phydeaux3

Weasel Marten or Mink

2011-06-10T22:26:00.001-05:00

Great headlines and story from Washington State.

Man with dead weasel-like creature accused of Hoquiam assault

The victim asked, "Why are you carrying a weasel?" Police said the attacker said, "It's not a weasel, it's a martin," then punched him in the nose and fled.

He said he had found the martin dead near Hoquiam, but police don't know why he carried it with him. A martin is a member of the weasel family.

Thankfully, the local press didn't stop there and updated the story with urgent information.

Hoquiam 'weasel' assault case involved mink, not marten

Now, Hoquiam Police Chief Jeff Myers tells KXRO the animal actually was a mink. He says martens haven't been seen in the Grays Harbor area for 50 years.

I'm glad that's solved.

Keep Me Turning

2011-05-17T02:40:00.000-05:00

"Keep Me Turning" from the album Rough Mix by Pete Townshend and Ronnie Lane.

Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise

2010-09-11T21:03:00.000-05:00

Blogger, Robots.txt, Canonical URLs, Feeds - Let's get some Synergy

2009-02-21T21:27:00.004-06:00

A little rant where I ask Blogger to make a slight change. The story begins...

Several months back, Blogger changed the way they did comments somewhat. Short version is they broke up post pages that receive many comments (200+). This is fine. In doing so, they also had to add some query parameters to comment permalinks so they could work with the new pagination. Again, nothing wrong with that.

But sometimes googlebot gets confused with a page having multiple urls. These are canonical issues. ( Admission - I have trouble both spelling and saying canonical, but I digress). This hit our favorite blog phydeaux3 when I noticed suddenly last December hits from Google had dropped off, to almost nothing. What I found when I started looking into it was it seemed Google was now suddenly grabbing tons of these comment permalink urls and giving them prominence over what should be the real url. Example.

Instead of having this url in the Google index
phydeaux3.blogspot.com/2006/09/code-for-beta-blogger-label-cloud.html
Which is the proper url, which has hundreds of links pointing at it, Google was indexing urls like this instead
phydeaux3.blogspot.com/2006/09/code-for-beta-blogger-label-
cloud.html?showComment=1221076440000
Which is just a link to a particular comment. But since that url doesn't having any links to it (as it shouldn't) it doesn't rise to the top of any searches like the real url would.

In a perfect world, Google usually knows which is the better url, and probably most of the time it does things correctly. But for whatever reason Google was mucking it up the same way on many of my posts that used to get search hits.

I should say here that ultimately I don't give a shit. Hell it took me a month to even notice as I'm not doing a lot of posting. I don't really care too much whether I get hits or not and I figure it will eventually work itself out. But it's a problem with such an easy solution.

Now my good pal, Notorious I.M.P, pointed out to me this recent post from Google Webmaster Central talking about a new feature that allows you to fix (supposedly) canonical issues like this by adding a "hint" to google with a <link> tag. Well that's fine. If'n it works.

If you wanted to try it for Blogger you would add something like this to the head of your template.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<link expr:href='data:blog.url' rel='canonical'/>
</b:if>

I've just tried that so I don't know if it actually works or not, but it outputs things the way the Webmasters Tools blog says to.

But for Blogger, we are really fighting a battle that could have a better solution. Only we users can't do it. It would have to be done at Blogger. A better solutions would be to add a few lines to the robots.txt file to take into account these canonical urls that the comment pagination changed caused. Blogger already blocks urls with "search" in the path which correctly blocks redundant label/search pages. But a few tweaks would help out also. Something along the lines of adding these two lines to the robots.txt

Disallow: /feeds/comments
Disallow: /*?showComment*

Now if I have that right (which I may not) that would 1) Block comments feeds from being indexed. That's where I believe the comment pagination links are being picked up from mainly, and besides comments feeds really don't need to be indexed do they? 2). Would block any urls with ?showComment in them which would block any of the comment permalinks if they got picked up somewhere else.

Or maybe there is a better way of doing it. Or they could do nothing. I'm just ranting.

Random Post Widget Fix

2008-09-24T23:41:00.003-05:00

Ok, following up on the recent breakage of the Random Post widget, I've updated the instructions page with the new code that should fix everything. If you need it, then go to the Widgets Instruction page and you can get the new works.

