Google's mysterious new blogging platform

Google Blogger has been largely forgotten, but over the past 1-2 years it's been receiving regular updates.

Mostly these have been improvements with a few odd regressions. Some of the regressions have been fixed.

It's kind of curious. Google still uses Blogger for some of their blogs on googleblog.com (ex: Scholar), but they also have a new platform - https://blog.google (Keynote, Data Centers). On the Keynote blog page the RSS feed is hidden (but exists), on Data Centers and Photos blog there's a familiar feed icon top right. Data Centers articles date to 2012, but the .google domain was only registered in 2014. So they've migrated some old content, probably from Blogger.

I looked a the source from a Data Center post and it's surprisingly old school readable. There are commented out tags for handling IE 7 (!) and metadata for Open Graph and Twitter Card. Style sheets refer to "/static/blogv2/css/blog.min.css?version=4.4" />. 

I wasn't able to find any articles on "Google's new blog platform". That doesn't surprise me, Google search is fairly useless these days. Clearly they are up to something internally.

If they do make this a public blogging platform I'm sure it still won't handle paragraph spacing correctly.

Blogger will republish old posts with new dates but keep old URL

So I learned something today about Google's ancient blogger platform.

You can republish old content with new dates without breaking the URL. Today I revised a post I'd written in 2008, but I set the publication date to today's date.

The post republished with today's date and is ordered correctly on my tech blog page, but it kept the old URL embedded date: tech.kateva.org/2008/09/os-x-major-version-updates-my-approach.html.

It's probably always been that way, I just never tried republishing before.

It's something I'll do more often now.

Blogger (draft) supports mobile

If you are using Blogger Draft you will find that it works fairly well in Safari.app and Chrome.app for iOS.

The new interface is responsive. 

I’d prefer a different font for writing on mobile but it’s very doable. Competitive with WordPress mobile app but expect some rough edges.

(Eons ago there was a mobile app for Blogger, but it was discontinued. I doubt it will return.)

Unable to use MarsEdit with Blogger - Google web OAUTH failure with DHCP mode on AirPort Extreme

I'm now unable to use MarsEdit with Blogger on Mojave or High Sierra. When Google asks me to authenticate instead of getting the usual embedded web page for entering credentials I get a blank page.

Either Google has changed something so this only works on Catalina or there's something odd about my Google accounts. I've tested with

• two non-2FA Google Apps identities that used to work
• my personal 2FA Gmail Google ID
• my wife's personal Gmail Google ID never used for blogger
• two user accounts on my Mojave machine
• 1 user account on High Sierra
• Admin and non-admin account
• Clearing caches with Onyx
• I think I also tried an older version of MarsEdit that was on my old account on the High Sierra machine

macOS Console has not been helpful, but I have yet to download and try it using Consolation.

 

MarsEdit dev (Daniel Jalkut) says it works for him on Catalina and on pre-Catalina.

Update 12/6/2019: I eventually realized the problem was my home network. I have a Comcast Xfinity router and an Apple AirPort Extreme. Both have had no configuration changes in months, but Comcast recently updated my service and the AirPort firmware went to version 7.9.1 a few months ago.

 

Inquiry on Apple Discussions.

 

Update 12/7/2019: Today I discovered my AirPort Extreme Guest Network no longer works. That’s the network all our IOT devices connect to.  Turns out suggests that the Guest network doesn’t work in Bridge mode unless the internet router is configured for VLAN support. Would be nice if Apple documented some of this stuff. Maybe this is why they exited the router business.

 

So I have to go back to double NAT for now then try reverting the firmware. (Though once I’ve authenticated a blog I don’t need the web OAUTH, so there is that option.)

 

Update 12/8/2019: So I reverted from 7.9.1 (79100.2) to 7.7.9 and it still doesn’t work! So I think I’ve ruled out a problem with the AirPort Extreme firmware update. I think I tried an older version of MarsEdit. I can’t say for sure but now I suspect it’s something Google did that broken compatibility with Double NAT (DHCP) on the AirPort Extreme.

 

I went back to 7.9.1 (got an ominous notice that firmware update failed but it seems fine) and I guess I’ll use my TunnelBear VPN when I need to authenticate with Google. I’ll test periodically to see if Google fixes things.

 

I tried out Google OAUTH playground. It’s a bit above my pay grade but it seemed to work across my Double NAT setup.

Migrating from Blogger to WordPress ... again ...

