Google Blogoscoped

Sunday, May 9, 2004

Blogger Relaunch

After a two-hour maintenance break yesterday, Blogger.com is showing its completely redesigned face today:

"We've splashed around some bright colors and rounded the corners a bit. Which is good for us because we kept hitting our shins on the corners of the logo here in the office (...) We've got new fonts, new layouts, new illustrations, and some fun icons and buttons to help you get around. But the coolest thing about our new designs is that they are 100% geek-ified. They are all CSS based, standards compliant, and usability tested."
– Biz Stone, The Great Blogger Relaunch (Blogger.com), May 03, 2004

Though the XHTML1 Strict the document-type pretends to be does not validate at the W3C, this is about the only major site which tries to go for XHTML1 Strict in the first place. The "Strict" flavor of HTML means separation of content and layout and leaner code*. All in all Blogger.com went away from a heavily frame-based approach to an easier, more streamlined and faster page-by-page one.

The relaunch includes not only design and code changes, it changes parts of how Blogger.com works. There are added features in the Settings; you can now upload your photo and share your profile, which gives Blogger.com a little more of a community feeling.

*At least in theory, as there are pitfalls into code-bloat even in Strict, and Blogger.com is falling for some of them – like the use of inline-styles, or layout-based class-names like "small", which shows a Non-Strict mindset.

One of the bigger new features for bloggers include the ability to add comments, even if you host your site on your own server.

New URLs

URLs now changed to the friendlier format http://www.example.com/2004/05/my-title.html. You must choose this format in order to add the comment feature if you plug-in Blogger to your own server. The only problem is that this updated format is not compatible with the old, which means old permalinks point to the wrong place. As far as I know there is also no way to automate redirects. The best I came up with is the following Apache server .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^archive/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_index.html  $1/$2/

However above would not be able to fully transform old into new:

Old: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2004_5_10_index.html#1234
New: http://blog.outer-court.com/2004/05/blogger-relaunch.html

More on the redesign at Stopdesign: The New Blogger

Win Your Gmail

On Mother’s Day, Google is giving out yet another invitation to Gmail users. If you want a Gmail account be the first to answer the following question:

Which two-word search phrase did I enter to get the Google Images result page shown?

Note that I turned off Safe Search and used http://images.google.com. Send a single answer to blog@outer-court.com with “Gmail-Invitation-II” in the subject. Please include your full name within the email. Good luck!

The answer has been solved first by Kaloyan, who won the Gmail account. Congratulations and sorry to all others who found the right answer: monkey business.

Mother’s Day Logo

Today’s Google.de logo is celebrating “Muttertag” (Mother’s Day, that is).

Videoblogging

“A vog is a video blog where video in a blog must be more than video in a blog.”
– Adrian Miles, Vogma: A Manifesto

A vog, or vlog, or vidlog, or video blog (the big brother of the phlog*): if you like to complain about what’s on TV, how about creating your own TV station, broadcasting worldwide?

After realizing the technical issues are easily solved – grab a digital camera, point it at something, and connect it to USB, or send it away from your moblogging device, you might also have editing software like Windows Media maker right on your PC – the first question to ask is how well does what you blog about now translate to video format. And:

Metavlogging [WMV]

* I find Phlogs, or photo weblogs, are already working quite well. But mostly I do not read personal journals, and pointing your camera at something is always personal – I for one could not point my camera at anything that is Google, because it is not a subject I’m personally (physically) close to in the Real World. Google first and foremost is an idea, a concept, metaphysics.
One thing interesting about what I see at Phlogs.net is people point to what is special to them – but if someone living on the other side of the globe would just point the camera at the most mundane things, it would be special to me (a sort of virtual tourism).

Proogle

Proogle is supposed to be a Google with PageRank being shown, but unfortunately it didn’t work for me.

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