If you installed the one-click widget then all you need to do is delete the old one, and reinstall from the updated instructions page.

If you used the manual code, then you just need to replace the old script code in your template with the updated code. (Note - if you are an FTP blog make sure you redo the first line with your Blog ID - only FTP blogs need to do that.)

Hopefully this should resolve all issues. Thanks for shopping at phydeaux3 and have a nice day.

Archive Calendar Fix

2008-09-23T22:10:00.002-05:00

Ok, following up on my previous post about problems with the Archive Calendar, I've made the changes in the calendar script so it works correctly again. I've updated the installation page with those changes so any future installs should work correctly. Now for anyone that's already been using it - here's the easiest way to get it working again. You'll probably need to just recopy/paste the script portion only so you can get the correct version. There are only a few lines changed, but trying to direct you to only those lines would be a real pain. You do NOT have to redo everything - just the script portion. So. Here's the plan.

Fire up Blogger and goto your Layouts tab, then to the Edit HTML link.

Make a BACKUP of your current template in case a mistake is made so you can revert back to it.

Scroll down a bit and you'll find the script section that begins !-- Blogger Archive Calendar -- and ends with !-- End Blogger Archive Calendar --

Go directly to Step #2 of the Archive Installation and copy that section and use it to replace the previous code.

Save the changes and that should do it (you may have to clear your browsers cache afterward when you check your blog to make sure it's getting the updated code). It's just one simple copy/replace - if you made it through the initial install then this should be easy enough.

Calendar / Random Post Busted

2008-09-23T20:56:00.003-05:00

Lesson learned (as if it shouldn't have been learned already). NEVER assume that ANYTHING will remain constant.

Unfortunately due to my lack of foresight, and Blogger making small changes in their feeds, the Blogger Archive Calendar and the Random Post Widget are slightly broken. For the calendar, the links to each post underneath the calendar are broken and instead will either go to a comment feed or the comment form. Same problem with the Random Post widget.

In a nutshell, the Blogger feeds that these work off of have changed the order in which they list the url that's needed. It's still there, just not where the script expects it. I would like to totally blame Blogger, but really I should have written the script to expect possible order changes. It's really not difficult. I just didn't think of it at the time. Meh. Freakin' frackin' meh.

So for anyone wondering what to do - I guess I'm going to have to make the changes for those scripts to work correctly. Then tell you how best to update it on your side. I'm not sure if it will be a few hours, or a few days before I can get around to it. But I will and give an update.

Also seemingly unrelated, but still broken, anyone using the Automatic List of Labels is broken also, but I can't do anything about it. Blogger is returning an error when the feed is requested - if you try the feed url that you made for the script to use it's returning an error code bX-hdm1cy. Such as http://www.blogger.com/feeds/02129299419606882574/blogs/20460175. As long as that feed is still giving an error, it's Blogger's issue and I can't do a thing about it.

I hate the intertubes.

Scheduled Posts

2008-02-15T17:00:00.001-06:00

Testing out Blogger in Drafts scheduled post feature. If you are reading this, then it must have worked.

OpenID for Everyone - Plus a Little Niggle

2007-12-14T04:03:00.000-06:00

Late last night the Buzz announced that OpenID commenting has been pushed out of Blogger in Draft and now is available to everyone. You can see my previous post on using OpenID on Blogger, with tips on how to delegate any url you want to use or also the Buzz recommends Sam Ruby's article on OpenID delegation article as well.

One of the additional changes pushed out with this, is now on your blog posts when the comments are displayed an icon will appear next to the author name (if it includes a url) to denote whether it is a Blogger account, OpenID authenticated, or for older comments that have a url but aren't authenticated an "anonymous" icon. Most layout enabled templates should get these updates automatically, but if you have a highly customized post widget you may not. I had to tweak mine for instance using the new data:comment.authorClass data tag it uses. I may cover how to do that as well for those that need to, but it's late (or too early).

One bugaboo I've noticed is for those using the old style Classic Templates. Here's an example from the great A Consuming Experience

Problem is on the classic templates, they are currently writing out the icons source with a relative path instead of the complete path to the icon image on Blogger, so the icons fail to load and only show their alt text. We presume that will get ironed out.

