 visits a day, without ever getting linked by the big names (EJ or WoWInsider). All of the additional visits come from search engines, mostly Google.

Worth it? Well, I don’t have advertisements on the site, but I still like the fact that my posts are being read, so I’d say yes, it’s definitely worth it for me.

Setting Up

First thing first. Before anything else, make sure your blog is actually allowing search engines. On WordPress, it’s under Settings -> Privacy. Blogger definitely has that setting as well, under Settings->Basic->Let Search Engines find your blog. Others? You tell me :)

Second, make sure your blog is known and recognized by Google. Blogger users have a slight advantage over others here as they will be included in some capacity even if they do nothing beyond changing the privacy settings. Nonetheless, start by visiting Google Webmaster Central and follow the Submit your content to Google procedure. Next, sign in to webmaster tools, and authenticate your site. Webmaster tools aren’t really good for a lot of things as much of the information is stale, inaccurate or way too plentiful to be of any practical use, but the diagnostics page can point out a couple of interesting elements to check and fix. Among these, keywords and meta descriptions.

For WordPress users, a good way to improve drastically the context of your posts – that is, providing some additional information to search engines to help them catalog your posts, or in other words, to give them some clues what your post is about, is to grab the plug-in All-in-One-SEO Pack.

The reason you want to use and configure this plugin is simple, it gives you a simple and handy way to edit meta keywords and descriptions for all your posts, which will appear as an additional set of fields in your edit post page. The settings are pretty self-explanatory, but basically you will want to fill in some generic recurring elements (like “world of warcraft” for the home keywords”) in there at the very least, for the general context of what you’re writing about.

In the post editor page, under the All in One SEO Pack menu you will have an opportunity to enter some specific keywords and a short description of what the page is about. Note that while not all search engines will use these, they are better filled in than left out. Descriptions should ideally have between 80 and 160 characters (more might get ignored, less are flagged as “short descs” by Google) and should be unique for each post.

Next, a very important element, the post slug, or permalinks – in short the url under which an individual post can be reached. Blogger users have little in terms of options here but in your Settings->Archive Settings make sure you have Enable Post Pages active. This is important so that the search engines index each post individually instead of just an ever-changing front-page where whatever search results fall off every 10 posts or so.

For WordPress users, you have many different choices in how to configure permalinks, under Settings->Permalinks. There are many schools of thought about permalinks, but one of the most basic one is to make sure these actually add to search visibility. That is, your permalink should be explicit and probably reflect your post title. The default setting in WordPress (both self-hosted and on WordPress.com) is to a simple numerical value. This is bad, as the numbers not only aren’t telling any story at all, but if for whatever reason you migrate your database the posts may get re-numbered, and all search results pointing to any specific posts will end up in a wrong place. You could further improve visibility by making the permalink text a rephrased version of your post title. For the rest, there are divergent opinions of what else should be part of the permalinks – just the post’s name, or the full date, just the month or just the year. The majority opinion seems to be the shorter the better (so no dates at all or just the year), but full dates are quite popular on some SEO trendsetters’ own blogs as well. As long as the permalinks are explicit, you’d probably have to work at Google to know which of the other options are best.

Last but not least, to improve the search engine’s knowledge of your blog’s content, you will want to generate a sitemap. The best way to do that is to use the Google XML Sitemap plugin. Once you create your sitemap, make sure to go back to Webmaster Central and link to the sitemap from here. As you will see in the plugin’s settings, you would be well advised at that stage to also follow through with the other search engines, use their own webmaster tools and make sure the sitemaps are registered there as well.

Duplicate Content? We don’t need no duplicate content!

In general and due to years of abuse by spammers and black hat SEOs, search engines will penalize duplicated content. The problem here is that WordPress in particular is very generous in the way people can access an individual post: by its permalink, by its category (../category/MyCategoryname/permalink)  and by its tags (../tag/MyTagName/permalink). A post in two categories will therefore appear in Google’s index at least thrice: by it’s own normal permalink, Category 1 and Category 2. This is bad because Google is said to penalize all results on the theory that it may actually be spam posted all over the web. If you use tags, you can add one additional individual result per tag, which will rapidly dilute the value of your post the more tags you’re using. Last but not least, WordPress 2.7 has added comment pagination, which means you may end up with your normal post’s permalink duplicated with permalink/comment-page-#/ by search engines. Not good.

