A Dingo's got my Barbie!!!

The one you've been waiting for.

Yes folks here it is, the post you've all been waiting for...the one where I tell you how to do the picture switcheroonie. Before I do that however, I'll give you two other handy tips.

1. This one is for Firefox users (just one more reason to switch). If you are reading a post (or any article for that matter) and you come across a word or phrase that you don't know, simply highlight it, right click the mouse and select "Search XXXX for YYYY" where XXXX will be the search engine you have set as the default, and YYYY is the word or phrase you have highlighted. A new tab will open with the results of the search.

2. Have you ever wanted to follow a link in a comment but the the blog you are reading uses those  half-arsed pop-up comment windows (Blogger's second most annoying function behind WV) so that when you click on the person you can't see a damn thing? Well, just close the comment box, click on the post Title and follow the link from there, simple.

3. Now, for the one you've been waiting for. What I'll do is tell you what I do to swap photos, what I won't do is give you step by step instructions, you're all grown-ups, you should be able to figure it out. When you upload a picture, TypePad asks if you want to provide a pop-up (I just checked Blogger and it doesn't, what else is new?). Never mind, I managed to get it to work in Blogger too. So what you do is upload the picture you want to be in your post into the post itself, and the picture you want it to switch to, into a draft post. Then you just switch the reference in the HTML to point to the picture in the draft post.

With a little bit of practice you can even get them to morph,

                                        like this ===>

PS. The photo switcheroo doesn't work with Fl1kr, or Ph0t0Bucket, or lmageshack, or any other piece of crap image hosting site whose main goal seems to be prevent people from getting a decent look at a postage stamp sized photo that's been posted. Oh, did I mention I'm not too fond of image hosting? They may save time for those who are uploading (although that's yet to be established) but they sure as shit waste everyone else's time when you click on a photo to get a better look and all you get in an invite to join.

 

HaHaHaYoMaMa post #28

A technical type announcement about my feed.

Recently the nice folks at Typepad decided to screw around with the way feeds are generated from TP posts, as usual they didn't tell anybody they did this, and when things went wrong they didn't tell anybody on the help desk so that they could provide answers to the poor bastards who were affected by their stuff up (or at least they didn't tell that snarky fucking bitch Laura).

As a result of being left in the dark for several days, and not being able to generate a valid atom feed, I took it upon myself to fix things. What this means is that you may be subscribed to a feed address than no longer exists (the RSS.xml feeds were ok, but the Atom.xml feeds were corrupted). It would be nice if our feed readers would tell us what was going on but they don't, they just don't pick up a feed and you assume that there has been no new post.

If you do subscribe to the Dingo through a feed reader (Bloglines, Google reader etc), and you want to make sure you get your serve of Dingo fresh daily, here's what you should do...

• Delete the existing feed
• Resubscribe using the button below.

Sorry for the stuff up.

In other Interweb news..

Commenting problems.

Some of you may be experiencing problems commenting (I know I am). Plus there are also a lot of duplicate comments showing up, and I'm, pretty sure that you aren't writing your comment twice.

Anyway, I raised a ticket over the issue and here's what they suggested so far. This relates more to when you have trouble enterig a comment, and especially of you have been made to enter a WV, which TypePad calls CAPTCHA

What kinds of comments trigger the CAPTCHA?

Comments that meet the following criteria will trigger the CAPTCHA:

• If the comment is posted to a weblog post that is more than 30 days old
• If the comment was submitted too quickly after a previous comment from the same IP address and triggers a throttle
• If the comment contains more than three URLs in the comment body
• If information submitted with the comment matches TypePad's comment spam blacklist
• If the comment is posted in a definitely different language from that set for the weblog
• If the comment was submitted from an open proxy

Not sure if this helps anyone, but I'll pass it along anyway.

This has nothing to do with all the duplicate comments (which is what I raised the ticket about), that's another issue that they are trying to sort out. TP seems to be hanging when you hit 'publish' for a comment, and those of you with broadband tend to hit it again, so it publishes it twice. I'm not singling the broadband users out, it's just that we dial up people are used to delays so we don't notice it so much and just sit and wait until it finishes(the story of our lives).

Update*** I just got this from the TypePad Status site (you can subscribe just like a normal blog)

Six Apart Status February 20, 2007 10:58 AM

By Six Apart

TypePad Service - TypePad Service is up. Users may experience slowness while commenting due to high load. We're working to alleviate this problem currently. We apologize for any inconvenience. TypePad Blogs - Blogs are up. TypeKey - TypeKey is up.

Please standby.

Poor old Willowtree is experiencing some severe technical difficulties and may not be posting regularly for the next few days (or however long it takes to sort things out). I blamed my ISP, but is seems to be a problem specific to my PC.

While I have no definitive answer as yet, it's looking likely that recent MS updates have caused the problem. I'm only able to get a data transfer every now and then, the rest of the time I can log on but not transfer data either way.

If it continues, I know exactly what the problem will be....a computer lying in pieces in the corner.

