Another workaround for Blogger publishing

Many have experienced problems when publishing content from Blogger. The error message is:

The error message is:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out

As you might guess I also have this problem. You can read more about it here.

I did some investigation and finally have managed to make a workaround that works for me.

I pretty early guessed that the source of the problem was network related but could not pinpoint the source of the problem. So I started by trying to publish to other IP addresses to see what happened. For all other ISP's I could see that Blogger tried to publish the content for me.

I started out by using another IP address for Blogger - they published to a different IP address than the normal one. This did not work.

My hosting company (where I work...) have two separated data centers with all infrastructure duplicated. So I then went on and configured inbound NAT in the other data center and routed the traffic back to the original server.

This worked for me and also proves that there is a problem, probably within the Blogger environment itself. I also understand that not everyone can do this by theirself.

Word verification is not easy to use

Google is not making it easy for OCR software to analyze their verification words.

Unfortunately they do not make it easy for us either...

 

Cannot publish with blogger

This post was also posted here. The reason is because of writing I currently cannot post new posts to my own blog. Free services are great until you get into trouble and need some help.

I can not publish my blogs any more. This only happens for one of my four blogs. The others works well. The problem started around Christmas time, but I can not give the exact date.

The error message is:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out

I have read about many others with the same problem. The problem appeared at the same time. Unfortunately I have yet to find a solution for this problem.

I started by looking into my own server to see if I could find an error there. I could not.

I switched from sftp to ftp publishing to see if that helped. No luck.

I then changed from a hostname to IP address to see if that helped. It did not.

I do not see any kind of traffic through my firewall when I try to publish anything.

I then decided to try publish to another IP address, on another ISP. When I did so I could se traffic. When I did so I got the IP source 72.14.206.132 which belongs to Google.

This made me believe we have a routing issue on the Internet. But I checked that as well and it seems to be right. I can at least do a ping back to the originating IP.

It seems like blogger works from multiple sites. I have found in my logs that some of my blogs are published from a site in Canada - but I have this problem when publishing from Google i California.

I hope they find a solution really soon.

Some sources:

• SmarterGeek
• Blogger support thread with many complaints (but no solutions...)
• A Google search

Images at stockxpert

For some time ago I wrote about how to find and add cool graphics to your website. The site www.clipart.com is still a favorite of mine as they are cheap and have lots of cool drawing, art and photos.

But lately I have found out that I also want more real-life pictures on my site, in addition to clipart. But I don't want to pay much for it. Is this possible?

I found the site www.stockxpert.com where you can buy the right to use images starting at about US$1, depending on size and license you want.

Their metadata is not as consistent as with www.clipart.com but they sure got lots of images.

Give it a try!

I have upgraded to the new blogger

I just had to upgrade to the infamous new version of Blogger. I have to admit that it was much less painful than I first expected. It took about 5 minutes with my 150 posts.

Now I can start into looking up what new features I can take advantage of...

Email submissions to Blogger from Windows Mobile does not work

Email submissions on Blogger.com does not work for me when I send emails from my Windows Mobile.

Blogger could not process your message at this time.

Error code: 9.1B538E0

Original message:
From: my email address
Date: None
Subject: None
None

I get this kind of error messages. And no match on the Internet when I search with Google.

I don't think it will help to write Santa so I ask if you have a solution for this problem - please give me a comment.

<<email-submissions-wm5.htm>>

Publishing with Blogger

In this article I will talk about how to use www.blogger.com publishing features to make it easy to publish articles on the web.

I believe many users use the WYSIWYG editing that is on the blogger.com webpage. This editor is an easy way to publish small amounts of text, but if you want to do more with the formatting of your blogs this is editor not good enough.

Also, as we all are aware of - Blogger is Google quality software - it buggy and often down. Usually you can send emails and your blog will be added as soon as blogger is up and running again.

In this article I will talk about how I use blogger.com to publish my stuff. I will show you how to make the most out of existing tools with the goal of making good presentation of your content. Everything on this page is with the old version of Blogger. Your mileage may vary with the new version.