The best way to fix that is twofold: For most search engines, noindex directives to categories and tag archives will be honoured. The simplest way to implement that is to use a plugin called Robots Meta, it’s configuration is still pretty straightforward. Google is however pretty bad at honouring noindex and nofollow directives, so for these guys, you’ll want to make sure the following is set in your robots.txt file (create this one at the root of your blog’s path, eg altitis.treehuggers.info):

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /comment-page

This will simply prevent Googlebot, the automated scanning engine, to access all links containing these three elements, and sort the issue.

We’re doing it with Style!

Last but not least, remember the good old html heading tags, <h1> to <h5>? Since the advent of CSS, they have often become underused, but in terms of search visibility, that’s probably a mistake. Headings are important as they give additional context, so do use them properly to provide a clear hierarchy to your content. Again, there are a couple of options available to you, but roughly, you should decide how you will build up your blog’s brand. Is each individual post the key element you want to promote? Make sure your post title is styled with <h1> tags. Is your blog’s name the brand you want to promote? Make your blog name a <h1> tag and your individual posts <h2> tags. Everything else should have a lower heading that these, your posts however should probably not be lower than <h2>.

Content is King

Beyond the above basic technical measures, there are almost as many tricks and methods as there are SEO specialists. Whether to investigate the field further for a hobby WoW blog is worth the time or not is up to each individual blogger, but you can easily get lost in the wealth of additional stuff to do (popular things include link-building and the realtively new but still not proven pagerank sculpting, for instance). That being said, the best way to have a good search visibility remains to simply write quality content matching the purpose of your blog. The better your posts, the more people will read it, comment on it or comment about it. In the end, a trackback from your blogging peers will remain a high-value testimonial to the quality, relevance, importance or wittiness of your writings, and no amount of additional SEO techniques can replace that.

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Gravatars (Finally) Enabled, and Plugging the NOFF Plugin

I finally managed to take the time and add Gravatar support to Altitis. So if you want to have an image appear next to your name when you comment, hope over to gravatar.com, sign up and add a little picture of your choice. Note that this is tied to the e-mail addy you use when commenting.

On a related matter, let me briefly talk about the NoFollowFree Plugin, which I’m using here as well.

The No Follow attribute is basically a switch you can assign to hyperlinks which was initially added to help combat comment spam. What it does, in practice, is prevent Google and MSN from indexing any URLs added in comment sections.

This is pretty much a given on many blogging platforms nowadays – default behaviour on WordPress for instance, fixed setting on Blogger. But the thing is, keeping a discussion alive between several blogs is part of what makes up a blogging conversation, at least in my eyes. Using a blanket No Follow goes against this philosophy – if you comment and refer to your blog, your blog forms a generic background to your comment, the broader context of the conversation. And doubly so, of course, when you link to a more elaborate answer from a comment.

No Follow is a crutch which actually breaks conversation in terms of search engine indexation (not to mention that Yahoo and Ask don’t honour it anyway, and in practice Google follows it but doesn’t count the link), and there are other, better tools to combat spam available anyway.

I’ve implemented the NoFollowFree Plugin about a month ago. What it does is selectively remove the No Follow attribute from commenters based on a certain set of rules, among which a threshold on the amount of comments you posted. What threshold? This is something I’m not telling. Just do know that commenting will now tie your blog into the conversation in terms of search engine management for the returning visitors.

What effect did adding this plugin have? Well, user registrations have increased massively since I activated the plugin, since there’s an option to set a different threshold for registered users. Most of them appeared bogus, though, so I’ve closed site registrations and kicked them. If you were a legitimate (and human) reader, my apologies. If you have a technically valid reason to be a registered user on Altitis, drop me a mail.