Update The niggle now has it's own Known Issue for the icons on Classic Templates. Update Later today, it's now marked as fixed. Quick turnaround.

Firefox 2.0.0.11 Quick Release

2007-12-01T19:06:00.001-06:00

Anybody else wonder why the release of Firefox 2.0.0.11 came so quickly after version 2.0.0.10 was released? John Resig (JavaScript Evangelist for the Mozilla Corporation, Creator of Jquery) writes a blog post to explain why. Summary, they fucked up but fixed it quickly.

Why Firefox 2.0.0.11 Happened So Fast

Happenings

2007-11-23T18:14:00.000-06:00

Just to point out a few things happening elsewhere.

After over a year of inactivity, the Blogger Developers Blog is back with some (few) signs of life.

After not quite so long but still some time Aditya the "Young Gun" is back at blogging. At least until school starts again. Already he's up to something.

Zo smacks Scoble around just for the fun of it.

And Improbulus finds a solution for the dreaded Windows - no disk error message, along with helpful info for United Kingdom residents regarding credit card purchases.

Blogger, Feedburner, Sitemaps and Submitting All Your Posts

2007-10-27T00:31:00.000-05:00

Blogger users who wanted to submit a sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools have always had some disadvantages. Since we can't publish a real sitemap to the domain we are using we had to settle for only submitting a partial sitemap by using our default site feeds (which only contain the last 25 posts). Add to that confusion when Blogger introduced Feed Redirection (to FeedBurner or others) made things even trickier, as for awhile if you chose the feed redirection option, then you couldn't submit a sitemap. Fortunately Blogger came up with a super secret option (so secret they never bothered to tell anyone) that fixes the problem for submitting a sitemap when feed direction is enabled ( hat tip to Amit for letting their secret out). And in the same step opened up a way to submit all your posts in a sitemap, instead of just the last 25.

So, starting at the beginning. To submit a Blogspot hosted blogs feed as a sitemap to GWT, you have to use the root-level feed that Blogger provides.

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
http://yourblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Of course change yourblog to your blog name, or using your custom domain. Which one you choose doesn't matter really, one is Atom and one is RSS format. Either will work.

Taking care of the redirect

If you are using the redirect option on your feed, you can add a query parameter to stop the redirect on your feed in the format of (I'm only giving the filename paths here)

atom.xml?redirect=false

That will keep the feed from redirecting and is now usable as a sitemap at GWT.

Submitting all your posts

Previously the root-level Blogger feeds did not accept any query parameters, but when Blogger added the redirect=false one, they also seemed to open up those feeds to all the known Blogger query parameters. And that's how you can submit more than the standard 25 posts. First off, figure out how many posts you have (you can do this at the Blogger Edit Post page and selecting only published posts, it will tell you how many total you have). Then you can use the max-results and start-index parameters to expand the number of results obtained, and to submit more than one map if needed. Note: Currently Blogger limits the max-results to 500 entries. This has gone up and down a couple of times so it could change. As of right now the upper limit appears to be 500. But 100 was the limit at one time.

I'm going to use the max limit of 100 in my examples, you can use more if that's what you want. So to get the first set of 100 posts the url I'd submit would be

atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100

Then, if I have more than 100 posts (I currently have 105) I can create another sitemap with the url

/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=101&max-results=100

If you notice, just increase the start-index number by the amount of results you are getting. So the first sitemap started at 1, and returned 100 results, the second sitemap would use the start-index of 101 (100+1). Now that should automatically cover me for the next 95 posts. If I had more than 200 posts, just create another sitemap with the start-index of 201 (you get the idea). GWT will automatically download the sitemaps (usually about once a day) and if I've made a new post it should get added to the mix. Here's a screenshot of my current sitemaps in GWT, which I've been doing this way for almost a month.

Having said all that, two last things. One, I don't really think all of this helps any (if at all). Blogger blogs aren't that difficult to crawl and Google will probably crawl your blog just as well with or without a sitemap of any kind. Two, if you really wanted to create a non-feed sitemap with some sort of sitemap generating tool, then according to this recent post at Google Webmaster Central Blog, you could upload a sitemap for blogspot through another verified site (like maybe googlepages? I haven't really tried it).