I’ve been contemplating migration to WordPress for almost a decade, but Google kept Blogger good enough to keep that headache at bay.

Alas, the days of good enough are ending. Google is removing their photo management API without recourse. They do support posts with images, but only by using their web interface. It’s a concrete and undeniable sign that Blogger is either dead or going to a bad place.

I though I’d migrate first to wordpress.com then to my Dreamhost open source wp install, but via Twitter Daniel Jalkut tells me he got better results using the open source importer directly.

I’ll do a dry run on one of my big blogs first. The URL won’t change but I’m sure feed subscriptions will have to be redone (ugh).

Update 2019/04/06 - results of the pipdig import process

I tested the Dreamhost free version of the pipdig importer from a Dreamhost wordpress (open source) blog. The results can be seen here for the moment, I’ll eventually delete them. I found:

• It doesn't remap internal links. This is a big disappointment. Links continue to direct to blogger, once that account is gone they will be invalid
• There’s no option to migrate images that I can see.
• It missed at least 4 posts from the source blog — specifically from early on. No idea why and it suggests more are missing.
• It does copy drafts over.
• It requires a LOT of access to your Google account! If you use this utility I suggest creating a new google account, give it access to your blog, then after the import destroy it. 
• The paragraph breaks are missing - line feeds vs <p>. This is an ancient Blogger problem with MarsEdit; a legacy of the original sin of English language text formatting end-of-line standards. I think Blogger is mostly to blame.
• Images were not relocated locally, they remain at their original locations.

Pipdig is better than nothing, but I’m going to try wordpress.com’s import tool next. I wonder if a better solution wouldn’t be a static site that I could archive on my personal web server, then do a web server redirect to handle the links. For now I’m still on Blogger. The porting experience reminds me of the impossibility of leaving Apple’s defunct Aperture photo management app.

(As I write this the wordpress import is processing - result should eventually show up at gordontest.tech.blog temporarily, but we’ll see if it works. It’s taking a long time.)

Update 2019/04/06b

Well, that wordpress migration didn’t go so well:

Your site has been suspended from WordPress.com for violating the Terms of Service. If you believe this was done in error, please contact us as soon as possible to have the suspension reviewed….

I sent a contact inquiry, nothing yet.

The end of Google+ will impact Blogger

Visiting Google’s official Blogger blog today I tried viewing comments on a May 2018 post (a list of things removed and a promise of future work). There are 858 comments, based on Google+. I wonder what will happen to them now that G+ is dead. (So will we get our + back in search syntax?)

At one point Google tried to integrate G+ and Blogger — particularly identity management. It didn’t go well. I suspect the divorce won’t go well either.

- fn -

[1] Suggestively most of the future work mentioned were enhancements to moving data out of Blogger.

PS. Google+ was a really dumb name.

MarsEdit - don't enable all post sync if you have a very large number of posts

MarsEdit 4 added a new feature — the ability to sync all posts. It didn’t work for my Blogger posts, somewhere around post 3,000-4,000 Google Blogger dies. It looks like a Google bug.

It did work for kateva.org/sh though — that has over 30,000 posts (it mirrors my pinboard shares and twitter tweets). Unfortunately that slowed MarsEdit launch severely — it took up to 3-4 minutes to start. Turns out MarsEdit loads all posts into memory and it doesn’t scale to that size.

I reset the kateva.org/sh sync to ‘last 50’ and startup is ok now.

Google's phishing vigilance and the risk of blog comments

I got a notice from Google yesterday. tech.kateva.org had been quarantined as a phishing vector. Visitors would be warned away. I had a short time to fix the affected page that was listed below …

But there was nothing there. Same thing with a link to a downloadable spreadsheet of issues. That was empty too.

Elsewhere in the message a page was identified. It sure looked benign, the only link was to an Apple support site. It’s a (Google) blogger site and all the widgets were default Blogger. No extra HTML. No comments.

Also, despite Google’s warning, the blog was not quarantined.

A puzzle.

Oh, I left something out. The day before a published spam comment showed up in my comment tracking feed. I get a few spam comments every day or two, but this was the first published one in a while. I went to delete it … but by the time I got to Blogger’s post management menu the comment was gone.

