Signing a post with a graphic signature

I will try to add a graphic signature to the end of this post. Tell me how you like it by leaving your comments.

Instruction on how to get this image signature is given at Nice image signature for you blog posts

Poll: Should Blogger give make Autosave an option?

Vovici Online Survey Software

To help you vote, here is what I have been reporting to Blogger and pestering them to give us the option to turn Autosave on and off:

1. Doing long edit. Autosave publish unfinised edit which is visible on the web, Not desirable. I would much rather to have option of when to publish the edited post and when to let Blogger autosave for me. Using IE7, Firefox 2.0, Flock

2. Using Flock to prepare long post. Definitely took much more than 10 minutes. Autosave gave sense of complacency and didn't click SAVE NOW. I had IE7, Firefox 2.0, Flock browsers, many tabs, 2 Excel files, a few Notepad files opened. Forced to shut down. When I tried editing that post again, to my UTTER DISMAY, the great part of what I had prepared was not in the autosaved draft.

3. A blogger complained that he likes to edit his old posts, play around with its layout, etc, and if he doesn't like it, he just don't publish. But now because Blogger don't give him the option (my own words) to turn off Autosave, whatever he edited get autosaved and he has lost the original which may be actually what he wants.

4. (not sure about this because that seemed to be a rare occurance) I think Autosave save at intervals of every 10 minutes. After getting Autosaved, the SAVE button is grayed out and become not clickable. If while editing/preparing post, say, 5 minutes after that, he had to do something else if the button is still unclickable, he can't save and leave the post in peace while he go to do other things. It has actually happened to me, but I can't remember how long after the post got autosaved and I don't know how long before the SAVE button become clickable again. Further, as mentioned in 1, the half finished editing post may get published because of autosave. In circumstances like this. I would really like the option to turn off Autosave, the post remain in its unedited form on the web, then come back again to continue the editing.

5. Here is another blogger complaining about autosave:

"I'm even worse off. Autosave triggers several script errors when I
have the blogger editor open on my laptop (I think my laptop has some
usual configurations that screws up the autosave script), so I get
error messages every few seconds, and the times I've tried to recover
something from autosave, it hasn't worked anyway. I really want this
feature to die."

Really hope you vote because if I get enough response, I will try to submit result to Blogger.

Find PageRank of a site

I have a post How to easily get the Google PageRank of your blog, any pages of your blog or any other site. This involves installing the very useful Google toolbar. You can find some information on why I like the Google toolbar in these posts:

Search a website which did not provide for a site search box

FireFox with Google toolbar for your blogging tasks

My preferred way to do spell check

What is FireFox and why you should be using it (the part about Google toolbar is at the bottom of the post)

However, a reader of my blog commented he prefer not to install any toolbar to find the PageRank of a site. Is so, there are many ways you can get the PageRank of a site or any particular page of a site. As I believe the PageRank of a website can be increased by the number of backlinks (inbound links) from other sites to the site, but can be decreased by the number of outgoing links, I shall just give the URL below:

http://www.rankwhere.com/google-page-rank.php

http://www.google-pagerank.net/

http://www.findpagerank.com/
(you can simultaneously get the PageRanks of multiple sites at the above PageRank finder)

http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.ranking.htm
(this one is supposed to give you the Google PageRank as well as the Yahoo PageRank, but when tested, don't seem to work. For example, checking on my main blog

blogger-tricks.blogspot.com

resulted in "blogger-tricks.blogspot.com has a Google PageRank of /10" and nothing else)

Increase link popularity and PageRank for old classic template by removing NOFOLLOW attribute for comments

I have previously posted about Increase link popularity and PageRank by deleting NOFOLLOW attribute for comments for New Blogger. One of my reader asked how about removing the NOFOLLOW attribute for old classic Blogger templates.

For old classic template, sign into blogger.com (Dashboard). Click "Template" in the section for the relevant blog (circled in red below):



This will open the template editor. You will have to look for this block of codes in the template:

<$BlogItemCreate$>
</p>
</BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
<BlogItemBacklinksEnabled>
<a name="links"></a><h4>Links to this post:</h4>
<dl id="comments-block">
<BlogItemBacklinks>
<dt class="comment-title">
<$BlogBacklinkControl$>
<a href="<$BlogBacklinkURL$>" rel="nofollow"><$BlogBacklinkTitle$></a> <$BlogBacklinkDeleteIcon$>
</dt>
<dd class="comment-body"><$BlogBacklinkSnippet$>
<br />
<span class="comment-poster">
<em>posted by <$BlogBacklinkAuthor$> @ <$BlogBacklinkDateTime$></em>
</span>
</dd>
</BlogItemBacklinks>
</dl>
<p class="comment-timestamp"><$BlogItemBacklinkCreate$></p>
</BlogItemBacklinksEnabled>