Blogger GData Javascript Client Library

2007-10-19T19:32:00.000-05:00

My last post I pointed out the release of a GData Javascript client library for Google Calendar, and stated it would be more interesting to me when/if it was released for Blogger. It got more interesting today with the announcement on the Google Data APIs blog.

This could bring up some interesting ideas. And some included sample apps show some of what can be done with it. Like CalendBlogger (great name..ahem) which allows you to post entries from your Google Calendar to your blog. Or even better, blog.gears which is a Google Gears powered offline app for Blogger. Or blog.press, which is the same as blog.gears only without the offline capabilites.

Of course these are just sample apps to get people motivated, but gives a nice idea of what can be done. Should be interesting to see what people come up with.

GData Javascript Library

2007-09-20T22:14:00.000-05:00

An interesting announcement on the Google Data API blog yesterday, the launch of a GData JavaScript Client Library for Google Calendar.

Google has several client libraries for GData, and up till now you could use javascript on the feeds but in read-only mode. With this release for Calendar, you can interact completely with Calendar via client-side scripting, including authorization. This could open up some interesting possibilities.

Unfortunately it's limited to Calendar only right now, and Calendar doesn't interest me that much. I have no where to be. But if they add the Javascript client library to other services, say Blogger and Picasa Web Albums, well then you might have a little something something.

YouTube Goes GDATA

2007-08-29T03:15:00.000-05:00

YouTube has now started their announced plans to move their API to Google's GDATA API protocols, and have now released it in read only mode. So another Google product joins the GDATA family. The YouTube Developers Guide is also up.

One of the things I like is with the move it also comes in JSON flavors like many of the other GDATA API's. One thing I don't like, is there have been a ton of Video Splogs recently already on Blogger (hundreds of splogs from the same people, all updating all day with different videos from the old YouTube API), and this just makes their job somewhat easier. But then again, they don't seem to need any help. I'm just being cynical.

So to stay positive, figured I'd kill a few minutes and use the YouTube API to created a quick showing of videos...and since Imp lurves kitten videos so much, let's make it kittens only. I was too lazy to make them embedded flash (hey it's late), so they are just thumbnail images linked to their video page. We'll see if'n it works.

Using IE Conditional Comments in Blogger Layouts

2007-07-17T22:53:00.000-05:00

Anyone that has struggled with the Internet Explorer 6 CSS implementation knows it's a pain. IE7 of course is better, but still lacking and IE6 is still around enough as well. One of the helpful methods for getting around IE quirks is to serve only that browser special code, be it CSS or HTML or whatever. That's where IE Conditional Comments come into play. I'm not going into the details of that here, Quirksmode does a fine job of explaining the details, only how to use them in the new Blogger Layouts templates, as there are some unexpected results that threw me for a loop the first time I had to use them in a Layouts template.

Easiest for me to just use my real example as a base.

Several months back I noticed that in IE6 this blog suffered from the dreaded IE Double Floated Margin bug, explained well at Position Is Everything. I had run into this in the past, and knew that conditional comments would be a great way to serve IE6 the CSS to fix it. Position is Everything recommends different ways to fix, but I always found conditional comments easier.

So since what I needed to do was give IE6 only different CSS for the #main-wrapper and #sidebar-wrapper divs (give them half less margin since IE6 would double it anyway), here's the simple way to do it. Add this conditionally commented section in the head after the main stylesheet.

<!--[if IE 6]>
<style type='text/css'>
/* IE double margin float crappola */
#main-wrapper {
  margin-left:7px;
  }
#sidebar-wrapper {
  margin-right:7px;
  }
</style>
<![endif]-->

So that should give my main and sidebar wrappers only 7px instead of 14px of margin, which IE would double to 14px which is what I eventually want. Other browsers will ignore this snippet and treat it just as an HTML comment, and use the regular CSS instead.

But when I tried it, didn't work. Matter of fact it didn't seem to show up in the rendered page. After several rounds of checking my template (it is there) then checking the published page (clearing and draining cache etc) that just wouldn't show up at all. After losing more time than I care to admit on this, finally realized that Blogger Layouts strip out ALL HTML comments when the page is rendered, which I hadn't noticed before.