My Akismet stats have exploded, but at the same time, Patch 2.4 brought several thousand visitors looking for damage meter information to the blog, so there might be a relation between both. At any rate, there has been one single spam which made it through the filters since I activated the plugin. Which means the experience is mature enough for me to keep it alive, and talk about it. And that’s now a done thing.

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Blogosphere Highlights

At one point in time, my blogroll started to become so laden that I simply stopped advertising any additions and entered silent mode.

Still, from time to time, it’s definitely worth going back to some of these blogs and reviewing what they provide.

So without further ado and in no particular order:

Alts Ahoy! is brand new and on the surface definitely goes against my long-held policy of only adding blogs with at least 20 posts and 2 months of age, simply because I want to link to writers with staying power. As it happens, though, Alts Ahoy! is the new blogging venture of Nasirah, who previously ran A Tale of Two Druids. Changing focus from a previously main class to other horizons? That’s damn close to what Altitis was about in the first place. I’m definitely looking forward to Nasirah’s retelling of the part of the game we tend to look over (and forget) after a while spent at level 70.

Of Light and Fury does look new. In practice, though, it’s the reincarnation of Zerei’s Blood Paladin, who underwent a name change and then moved from Blogger to WordPress.com within the past week. Zerei, one of the first blogging paladins to link Altitis in its early days, recently realized that his interests have broadened way beyond all things Healadin and decided to embrace his altitis in full. No matter the class he really writes about, though, Zerei does it in a clear and thorough manner, never afraid to delve into the maths where needed without actually becoming boring like a statistician.

Adventures in Azeroth is a resource only a druid noob like me could leave off the blogroll for as long as I did. Amanna is one of the many well-written, high quality druid resources, also well knows for in-depth druid gearing and gemming advice.

Altosis is written by Skindancer, a poor sap who suffers from the acute version of Altitis. In his typical “Hello World!” post, he positioned his blog like this:

I have lots of alts. In fact, I have leveled every class to the endgame (…). So, I must be crazy. “-osis” is a medical suffix tacked onto to something to indicate a condition, disease, or abnormal process. Hence, I arrived at Altosis. This is not to be confused with altitis, mind you. That would mean that I had an inflammation or irritation of my alts, like this poor soul on Altitis. Maybe there is an ointment for that.

There is none. Skindancer however combines his medical (mental?) condition with being an active raider, though, which means there’s even less chance of a cure for him. That being said, Altosis is proficient in almost all end-game classes and has a lot of techniques to share, and that blog is usually a lot less cluttered with the kind of social fluff you’ll find here.

Apathy, Inc is written by Fate, and he provides a well-written and sometimes deliciously cynical perspective on the game in general. Fate writes as a raider first and foremost, but fortunately for us as one of these who is fully aware that WoW is a vast universe appealing to a very broad audience. If you’re seeking a hardcore raider frothing and dribbling in outrage about the upcoming doom which will kill the game the very moment another MMOG releases because evil Blizzard is making the game more casual-friendly, you’ll have to keep searching. If you want to read sane commentary by a mature poster, Apathy, Inc is definitely a place to add to your feed reader.

And this pretty much concludes the “A” section of the more recently added but unadvertised blogs on my roll. Since my limited English vocabulary only allows for a limited amount of words like “insightful”, “perspective”, “view” and “voice” per post, the rest will follow some other day. So my apologies to all the other blogs I mean to mention some time, but I totally ran out of words. Someone get me a thesaurus, or something.

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Blogging: A few Pointers on Copyrights

This post can also be found on Blog Azeroth.

You blog, you write, and therefore you produce Intellectual Property, which is copyrighted. How does it work in practice? Let’s find out.

Mandatory Disclaimer
I am not a lawyer. This post cannot constitute valid legal advice under any jurisdiction and doesn’t pretend to. I urge you to contact a lawyer licensed to practice in whatever jurisdiction is relevant to you if you are looking for said valid legal advice.

That being disclaimed, and without further ado, here are the few promised pointers:

1. Copyright Fundamentals

Intellectual Property is regulated by the Berne Copyright Convention, an international treaty which almost all countries have signed. The convention defines that a creative work is copyrighted by default the moment it is published unless explicitly stated otherwise.

