Blog Posting Tips

I have posted many blogs for this class using blogger. Along the way I found out a few things that make using this site a little easier. There have been a few comments on how to view the blogs you have posted and your comments as well as how to arrange an image on a post.

The easiest way to keep track of our posts is by going to the dashboard where you can manage your blogs. At the top of the screen there is a link for the dashboard. Here it will allow you to view and edit your profile. Also, there is a link for new post, edit post, and settings. When you click on edit posts it will show you all of the posts for the class by author and allow you to view them and the comments.



For the posts that you have created there will be an edit option to the left. If you forgot to add labels or an image you can just click on edit and make changes, then publish the post again. You can also view drafts that you saved and delete a posts that you don't want.



Another thing to make blogging easier is how to arrange an image on a post. Every time I upload an image it will always place it at the top of the post. It doesn't seem to let me move the image by dragging or by hitting enter. It is very simple to solve this problem. At the top there is a tab for Edit Html. When you click that you can see your post in html format. All you need to do is highlight, cut, and then move the html for your image to the area in your post you want it to be. Then click on the Compose tab to continue writing and view the image placement.

These are just a few things I found that make using this site easier. I hope this will be helpful.

Blogging

I guess I'm a little late to the party, starting my first blog. Having a "web log" is something that has interested me for a while. The only experience with blogging is on Biggerbuybuton from IS 279 and IS 379. I eventually got use to the idea of having a short blog due every day. However, just because I was used to it didn't mean I got them done every day. By the end of the last section I remember not being too behind, and having to catch up by writing just about 8 or so blogs. One thing I didn't like about the way we did blogs in those classes was that it kind of felt like you were writing the blog for no one because we weren't required to read or comment on other people's blogs. I had a film class in community college that we has to post and comment on other's post about the films we watched in class (mainly because there wasn't enough time for an in class discussion after we watched the movie.) this class really had an online community feel to it which made it easier and fun to post, I’m hoping that this will feel somewhat like that and not just writing an eDiary like I’m Doogie Howser or something.

One thing that I am worried about is writing a full blog every week. I’m really don’t like to write a great deal. I have the tendency to try to find the shortest way to write something and when I’m given a minimum length to write, it tends to be frustrating for me. Three paragraphs isn’t too long to have to write and I don’t think I’ll have too much trouble, if I don’t get behind.

I did have a question that I thought I’d add to my first blog. I was wondering if the weekly blog was to be on one single topic, or if it could be a “week round up” of sorts containing a paragraph about how our project is doing and a something we read in our book and then maybe something interesting we saw on line that week that related to class. The rubric says to “remain … on topic.” So what if the topic is something like “What Happened Last Week” or “How This Week is Going, So Far.” This might make it a little easier to write every week.

Blogging IS449

This is not my first time blogging for this course. Last semester I took IS449 with professor Drake and we had the same requirement for blogging. At times it seems difficult to come up with ideas to blog about but as the semester progresses it gets easier.

This is a writing intensive course but there are huge benefits from the class blog. This is a great way to share ideas, trouble shoot problems, and find resources. Many of the things I worked on last semester were done with the help of others through blogging.

It only takes a few minutes to write a few paragraphs and share information. Then you have an entire class working together to make that information more useful with feedback. It is very important to keep up with your blogs every week because they are worth a large portion of your grade.

Blogging

Alright so I was sitting here and thinking about what to right in this blog. I have heard of blogs but haven't really seen or have written one before. So I googled search th e meaning of blogging and what i got in return is wikipedia defintinon: and it states " is a blog is a type of website, usally maintained by an individual with regualar entries of commentary, description of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order. Blog can also be used a verb, meaning to maintain or add a blog. (Wikepdia)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogging

This clears up the meaning for me in that I know exaclty what the term of blogging means. And this should be interesting what will be written by people during the course of the semester. As it is open to many things we can write, discuss or comment about. While i was reading about blogs I noticed that there are different kinds of blogs such as personal blogs, corporate and organizational blogs. They can also be grouped together by genre, media type, and by device which I found interesting to read about.

So during the course of the semester we can technically do all these types of blogs. There were some interesting things about blogging history, origins, how it has transformed over the years, and legal and ethical issues that were also mentioned. So in this little research I have done I have learned something I never really knew about.