This isn't so bad by itself. The comments still appear in the template where I suppose they are most needed, but are stripped out when the page is dynamically rendered by Blogger. But these comments need to be in the page, or they won't work. What to do? Just HTML encode the opening and closing brackets of the comments instead.

&lt;!--[if IE 6]&gt;
<style type='text/css'>
/* IE double margin float crappola */
#main-wrapper {
  margin-left:7px;
  }
#sidebar-wrapper {
  margin-right:7px;
  }
</style>
&lt;![endif]--&gt;

In that way, the comments aren't stripped, but the encoded brackets are turned back into brackets when published, and the HTML comments will work. If this helps just one person save a few minutes it's worth it, about drove me batty one night until I saw what was going on.

Blogger Feeds Now Sorted by Published Date

2007-06-26T22:07:00.000-05:00

Since the start of the new version of Blogger in Beta, the default behavior of feeds had changed. Causing aggravation to some. Instead of being ordered by the dates of publish, the feeds were all sorted by the last updated time meaning if an older post was tweaked it would jump to the top of the feed. There was much complaining.

Then last March, Blogger added a new query parameter for those that didn't like that sort behavior. Adding orderby=published to the feed request would sort the feed by published date. There was much rejoicing for those that were aware of this, but the masses still complained.

But tonight in an apparent change of policy on the matter, an announcement on the Blogger Dev Group says all post feeds will now be sorted by published date by default. What does this mean if you had been using the orderby=published query parameter? Nothing really, it's still a valid parameter so it won't hurt to keep using it. It just means it's no longer necessary to add it. Requesting a feed without any orderby parameter will return the feed sorted by published date by default. If you want the feed sorted by updated status, then you'll have to add orderby=updated to the feed request.

And there was much rejoicing.

Blogger: FTP Now Saves Your Blogspot

2007-06-19T04:57:00.000-05:00

Another small change has popped up in the way Blogger appears to work. Small but nice addition in my opinion, and it concerns what happens when you change from blogspot hosting to publishing via FTP to your own server.

Since, well always, if you switched from blogspot to FTP publishing then your blogspot address was released into the wild leaving you to have to "reclaim" it with another blog if you wanted to make sure no one else got it. And this is still what it says in the Blogger Help file on the subject.

But have just noticed this now no longer seems to be the case. When you change to FTP publishing, where you enter in your new FTP Blog URL, a note comes up saying that your blogspot address will redirect to it.

I just tried it out on a test blog, and that indeed is what happens. But keep in mind the redirect isn't a page-for-page redirect (like it is if you switch to using a Custom Domain) but rather it appears anything at the old blogspot address will be redirected to your FTP homepage. Which is better than anything you had before.

Really I think using FTP via Blogger is becoming less and less desirable, as you get much more functionality (and less headaches) using the Custom Domain feature instead, like my pal the inimitable Improbulus has done. But for those who want that, it's a nice little tweak over what happened previously.

Blogger Video Upload Released in Draft

2007-06-13T21:18:00.000-05:00

Well most have probably seen this already by now, but since I've been tracking the Blogger Video upload for the last few months I should note it's finally out...sort of.

Everything is like I had said it would be, except Blogger threw a curve ball by releasing it with another new Blogger feature, Blogger in Draft. It's a separate version that early adopters can login to and play with Blogger features that aren't quite ready for prime time yet and the Video Upload is it's first draft feature. Cool enough, at least I can stop watching the damn video upload now. :-)

The Draft version of Blogger is an interesting idea, and hints that there are more things to come. Also interesting that they left comments open on their Blogger in Draft blog, as that's the first time an official Blogger blog has done that. How long before every idiot with a real or imagined grudge turns the comments into their own soapbox? Anyone taking bets? Note I just noticed a special message on the Draft comment posting form saying off-topic posts will be deleted, so if they keep on top of it maybe it won't turn into a comment fiasco. That could be a job in itself.

Blogger Video Upload Sneak Peak 2

2007-06-13T01:44:00.001-05:00

Just an addendum to the previous sneak peak, another screenshot after the video gets uploaded to Blogger of the placeholder image. It must be getting closer, as the script that actually uploads the video to Google Video is now in place and videos can be uploaded...just waiting for them to turn it on for the public. One other difference from the previous screenshots is they've added a message "Do not upload infringing or obscene material" to the upload dialog. Obscene? Moi?