This means, concretely, that you don’t have to register your blog or even every single post for it to be protected by international copyright laws – the content is yours by default.
Also note that this right is yours even if there is no copyright notice included. A notice simply serves to reinforce and remind everyone, including people unaware that any work is protected unless otherwise specified, that it is yours.
The correct and internationally recognized form for a notice is:
Copyright [dates] by [author / owner]

If you are blogging for a third party and being paid for that, the basic assumption is that what you write for that 3rd party is considered as Work-For-Hire, and that they, not you, are the copyright holder. Concretely, if you netted yourself a contract with WoWInsider or Curse.com, unless something different has been specified in written between you and them, what you write for their sites is their ownership, not yours.
Conversely, if you have a guest blogger writing on your site for free, unless otherwise specified, whatever the guest writes is his intellectual property. It is also assumed that since the guest publishes on your site, that you retain an implicit license to use the material. Same assumption is also valid for the comments you get.

2. A Copyright is no Trademark

When someone (typically a corporation) is involved in a trademark dispute, whether they have taken action on other prior trademark violations or let it slide has a big impact on their case. Copyright is different. You could let 100 of copyright violations slide and still have the exact same case if you were to act upon the 101st. Or the 24th even if you have been letting it slide for years.

3. Fair Use

Although certain big media organizations have done their utmost best to limit or even fully eliminate Fair Use in recent years, the right still exists and allows someone to reuse excerpts from work copyrighted by third-parties without requesting explicit rights for the purpose of quoting it, exposing a point or teaching about it, or satyre. You can’t repost something in its entirety, add one line, and claim fair use, though. It is normally meant for small portions of a copyrighted work, not the work in its entirety.

4. Usage Rights

Beyond Fair Use, even a non-commercial reproduction of someone else’s work without the author’s consent is a copyright violation. There is two ways you as an author will typically grant permission:

  • Individual, per case basis
  • Wholesale licensing

Individual, per case basis is simple. People wanting to use your material have to ask you permission individually, and you grant them whatever rights are appropriate.

Wholesale Licensing simply implies declaring the rules under which anyone can reuse your intellectual property.

For instance, Blizzard Entertainment grants their players an unlimited non-commercial right to use their name and their screenshots, you should however include the text below somewhere on your blog if you do more than discuss about the game (that is, use material coming from WoW directly):

World of Warcraft™ and Blizzard Entertainment® are all trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment in the United States and/or other countries. These terms and all related materials, logos, and images are copyright © Blizzard Entertainment. This site is in no way associated with Blizzard Entertainment®

That is an example of wholesale licensing.

There are other means to do wholesale licensing. The simplest way is to explicitly state on your blog what rights you grant third parties under what condition. The most practical is re-using existing licenses. For blogging, my own recommendation is that you investigate the Creative Commons licenses, as these aren’t just well suited for our purpose but also implemented in several complementary tools, widgets and plugins. Feedburner for instance can add your Creative Commons license to your syndication feed, and that’s just one among many examples.

5. Derivative Works

If you expand significantly upon the work of someone else, you will typically retain the rights to your own intellectual property, assuming of course that the original author has granted you permission to create such a derivative work in the first place. This is probably less directly applicable to blogging, it would mainly focus on, eg, AddOns you would be recoding or something. But WoW-comics or machinima ought to qualify as derivative works.

6. Defending your Rights

This is where it becomes tougher, because a lot of it will depend on where a copyright violator resides.
There are however a certain amount of steps and measures you can take no matter how without having to enter the court system right off the bat.
It is customary to first send a firm but professional communication to the offender, informing him that he is in violation of your copyright and that you demand the content to be removed. If it is someone who simply isn’t aware that there are rights attached to anything published on the web, he will usually say sorry and comply, or try to work out a way to reuse your material legally. If it’s a scrapper, he’ll probably ignore it, or just reply “hahah, whatcha gonna do about it?”
In that case, your next resort is to take it up with his host. Send the host a takedown notice where you declare you are the owner of said piece of intellectual property, and that such and such, hosted by their services, is in violation, and ask for their assistance to uphold your rights.
If the host is based in the US or an US corporation (hint, Blogger, hint), you can issue a formal DMCA takedown notice instead.
If this still doesn’t help, your last resort before court action is to write the upstream provider. Finding this one is a bit of work out of scope of this short overview, just know that your chances are a lot slimmer, as since they aren’t hosting the offending material themselves, you will have to ask for their kind assistance (and most of the time get a “sorry, we can’t help you here”).

