Blog archives: Blogger - Orangescale.NET / Thomas Arie Setiawan

§ Blogger will stop its FTP Publishing feature

When I use Blogger service few years ago, one of my favorite feature was FTP Publishing. Using this feature, I had Blogger publish my post to my own web hosting account. The main reason was that I can use my own custom domain for my Blogger-powered blog. If you’re using this, I think we had a same reason.

But, it was the time when blogging was not so easy like today. Right now, some people find that finding a free blog service is challenging. I mean, there are lots of options available. You can have WordPress.com, Posterous, Tumblr and more. Web hosting and domain service are also much cheaper. Most hosted service also offers a custom domain feature so that we can use our own domain using service’s infrastructure.

Blogger says that there are only 5% of active blogs published via FTP. And, it’s a reason to stop this feature. Probably, it’s a bad news for those 5% users. This FTP Publishing feature will not be supported after March 26, 2010. So, what should you do if you’re using FTP Publishing feature? You can switch to Blogger’s Custom Domain OR use the Blogspot.com domain. This migration tool will be available on February 22, 2010. All traffics will be redirected.

For this FTP Publishing related information, Blogger already setup a blog to give updates of the situation at http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com.

§ Blogger.com Supports Geotagging

Blogger.com will support geotagging feature. You can get this feature on Blogger in draft. If you don’t know what geotagging means, Wikipedia explains:

Geotagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though it can also include altitude, bearing, accuracy data, and place names.

When posting an entry, we can include geotagging an additional posting info. This can be useful for travel bloggers. Geotagging meta data will be placed in entry footer area. The location is integrated with Google Maps. So, clicking on the given location will go to Google Maps. [See picture]

About finding location, we can use the inline search feature. Just put the location e.g. Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Or, if you want to get more spesific location, we can search using latitude and longitude coordinates. For example: -7.797224,110.368797. The geo location will be included in RSS using GeoRSS. It will make feed readers, map applications and search engines be able to associate your posts with their locations.

Since this feature is still in beta phase (draft), there are some bugs. But, if you only want to test it out, you can do it.

§ Joining FAM Trip Journalist as bloggers

Last week, Yan Arief told me that we’re invited to join an event called FAM Trip Journalist. Yan Arief got the news from Pak Octo Lampito from Kedaulatan Rakyat, the biggest newspaper in Jogjakarta. Anyway, what is FAM Trip?

A FAM (familiarization) is a trip offered to meeting professionals (including planners, journalists and travel agents) in which event venues and destinations highlight–and, thus, give attendees first-hand experience with–their products. FAMs may be fully or partially sponsored by venues or destinations. (source)

We’re invited as bloggers. Yes, as bloggers. Yan Arief already knew Pak Octo for long time, but I just met him (Pak Octo) when Yan Arief took me to Kedaulatan Rakyat in last February. At that time, we introduced our unofficial TransJogja.NET website. (Read more about it — in Bahasa Indonesia). Luckily, Pak Octo already knew a bit about blogger and he told us that there would be an event that would involved bloggers. Great!
Continue reading »

§ Blogger Play, real-time slideshow

Blogger users have another features offered by Blogger.com service. It’s called Blogger Play. You will find a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. The images are from all blogs that are set to “public”, listed on the web and from public Blogger profiles. IF you do want to have your images/photos displayed on Blogger Play, you can make it private by choosing “No” in your blog profile. Go to Settings | Basic and for Add your Blog to our listings? field, choose “No“.

Blogger Play will only display images based on user settings preferences, and it uses Google SafeSearch algorithms to filter out adult/inappropriate images. You can always send a report to Blogger team if find inappropriate photos.

Visit Blogger Play FAQ for detailed info.

§ Blogger will stop its FTP Publishing feature

§ Blogger.com Supports Geotagging

§ Joining FAM Trip Journalist as bloggers

§ Blogger Play, real-time slideshow

from dadio.tv

Elsewhere

Flickr photostream