Placeholder image after Blogger Video Upload

Happy Half a Million

2007-06-01T22:11:00.000-05:00

Want to give a shout out to my friend and sometimes pardner in crime for reaching a pretty cool milestone. Over half a million visitors to the great A Consuming Experience, cream does rise to the top.

Started on October 24, 2004 with a rant about internet banking security , ACE quickly became known for an eclectic mix of posts on technology, blogging,consumer reviews and how-tos, digital rights, and naughty humor, amongst many other subjects.

A couple of her recent posts are great examples of why I like her blog so much. In-depth, well written analysis of interesting subjects with a 'real human' perspective. Like her recent post exploring the question of whether certain factors in racism and prejudice may have a biological component ( Prejudice, discrimination: is racism inborn? ), or her recent review of the BBC iPlayer ( BBC iPlayer: free TV, radio programme downloads on demand - preview ) that was so hot it got the BBC's knickers in a twist!

Well I could go on and on, but better still just go to A Consuming Experience if you haven't before and poke around. You'll most likely find something you like. And congrads on over half a million visitors Imp. Well deserved.

Blogger Custom Domain - Missing Files Host

2007-05-31T17:25:00.000-05:00

Another pretty cool feature has been added by Blogger to their Custom Domains hosting option. It's called the Missing Files Host, and while most won't need this for those that do it's pretty neat.

Now if someone is just starting a blog, but wanting to use the custom domain feature then the missing file host option is not necessary at all. They don't even need to think about it. But here is the hypothetical situation where it will come in handy. Let's say I've been on Blogger for several years, and have been publishing via FTP to my own host during that time for my great make believe blog at http://www.mysnarkyblog.com . Now I want to take advantage of the custom domains feature in Blogger to get all the Blogger goodies, and want to have Blogger handle www.mysnarkyblog.com for me. That's all easy enough.

But in my snarking, I very often use images, which when publishing via FTP all get uploaded to my images upload folder at http://www.mysnarkyblog.com/uploaded-images/. Switching to custom domains breaks these links, as I can't have an uploaded-images folder on my custom domain. And all my old post will still use that url in their image tags. That's the situation where the missing file hosts will come into play. When you turn on custom domains, and specify a missing file host, when Blogger comes across a file it cannot find on your domain, it will then turn to the missing file host to look for it. Here's a screenshot of the hypothetical setup.

So I've setup my custom domain at Blogger to use www.mysnarkyblog.com. Then I've specified www2.mysnarkyblog.com as the missing file host (it could be any subdomain on your domain, you just have to set that up at your host). Now all I have to do to keep all those image paths from breaking, is at my host create the www2 subdomain, then move the uploaded-images folder to that subdomain (keeping the same directory/name structure). So when an old post looks for an image at http://www.mysnarkyblog.com/uploaded-images/snark.jpg, Blogger intially won't be able to find that file as it doesn't exist on the new setup, but the missing file host will tell Blogger to find it at http://www2.mysnarkyblog.com/uploaded-images/snark.jpg and the image will be displayed.

So while new users won't need this option at all, but if you're a long time Blogger FTP user who wants to move to Custom Domains, this could come in very handy.

Blogger Video Uploading Sneak Peek

2007-05-25T04:06:00.000-05:00

Way back last month I made a post entitled Blogger Video Uploading Coming Soon? where I pointed out some scripts that hinted at Blogger handling uploading of videos in the post editor to be coming. Well, it hasn't happened yet. But it must be getting closer.

A bit more digging around, and with the help of Greasemonkey I found and could activate most of the video uploading controls, and it gives a sneak peek at what it will be like and seems to answer the big question of where the videos will be uploaded to. And it's pretty much what one might suspect.

A new video icon appears next to the upload image icon

When the video icon is clicked, a modal type upload box appears on the screen with the suspected options like video title, and a regular browse dialog to pick the file from your computer.

It's at this point I couldn't continue any further, because it appears the actual script that handles the upload isn't in place yet. But it's not too hard to guess what will happen next. The video will get transferred, then the scripts I pointed out in my first post will be used to toggle the display of the video between a thumbnail and it's actual video content depending on the editors display mode.

You may have noticed that you have to agree to a Terms Of Service to use it, and of course this tells us exactly what other Google property is handling the uploaded videos...and the winner is. Google Video!