At any rate, though, you can fully expect the major blogging platforms to honour your takedown requests after some basic delay, and at present, this is our first and best defense.

This concludes this short and limited primer. For further reading,  I recommend starting with Lorelle’s excellent posts on the matter, the one I just linked will lead you through a lot more material.

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Gold Spam in the Blogger part of the WoW Blogosphere

Within 24 hours, several of our blogging peers have reported being hit by gold ads in their comments, and have therefore tightened the requirements for commenting.

Unfortunately, where Gmail shines with its rather strong antispam mechanisms, Blogger currently has little to offer in terms of automation.

For those wondering how things are on WordPress, here is how it works:

  • WordPress can do either full manual moderation or use some basic filtering rules which will place the comments running against those in a moderation queue (filtering by words and by amount of hyperlinks)
  • Various plugins can provide more and smarter antispam filtering, the most common one being Akismet (which works well for me).

Using Akismet, at the time of this writing 122 spams have been held for review, and so far I haven’t had a single false positive yet. Nothing else has been sent up to moderation so far (though Akismet probably catches them all anyway). Part of the moderation duties is simply logging onto my dashboard once a day, clicking the Akismet queue, browsing through the spam and hitting “delete all”.

Altitis still has a moderate readership, though, so the workload associated to comment spam fighting remains very light. This has also allowed me to leave comments unhindered by word verification methods so far. If I were to implement those, there’s a bunch of plugins available to do the job here too.

And that’s pretty much the exact shade of green on my patch of grass.

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Catching up

This morning my Technorati rank finally caught up with the one on my old blogspot blog before moving to self-hosted WordPress. Technorati had some technical issues for a couple of weeks which didn’t help either, and while I’m not too fussed about the Authority figures per se, the site used to be quite helpful in tracking down other blogs linking to me.

This morning most of it appears to be sorted, let’s cross fingers that it stays that way – technorati reactions is definitely a useful tool for blogging.

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From Blogger to WordPress: One Gotcha

Reviewing where I stand after the initial awe of discovery has died down, there’s one thing I’ve missed when I moved from Blogger: images.

Indeed, the importing process will get all your posts and comments off blogger without issues, but it won’t copy over the images you inserted in your original blog posts. All screenshots will remain hosted on blogger, which will not only slow down any reader looking up older posts of yours, but also consume unnecessary bandwidth and resources from a service which you don’t use any more.

Of course you could just not care, but beyond the experience offered to your own readers, being a good Net citizen in regards to free services will also help ensuring these services remain free for people coming after you.  And may avoid, in the long term, that people see the dreaded red cross should blogger decide some day that it won’t host images for a different blog platform.

So my own posting rythm may slow down a bit over the coming days while I fix my own mess and import my old pictures cleanly into the new Altitis.

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Blast it, Blogger! Get your posting dates in order!

Dear blog host,

When I start writing a post and then leave it as a draft for a day or two, post other stuff in the meantime, then re-edit my draft and finally publish it, by default, the post’s timestamp should match the publishing time, not the draft creation’s time.

It is extremely irritating to view your blog after publishing and spend several seconds wondering where your post has gone until you realize that this is a blogger quirk. I believe it to be either an oversight or a tiny design decision which hasn’t been thought through. But by default, drafting doesn’t mean squat. What’s important is publishing.

Please make it happen.

Thanks in advance,
An otherwise happy user.

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World of Warcraft™ and Blizzard Entertainment® are all trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment in the United States and/or other countries. These terms and all related materials, logos, and images are copyright © Blizzard Entertainment. This site is in no way associated with Blizzard Entertainment®