Update** Looks like it may be a conflict with the antivirus software and the firewall, both of which I updated recently. I've restored the bastard half a dozen times so far today. For the sake of my unofficial involvement in Post a Day for November, please consider this my post. I'm so pissed I might go ballistic if I write something.

Now I get the picture!

The real title for this post is actually "Another Techie Post", but they can't all be called that.

I've done some investigating and the news is both good and bad. The good news is that the photos sorta kinda do come across when you migrate to TP. The bad news is that only the HTML references and not the actual photos come across, that makes sense really.

What this means is that your posts will be exactly as they were in Blogger, and don't forget, the photos you upload in blogger don't go into the actual post, they go into a directory called... http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger2/and the name of your photo. When you import the old posts into TypePad, all that is imported is the HTML reference to this location. A similar thing with photo storage happens in TypePad but I won't bore you with the details.

So, as to the question of why aren't my photos showing up in TypePad? Well they actually are, but it seems that in a final effort to make our lives miserable, blogger is not always available, so when blogger is being its usual nasty self, the photos won't be available and therefore will not show in the post. I have recently checked all my old imported posts on a day when blogger wasn't having conniptions and they were all there. Still, I think I'll port them over eventually.

Hope that helps.

A techie post

Just a quick techie type post as I'm just about to leave for the Coast again.

I recently installed Firefox 2.0 (it only came out last week) and have been very impressed by some of the improvements.  The best thing about this version is that they have included a spell check that you can use anywhere, it's amazing and has saved me hours of effort when I'm commenting (despite Robin accusing me of never commenting).

It's very stable so far (unlike M$ IE7, which by the way they are wanting you do download now at a whopping 15Mb compared to Firefox's 5Mb). The other thing I like is the extensions that are available, I've installed a few that I have found useful.

• Morning Coffee. As the name suggests this is for people (myself included) who have a morning routine. You just add the places you visit regularly to the list (you can choose a particular day, or everyday). When you hit the button it opens them up in tabs. BTW, tabs has been improved in that now the tab close button is on the tab itself, much better for me.
• InFormEnter. This is good for stuff that you have to enter regularly like Blogger ID etc. Not need so much for TP because it actually can remember you like blogger used to. It puts a button next to any entry field and you can s=assign a name to the data to make it easier.
• Internotes. A handy little Post It note program that i haven't really explore but jut played with so far.
• Clippings. Similar to InFormEnter but a bit easier to use. I use it all the time when I leave comments on blogger, because again, it doesn't remember me like TP.

Anyway that's it for now, I'm off to see my specialist and MDW (oh yeah I almost forgot, she's heading for LA next week). I'll see you all later.

Geek Alert

You can read this is you like but really its just a geeky experimental type post. Normally I'd use a test blog but tghe cheapest TP account only allows for one blog.

Well let's see what happens here. I just downloaded something that's supposed to let me write my blog without even connecting to the Net. Obviously I'll have to connect eventually to upload, but this is supposed to let me create and edit offline.

I had a Word extension for blogger but it didn't let me post pictures, so I'll give that a try.

That was a bit strange....more later.

I had to upload the photo from TP because it timed out from Qumana, I'll have to investigate. But it does show some promise, it's actually quite a good editor.

Hi Guys.

Howdy gang,

What do you think of my new outfit? I think it's kinda slimming. When I looked at Ree's new blog, I wasn't jealous or anything (honest, I was really pleased for her), I was just really interested in the mechanics of it all. Like how do you get all your Blogger posts across and what's it like to work with.

Turns out the answers are 1. quite easily and 2. much better than blogger.

I only signed up for a 30 day trial but I really can't see myself going back to booger, it's just so much easier here. However experience has taught me that initial impressions don't always hold up. Time will tell.

The funny thing is, I was on the verge of quitting. It wasn't as much fun as it used to be, and I'm not a natural writer like a lot of you guys. And there's only so many embarrassing/dangerous situations that you can relate.

Oh, just one thing, blogger's editor looks suspiciously like this one.

Painting by numbers

Ok, there's been a bit of talk about Bloglines in the last few posts. Well not so much as talk, but more like a barrage of questions. I guess us computer geeks are a little different, when we see something that interests us, but don't know anything about it, we tend to google it. It seems that not everyone does this, so for those of you who are technically challenged (or lazy), here's the poop.

Bloglines is what's known as an aggregator, it can not only be used for blogs, but will also tell you when there are fresh news stories in your favourite newspaper, and for those interested, I'm pretty sure it does newsgroups too.

So to make things easy here's a screen shot of the blog you're reading right now (and before anyone is silly enough to try to correct me, I said blog not post). If you look at the two red circles, you'll see one that is a button on the sidebar, if you click on this (in the actual blog, not here, that would be just plain dumb) you will end up at Bloglines.

If you don't already have an account (free) you can create one, and no I'm not explaining how to do that, I've got you there the rest is up to you. The second circle is a Firefox extension that alerts me when someone has posted something new, all I do then is click on the little white 'B' and it lists the new post for my viewing pleasure. This saves having to actually go to all the sites you read just to check if there's something new, that takes time. As usual, you can click on the picture to make it bigger.

Labels: techo stuff