Not really shocking that. I had originally suspected that maybe Picasa Web Albums would be used, but over the last few weeks had started leaning toward Google Video instead. Some guessed that maybe YouTube would be the host, but apparently not.

It still remains to be seen when they will actually go live with it, but shouldn't be too much longer one would think.

Picasa Web Albums Now with Slideshows

2007-05-17T21:21:00.000-05:00

Well this pretty much sucks and is slick at the same time. As noted on Google Operating System, Picasa Web Albums now offers an easy to use embedded flash slideshow for your albums.

Sound familiar? It does to me anyway. Let's check it out.

From your album page, an option to embed slideshow.

Click and you'll get an easy to use code, with image sizes from small to large in a slick flash interface.

Just copy and paste the code they give you and you got a slideshow. What? No one-click add-to-Blogger button? It must be coming soon. Here's how it turns out.

Ok, it's very slick and cool. If I sound just a bit bitter, it's because it makes my little foray into making a PWA slideshow widget for Blogger obsolete. I was always hesitant to do much on that, as I always assumed that Picasa Web Albums would eventually come out with their own that would be much better than anything an amateur like I could. But still, I just updated the damn thing! Friggin fracking google. Note, my version of it came out in November 2006! So at least I beat the google boys by six months. :-) Gotta hang on to something I do.

Oh, the AJAX Feed API folks have made a javascript version of the slideshow control available for any image feed.

I need a cold towel.

PWA Widget Update 2

2007-05-14T20:09:00.000-05:00

I have made a few tweaks to my Picasa Web Albums widget maker for Blogger, and updated the original posts instructions to reflect those changes. So if you are interested in such things, it's at Picasa Web Albums widget for Blogger.

For the zero people interested, here is what is changed.

Setup - the setup should be a little easier, I think. Instead of having to physically go to Picasa Web Albums, finding the album you want, and then finding the RSS link for it to copy/paste now the widget page automatically does this for you when you input your PWA username. I originally wanted to do this, but at the time the PWA API was not announced nor documented, and so I only could find what I needed by poking around...which made knowing exactly what urls were correct problematic. It should work well enough now.

Ditched one option and numerous CSS tweaks - Normally I don't want to take away options, but I made an exception. I ditched the option to add a Picasa Web Albums logo for several reasons. It got in my way, most people never used it, and if PWA wants to brand it they can make their own. :-) Also did numerous small but frustrating CSS tweaks that no one but me will notice, but hopefully it should work well with most all Blogger templates and the various options it now has.

Horizontal option - It always had an option to display the images in either a slideshow, or a strip of images. But the strip was only a vertical strip. Now if the slideshow is deselected you can choose either horizontal or vertical.

Who needs Flash? Fancy schmancy image fades - My favorite part, and the main reason I did the update. I always wanted the slideshow to do a nicer transition when it switched images, but failed in that in the original so it just toggled the display. Good, but not what I wanted. Finally sat down to try to get an fancier transition, and failed on my own. So I went a searching...found this and it was just what I wanted. Online Image Fades without Flash

Very nice, simple and it works well. I just had to tweak it slightly to make it work with the slideshow, and do a reverse of it so I could also have a fade out option. And it seems to be cross browser too. The image transition effects appear to work in Firefox, IE6 and IE7 (really), and Opera 9. It should also work for KHTML based browsers (Safari, Konqueror) but someone would have to tell me. It's a subtle effect, but I think it looks much nicer.

I suspect this is the last update I'm going to do on this, unless someone finds something horribly wrong. Some people have made some comments/suggestions on the original, and while good ideas not necessarily something I'm going to try to incorporate. The code generated can be used in virtually any webpage (that can use javascript), it's really designed for Blogger, and to be used as a Sampler of your PWA images rather than a 'display-all-your-images-in-any-way-you-want' type of deal. So that's it's focus, to be a quick, easy to setup/install way to display a sampling of your PWA images in your blog (much like a flickr badge). But if you can make it work for slightly different uses, great.

Here is a current sample of the update, showing the fancy transition effects in the slideshow using Dodge Viper photos. The Chrylser Group is now an American car company again, but I guess that's something to talk about on another blog. :-)