This is what I think happened:

• This blog was set to allow comments without approval from authenticated posters for posts less than two weeks old.
• A bot created an authenticated identity and created a phishing attack comment.
• Google spotted the comment, quarantined the site, and sent the notification email.
• Blogger spam detection identified the comment author as a spammer and deleted all comments by that identity — including the one on my site (why it was gone).
• Google rechecked my site and lifted the quarantine — but couldn’t retrieve the notification email.
• The notification email was partly empty because that it was a query — that returned Null. It had one part that was written at time of email generation and that contained the link to the once contaminated page.

I changed comments on the blog to require authorization at all times — no two week window for authenticated users. Clearly authentication is no longer a sufficient barrier. I don’t want phishing attacks on my blog, and I don’t want to get quarantined.

This reminds me what a strange fish Blogger is. It works fairly well, though there’s a longstanding problem with CR/LF handling that reminds me too much of DOS 2.1. It gets very few, but still some, updates. Google has switched their blogs off Blogger, but they haven’t used their new proprietary RSS/Blog platform to replace Blogger. Blogger is neither dead nor alive, and Google RSS is similarly quantum.

MarsEdit tables: create in TextEdit and paste

MarsEdit is a great app — but I wish it were a rental product. Then I’d pay every year and Daniel Jalkut would be incented to add support for image resizing and table editing.

In the meantime I’ve discovered I can get good results by creating a table in TextEdit then pasting it into MarsEdit rich text editor.

Old pet peeve: Blogger uses <BR> tags instead of <P> tags to demarcate paragraphs

I wrote about Blogger’s mad formatting 4 years ago and five years ago. I guess it’s time again. This time I’ll include some screenshots.

My recent ebook DRM post as it appears in MarsEdit:

The MarsEdit HTML view, each paragraph wrapped in <p>:

How it looks when viewed as Blogger page:

Now view source (amazing how much cruft there is in the source):

Yes, still wrapped in <p>. Now let’s try to edit it using Blogger’s rich text editor. Suddenly the paragraphs are gone…

Blogger HTML view shows all the <p> tags have been replaced by a single <br /> tag:

This is a very old problem. I think this was configurable in pre-2010 blogger, but it doesn’t seem to be now. I doubt Blogger will ever fix this, I wonder they do this to be consistent with languages that don’t use paragraphs [1].

 There are two things MarsEdit could do to help since Blogger is never going to change:

1. Provide an option to follow Blogger’s convention and use two <BR> tags instead of one <P> tag when publishing. Do same conversion when bringing back an old post to edit.
2. Make it easier to edit an old post in MarsEdit — which is probably only possible if there’s some way to send Blogger a current URL and get back a post identifier that the API can work with. Otherwise I assume MarsEdit would need a post identifier like … blogID=5710205 … postID=1945754734324659424

[1] Update: I’m being too kind to Blogger, this really is a bug. If Blogger is replacing <p> tags on an English language blog they should be writing two <br> tags, not one.

Blogger's internal search is now very broken

I tried a search from Blogger’s web view. it returned 19 posts, the oldest from 2009. Using other methods it’s easy to find results back to 2003.

I don’t know when this stopped working, but Google turned off its Blog Search a few months ago.

I’ve been running a microblog on WordPress for a few years, but I’d put off migrating my primary blogs. Blogger has been a very reliable service — especially because Google largely leaves it alone. I guess I have to stop putting off the inevitable. This is gonna hurt.

Bloggers label (category) feeds (and Yahoo Pipes is still around)

I decided today to start writing more about ways to use Apple’s defunct Aperture photo management app. I’ll be using it for years while I wait for Photos.app to mature, and I know it’s not going to change much.

Writing that post I wondered again if Blogger supported feeds on tags (“Labels”). I thought they did; sure enough I wrote about this feature four years ago…

Gordon's Tech: Using Bloggers undocumented label (category) feeds and Yahoo Pipes to create a tech opinion feed out of Gordon's Notes

… To start with, here's the label for "technology"

http://notes.kateva.org/search/label/technology

and here's the feed (Atom) following the above pattern

http://notes.kateva.org/feeds/posts/default/-/technology

The only new development in the past four years is that this is now an official feature. Unfortunately the Feeds still don’t get a useful name.

I wrote about Yahoo Pipes in the same blog post; Pipes was the IFTTT of its day (but far more ambitious). Turns out Pipes is still around; things that are useful but abandoned tend to be stable and cheap to maintain (last Twitter post was 7/2013 though — I wouldn’t build a mission critical operation on Pipes).

Blogger's BlogThis! bookmarklet has largely disappeared from the web.