If you are using FireFox or Internet Explorer, press ctrl+F and type "nofollow" into the "Find" box and you will easily find it:



I have tried this with Flock browser and it didn't work. So this convenient "Find" function may not work with all browsers. If you have problem with that, what you can do is click inside the template editor window and press ctrl+A (or right click on the mouse and chose "Select all") to highlight the whole template. Press ctrl+C (or right-click and select "Copy") to copy the whole template into clipboard. Open a Notepad file, click EDIT > PASTE in the menu bar at the top of Notepad (or right-click and select "Paste") to paste the template into Notepad. Click EDIT > SELECT ALL in the menu bar (or right-click and chose "Select all") to highlight the whole template in Notepad, click EDIT > FIND, then type "nofollow" into the "Find what" box and click "Find next":



The "nofollow" in the template will be located and highlighted. Delete rel="nofollow" from the template. Press ctrl+A (or right-click and chose "Select all") to highlight the whole template in Notepad. Press ctrl+C (or right-click and chose "copy") to copy the edited template. Go back to the Blogger template editor. The whole unedited template in the template editor should still be highlighted. Click the DELETE key and the template editor window will become empty. Paste the edited template into the template editor window, preview, and if everything seems fine, click "Save template".

Host your blog on Virtual Server

If you are using Google Blogger for your blog, they now provide a relatively new feature - custom domain. With custom domain, you can have your own domain for your blog and you have a choice of either letting Blogger host the blog for you or hosting it yourself. Many are of the opinion that having your own domain gives your blog more respect, rather than being a sub-domain of blogspot.com. It is much like using a real office address rather than your home address for your business. Further, when you promote your blog, you are promoting your own domain rather than blogspot.com.

There are advantages and disadvantages of letting Blogger host a blog with custom domain for you and hosting yourself, most of which I will not go into here. If there are any issues not discussed here, leave a comment. The disadvantage of letting Blogger host it for you is that you have no access to their servers. That means there will be some things you can't do. You can add a Google sitemap to your blog, but it is not a real sitemap because they use the RSS feed for the sitemap rather than a real sitemap. It is not the real thing. You also cannot do your own HTML form. These will not be a problem to you if you host the blog on your own.

There is now the possibility of using virtual server, also referred to as shared web hosting service. Shared hosting is cheaper than other types of hosting such as dedicated server hosting. Usually the Virtual host provide takes responsibility for management of servers, installation of server software, security updates, etc. This is probably the most economical option for hosting as many people share the overall cost of server maintenance.

Virtual Servers offers Virtual Server services for businesses, webmasters, bloggers especially serious bloggers and business blogs. You get full root access to to install tools and utilities, blogging tools, community platforms, mail servers, etc. They have various Dedicated Virtual Server Plans. You get an easy Control Panel to manage your site. To get a better idea of what you will get, have a look at their Features and Control Panel Demonstration.

Blogger in Draft: Upload vidoe plus Poll

Sorry for the foreign accent in the video, but at least I beleive it is comprehensible. The video was uploaded via the Upload video icon in the post editor icon. Click on that icon, click BROWSE and locate the video in your computer. Add a title, tick the "I agree to the Upload Terms and Conditions" box and click UPLOAD VIDEO.

To get this new feature, you will have to go to draft.blogger.com and sign in. The short video took longer to upload than I expected. However, I do not know exactly how long because I do multitasking and uses browsers with tabbed browsing like FireFox and went to another tab to do other things.

Other than this new Upload Video direct from Blogger, you can also add a poll by getting into your LAYOUT, click Add a Page Element, chose "Poll", click "Add to blog" and type in your question and the choices. You can elect to allow only single or multiple choices. I have tested it and you can see the poll at the bottom of in the second left sidebar.

Testing publishing with a template

Testing publishing post with template It it works, you will see a banner at the top of the post Hopes this works However, not sure if post will be published or not Because the last time I chose to send message immediately I got the message "Your message has been queued...." I never saw the post in my blog So I don't know if this one will get published I am going to copy everything, and if sending immediately does not work, I will try schedulling to send in a few minutes time

-- If this message had been sent to a list and not as a test message, the footer and manage your subscription link would be here. To see this, add yourself to a test list and send a message to that list.