The noscript tag

BLOGGER UPDATE:
Hey guys, I wanted to update everyone on the blogger bug that was making the comments count incorrect. They fixed it!!! I don't know what was done, but the comments have been accurate for the past week now, and I've been closely monitoring everytime I make a new comment and the numbers are all correct! This means no counting by hand! I hope everyone can make use of my application and if not, that's fine, but I know it has saved some people a lot of time. It kind of just became a challenge for me to do at one point. I started doing it, thinking it'd be cool, then I hit those problems and it became something I needed to figure out! lol

Anyway, the reason I'm posting is to talk about the noscript tag. The noscript tag is a tag used in HTML when JavaScript is disabled or not supported by a browser. This tag is very important in our class because everything we're dealing with is AJAX, so it's all JavaScript-based! If a user visits one of our AJAX-based sites without JavaScript enabled on their browser or with a browser that doesn't support JavaScript, they will not get any results. All the visitor would see on our sites would be the static information within the HTML. Obviously for sites like ours that are developed 100% around the use of AJAX, our sites pretty much become useless then. This is where the noscript tag comes into play.


The noscript tag allows the browser to display alternate information when/if JavaScript isn't enabled/supported. Using the noscript tag is extremely simple. All you need to do is type . Unfortunately, if JavaScript is disabled/unsupported on our sites, the noscript tag still won't give the results we want, but it will at least inform the user that they need to either enable JavaScript or find a browser that supports it if they want to experience the full effect and purpose of our AJAX-based websites.

The majority of the time, the text you place between the noscript tag is what determines whether or not a visitor stays at your site, or just gives up and goes somewhere else. A few important points you may want to consider in the noscript tag are to try and type as much relevant content as you can related to the thing the user is trying to view (in the case of this class, that would mean listing some sort of related information to the API the JavaScript is attempting to access) and telling the user that JavaScript is necessary to properly view this site. Sometimes it's a good idea to give short instructions to the user on how to enable JavaScript on a few popular browsers in case they aren't aware it's disabled and don't know how to re-enable it.

Blogger API Limitations :(

Image taken from: http://markmossasj.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

Well folks, it deeply saddens me to announce that the blog and comment counter I spent so much time and brain power on is not going to remain useful very much longer! :( Apparently the Blogger API has a limit of 200 entries, and that's why the comments are being counted incorrectly already. Our class has a total of 130 blog posts so far, and if that surpasses 200, the count will begin to be incorrect as the comments counting is. I wish there was something I could do, but I guess we'll all have to resort to counting everything by hand from now on (or using Colin's way). I have contacted the developers of the API, but since it's through Google, who knows if they'll ever even respond...especially before our semester is over.

Sorry for the false hope in this application, but I don't see any way around this 200 entry limitation that Blogger has on their API. The most annoying part of it all is that the limit is not stated in the documentation anywhere! I spent countless hours trying to debug my JavaScript, assuming I had made a programmatical error along the way while counting the comments, but after a while I realized it wasn't my code. I began searching the Web to see if there was any sort of limitation and sure enough, 200 is the maximum!

If anyone can think of any neat ways to hack the thing or pull the information back differently from the API, I'd be more than happy to experiment with it some more, but I just don't think there's much of a way around it. I'm going to look into the different querying options they offer to see if I can query to different time frames or something than do the math once the two different results come back. Even so, that would still be a limit of 400, meaning the comments still would be incorrect.

If something ends up changing I'll be sure to post back with the results, but in the meantime I'm afraid we've reached the end....I guess it's like they say....All good things must come to end. LOL

Here's the link again for those who still want to use it to count the posts, but remember that once we surpass 200 posts as a class, that count will be off as well.

http://people.emich.edu/mmager/449


UPDATE:

Image taken from: http://justin-pierce.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html

I fixed it everybody!! The code to make this work is now a complete mess, but I basically had to make 8 different AJAX calls to the blogger API dividing it up in the query on a two week basis rather than getting it all at once. This allowed me to count the comments for each two weeks then add them all together in the end to get the total. You guys will notice your numbers are much higher and actually accurate now!