For this article to work - or at least the examples I talk about - you need to enable the email option for your blog site. This is done in a few easy steps when Blogger is up and running. Go into Blogger control panel -> into your site -> email. You will find something called Mail-to-Blogger Address. You will have to choose publish and type in a password to use. When this is done you can send emails to username.password@blogger.com.

First I want to give you an overview on your options

Feature	Usage
Outlook (any other HTML compliant email client should work)	I compose my blogs using Outlook. I format the text and images I want to use in the email and just send it away to blogger when I am done.
FrontPage	FrontPage is a very good HTML editor that makes it easy for you to use many advanced HTML features, like tables, bullets, inline frames and so on. You can work in the design mode of FrontPage, and when you are done simply use File|Send to email the HTML document to Blogger. Blogger will then remove everything outside the <body> part of your HTML file and publish only your text.

Including pictures

I am very found of using pictures in blogs. Just remember not to use too many, as I tend to do. Read here on how to get good clipart cheap and legal. Using clipart or any other good looking images in your blogs give you space and attracts users. I believe most readers will jump over your text if you write too much dense text.

I do not use blogspot.com to host my images. So whenever I include images of some kind in my blogs I place them - in advance - on a server at my hosting provider. This way I can include pictures both in emails and via FrontPage without any hassle. Blogger does not support images attached in emails at this time.

Outlook

Outlook supports HTML, plain text and HTML formatting of outgoing messages. To swich to the right mode just open the Format menu when you are composing a new message and choose HTML. You can now type whatever you want and do whatever you can do to format the text in Outlook. If formatting like bold face, italics or font color is of any issue on the article you are writing on you can choose plaintext as format.

You will shortly realize that Outlook has really limited capabilities for formatting text the way you want. At least with Outlook 2003. You can not make tables or make the infamous rel="nofollow" tag. But for easy small snippets of text Outlook is king!

Images can be inserted, and you have to type in the URL of the image that is on a external server.

Microsoft FrontPage

FrontPage is a very good tool. You can do many cool things with it. Most of the HTML language is available from FrontPage, and the stuff you can't find you can edit as HTML code.

Format the text as you want and choose File|Send when you are done. Blogger will remove everything except for the text (between the <body> tags) and publish it on the web.

You can not make custom style sheets as they are removed.

External links

Tags at Technorati: blogger, Microsoft FrontPage, publish blogs

<<publish-with-blogger.htm>>

Adding graphics to your blogs

Adding graphics to your blogs is not an easy task. At least if you care about copyright. I've been looking into this issue for some time and looked at the various options.

It costs money. Most photo stock libraries charge you by the picture - and from what I have seen the price is > $50/image. At least if I not ask for a quote. But for personal use - the prices scare you off.

That why I am glad I have found a site called clipart.com - a site that is subscription based. From how I read the license terms I can download up to a 1000 pictures each day and use on my web page, presentations and emails. Given their license I can not use their images on new stuff after I terminate the subscription but existing blogs created during my subscription are allowed to display the downloaded images.

I have searched a little on their site and usually I find art I can use if I want to write about something.

All art on this page is downloaded from clipart.com and scaled down to the right size using Microsoft Office Picture Manager. As you understand the two last pictures have nothing to do with this article - I just added them for fun.

Google Reader as an blog reader

Lately I've been looking into Google Reader and I have to say that I am impressed. This is one very useful tool.

For a while ago I wrote an article where I talked about syndication of feeds. Google Reader is one product that is really good at collecting and presentation. A few key features are:

• Mobile reader that is fast.
• GUI for Windows that is readable and easy to use.
• You can share good articles easily by sharing them or give them a star.
• You can share folders (tags) so you can collect and republish blogs that your group (work, hobbies etc) find interesting.

Sharing specific articles

There are two ways to do so. With Google Reader you can give an article an star, or you can share it. You can see my shared page here or you can embed it into your webpage as seen below.

The GUI

The web page looks nice and is easy to work with. You can find screen shots at Wikipedia.

Mobile access

It's to work with and fast as well. For me, I can read whenever I got a spare minute now.

Republish folders

Or tags, as Google chooses to call them. Look at my development folder here. This is all news, not the articles I found interesting as mentioned above. You can also embed this into your page if you want.

Links

Tags: google reader, syndication, aggregation, web 2.0