Google still hosts the BlogThis! bookmarklet at https://www.blogger.com/blog-this.g but they've removed all documentation. Google Search finds old posts, bad links, and splogs. If you drag above to your toolbar I think it will work (did for me). I am seeing new issues with Blogger's perennial line feed problem, so maybe that's part of the removal. [1]

In a similar vein the Blogger online documentation of limits doesn't mention the now 5 year old limit on search -- only the past 5000 posts are searchable within blogger.

On the one tentacle I'm surprised Blogger still works -- Google deprecated it years ago. On another, my RSS feeds are busier than ever, and Google has quietly returned to blogs for its external communications -- tacitly abandoning G+.

Interesting ride on the pseudo-IndieWeb of Blogger, one of the last remnants of pre-Evil Google. I've been using WordPress for years for my microblog posts and I'm happy to report that the migration tool continues to be updated (though last I looked it was still WP 3.5, we're on 4.0 now).

[1] One of the original sins of the personal computer was the CRLF, LF, CR division between DOS, Mac and Unix. Extra blank lines with various combinations of editing tools is the price paid for Bill Gate's CRLF blunder. He should send us all checks by way of compensation.

MarsEdit feature request: backlink to a social network share ...

Red Sweater’s MarsEdit (Mac) owns the world of WordPress, Tumbler and Blogger personal publishing. It’s a small world — the major publishers have their own ‘content management’ systems, and the small number of persistent independent bloggers often use native editing tools.

It’s a small world, and it is effectively a Mac only world. Eons ago Windows Live Writer was a fabulous tool by Onfolio purchased by Microsoft then severely neglected and eventually all but broken. You can still download it, but it is known to very few and is a shadow of its former self. So, in its small niche, MarsEdit rules completely. 

MarsEdit is a fine piece of software, but it’s still not the equal of Ontolio Writer. Image handling is particularly weak. On the other hand, it’s not like the (non-existent) competition is any better.

There are many features I’d like to see in MarsEdit, but there’s one odd feature that I’d particularly love to have. It’s a bit weird, but here goes. I’d like MarsEdit to create one or more social media shares at the time of publication, then embed a link to the shares in the post footer. The sequence would probably go like this:

1. Submit post to Blog to get post URL.
2. With post URL submit tweet or alpha.app.net or microblog post based on title of blog post. Get those URLs.
3. Update blog post with links in footer like
1. Comment on … my_app_net links.

The idea is someone reading the post could easily go to Twitter or app.net to respond in a defined stream.

Ok, that’s weird and kludgy and probably inexplicable. I don’t really think of this as a reasonable MarsEdit feature. I’m not sure how else something like this could be implemented though, and I do think we need this sort of thing as a better approach to comments.

Blogger's comment infrastructure - the end of anonymous

Google's Blogger has fought the good fight against spam comments for years, but it's failing now in several different ways. In the spam wars, failing to keep up is equivalent to surrender.

I assume that Blogger, like Google Reader itself, is slowly going the way of Google Reader Shares. Blogger is legacy GoogleMinus, not a good fit for the post-2011 Google. A small but dedicated team doesn't have the resources to keep it healthy.

I have looked at Disqus but $1,200 a year for SSO is too much for my budget. Other suggestions are welcome; I'd like a commenting system for Blogger that:

• Gives me control over what identity-authentication systems to enable, or, better yet, lets me define comment-rules on the basis of identity-authentication.
• Lets me blacklist authenticated users.
• Costs about $100 a year.

Anonymous comments would be nice to have, but they require spam filtering and CAPTCHA doesn't work any more. I'm afraid they are toast.

I suspect I can't get the commenting solution I want for Blogger, so I may have to switch to authentication via Google or turn them off altogether pending a future WordPress migration.

• Gordon's Notes: CAPTCHA has failed, and so anonymous comments may go too.
• Gordon's Tech: Spammers have found a hole in Blogger's comment system

Update: I've revised the title of this post, because when I actually, you know, looked at the current Blogger options they include OpenID as well as Google's authentication. Blogger comments support is still dated by current standards, but I'll switch to Google/OpenID, reenable notification for comments by email when > 2 weeks old, and leave out CAPTCHA. No more anonymous comments sadly.

How to embed a Google Docs spreasheet into a blog post with a generated iFrame tag (MarsEdit, Blogger)

This Google web page gives you part of the solution for Embedding a spreadsheet in a blog or webpage. Unfortunately, they only talk about Google's near defunct "Sites".

The directions for blog embedding are cryptic: "If you want to embed a form in a website or blog, click the More Actions button at the top of the editor, and select the 'Embed' option from the drop-down menu." I think this language is obsolete.

Here's how you do it now. In the Publish to Web page on Google Docs there's a drop down that defaults to web page. Choose HTML to embed in a page instead. You get an iFrame tag you an put in MarsEdit HTML or in Blogger.

 

Pinboard and IFTTT - blog, task, share

Despite concerns about too many moving parts, I'm still using Reeder, Pinboard and IFTTT as my core information process workflow. I just added two more IFTT actions based on single character Pinboard tags. The current set is:

• s: Reeder/Pinboard shares with the tag s are "shared" via IFTTT to Twitter and WordPress (it's a public tag, so there's a Pinboard feed too).
• t: Reeder/Pinboard shares with the tag t generate a Gmail email to a 'secret' toodledo address that creates a task. This is most often a f/u task on a product I'm interested in.
• b: Reeder/Pinboard shares with the tag b generate a Gmail email to a 'secret' toodledo address that creates a draft Blogger post. (I prefer this to IFTT's limited Blogger channel). These are subjects I would like to write about.

I enter the one letter space separated tags when I share to Pinboard from Reeder.app for iOS and OS X, or from Google Reader. Many posts have two or three tags.

Spammers have found a hole in Blogger's comment system

I'm used to getting comment spam with embedded links. Often the spam appears benign, but the links go to bad places.

This one was different however:

I agree. The organization and departments like FDA or BFAD should check the contents of these toothpaste products. This will ensure its safety to the people. Aside from that, other chemicals in the toothpaste formulation should also be checked. According to my dentist, Ron ******, some products may contain melamine which can cause severe damage to the brain. I hope that they will be able to resolve this kind of issue.

It sounds spammy, but it is somewhat related to my blog post and it didn't display with an inline link in Google's Comment review. It even linked to a Blogger profile.

So I approved it. Blogger emailed me a copy and then I saw it had a link. It was spam of course. (I think BFAD has something to do with "Black Friday" sales deals?)

The post was crafted so the link didn't display in the Blogger Comments review UI, but it did display once the post was approved. The senders even invested in a spambot (human or silicon).

Obviously a high class operation! I wonder how long it will take Google to close this loophole. In general their Blogger spam filtering is excellent; most spam isn't even presented to me for review.

WordPress Import Blogger tool failure

A few months ago I was impressed by how well WordPress.com managed importing a copy of notes.kateva.org.

Today I tried an import from my Dreamhost [1] version of WordPress 3.3.2 using the "Import Blogger" tool. This time it failed; Google rejected the authentication request with a cryptic message:

The page you have requested cannot be displayed. Another site was requesting access to your Google Account, but sent a malformed request. Please contact the site that you were trying to use when you received this message to inform them of the error. A detailed error message follows:

The site "http://kateva.org" has not been registered.

I couldn't fine any fix for this, though I did come across many reports of the error with various half-fixes. I wonder if this is because both my Blogger blog and the WordPress blog are on kateva.org. Or perhaps this is another sign that WordPress is problematic; I think if I do move to WordPress I will pay for WordPress.com and the associated support.

[1] If you use the promo code of KATEVA you get $50 off the 1st year fee and I get an equal credit (50/50 split).

Blogger is dying more quickly than expected

I've been expecting Blogger to die, but since Google has been porting it to the "new look" I thought it had a year or two left.

Today when I search in Blogger I'm getting results sorted from oldest to newest, and search ends at 2006. I'm seeing this in both the old and new UI. In the new UI, of course, search is very limited; in particular you can't navigate large numbers of results readily.

Blogger is showing more of these inconsistent and failed behaviors. If Blogger were human, I'd say it had an untreatable cancer.

The good news is that WordPress.com's Blogger Import works fairly well -- though it omits all draft posts.

The bad news is that blogging is tracing the same trajectory I remember with web site authoring. In the 90s web site authoring tools were accessible to relatively non-technical amateurs. By the 00s that market had gone away, and quality "content management systems" were aimed at professionals and businesses. I'm seeing the same thing happening with blogging -- it's becoming a professional activity dominated rather than an amateur form of communication. The number of interesting blogs expressing personal opinions rather than muted convention is also diminishing.

These things are easier to understand if you live in a climate that has ice and snow and darkness.