Blogger Introduces Google+ Integration

Further to my post yesterday, Blogger Buzz have just announced the integration of Google+ on their testing platform, Blogger in Draft. The option to use a Google+ profile on the normal blogging platform (www.blogger.com) will be available in the coming weeks.

The announcement came not long after it was found that the "Edit User Profile" section on Blogger's profile settings showed a message and links to connect Blogger to Google+. Although the links were redundant, this message caused quite a stir and incited speculation on what the integration might mean for users of it's platform. This message and links were later removed and the announcement posted shortly after on Blogger Buzz.

The integration is exciting news and by logging into Blogger in Draft, you are now able to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile by clicking on the "Get started" promotional message that will appear at the top of the screen or alternatively, by using this link.

Although the switch is seamless, Blogger have suggested that you backup your original profile information as it will not be transferred to your Google+ profile. If for some reason you want to switch back, you can do so within 30 days by using this link. If you don't switch back during this period, your Blogger profile will be permanently deleted from their system once the 30 days is up. Once you switch to the new profile, blog comments that use your original profile will be automatically redirected to your new Google+ profile.

The integration certainly has a lot of benefits. For one, you don't need to maintain two separate profiles and as announced on Blogger Buzz, you will be giving your readers a more robust and familiar sense of who you are and your social connections will see your posts in their Google search results with an annotation that you've shared the post.

Blogger have indicated that blog owners who switch to the new profile, will automatically get access to the new Google+ integrations as and when they are rolled out. One of these new integrations could see the replacement of the old (and probably soon to be discontinued) Google Friend Connect widget with a Google+ widget which will give blogs and their owners a wider social connection.

With Google's latest announcement that they will soon accommodate pseudonyms (see post: Google+ To Accommodate Pseudonyms), it will not be mandatory to associate your blog with your real name. However and when pseudonyms are finally allowed on the social network, it is recommended that the switch should only be done by those who want to associate their real-world identity with their blogs.

As yet and probably because the integration is still in draft, new blog comments made using the new profiles are only viewable on the blog and not on Google+. It shouldn't be long however, when full integration between the two platforms is evident. This will probably happen when the switch is widely available on the normal blogging platform in the coming weeks.

As I mentioned above, this is exciting news and I personally cannot wait to see what the new integrations will bring. If you have yet to switch your profile, you can do so by visiting Blogger in Draft or find out more information by visiting the FAQs page or the Blogger Help Forum.

Have you tried the new Google+ profile integration on Blogger Draft? Do you think the new integration will improve the blogging platform? Please let me know by leaving a comment.

Related articles:
Blogger And Google+ To Integrate
Google+ To Accommodate Pseudonyms


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Blogger And Google+ To Integrate

As reported today by Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, Google+ will soon be integrated with Blogger providing additional social features to the popular blogging platform.

This news comes after the "Edit User Profile" section on Blogger's profile settings is now showing the message: "Connect Blogger to Google+ : Use your Google profile and get access to upcoming Google+ features on Blogger," and includes links to "Learn more" and "Get Started." Both of these links are currently redundant (broken) but it shouldn't be long before they become active and you are able to connect your Google+ profile with Blogger.

With Google Friend Connect slowly being discontinued, given the shutdown of the Friend Connect Discussion Group and the closure of the Google Friend Connect Help Forum, it's not surprising that Google are taking steps to integrate it's new social network platform with Blogger.

Once the integration is complete and according to Alex Chitu at Google Operating System, Blogger profiles will be discontinued and replaced by Google Profiles. This integration will also be used to introduce additional social features that have been provided in the past by Google Friend Connect.

If the discontinuation of Blogger profiles is correct, the integration could also mean major changes to Blogger's current commenting system. This would mean blog comments would be made using Google+ profiles with the comments posted simultaneously and viewable on the blog itself and also on Google+. This is similar to blogs that use the Facebook commenting system.

As this is mere speculation at the moment, we will just have to wait and see what Google has planned. Whatever it is, the integration can only improve Blogger and make the blogs that are hosted on it more social friendly.


UPDATE: As of publishing this post, the message to connect Blogger to Google+ has now been removed. It looks as though Google have decided to remove this message until work has been completed. If I hear any more news on this integration, I'll keep you informed by updating this post.

UPDATE 11:30pm: Blogger Buzz have just announced that you can now replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile using their testing ground, Blogger in Draft. The option to use your Google+ profile on the normal blogging platform (www.blogger.com) will be available in the coming weeks. For more details on this announcement, see our new post: Blogger Introduces Google+ Integration


If you found this or any of my other posts helpful, don't forget to +1 or share the posts to your favourite networks using the toolbar below or by using the "+1" and "Share" buttons located at the bottom of each post.

As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on NetworkedBlogs, via Email (maximum of one email per day) or by subscribing to our blog feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

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Until my next post, have a wonderful week!

Blogger Launches New User Interface

The popular blogging platform Blogger have officially rolled-out the new user interface to all of it's users.

In a post by Chang Kim, Product Manager on Blogger Buzz: "It's been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger's look and feel, and there's a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics. We've rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it's faster and more efficient for you - and easier for us to update and improve over time."

Mr Kim continues to say: "Throughout the design process, we conducted user interviews to help identify how to make Blogger even easier and more enjoyable to use. We also watched users try our new interface and made many refinements based on their feedback."

Here's a screenshot of Blogger's new post editor which has been expanded and simplified to give a larger canvas for drafting and previewing work.

This new streamlined interface which has been in draft for the past few months (see Relevant articles below) is clean, easy to navigate and most importantly, has good statistics reporting showing recent traffic numbers, comment activity and follower counts.

If you're using Blogger to host your blog, you can choose to update to the new interface immediately via a pop-up announcement that will appear on your Dashboard. If you decide not to update immediately, you can always update to the new interface at a later date by clicking on "Try the updated Blogger interface" on the top-right of your Dashboard.

Note: I have updated the post: Have You Backed Up Your Blog? with information on how to backup your blog on this new interface.

I personally like the new interface but what's your thoughts?

Related articles:
Google Plus, Facebook Chat & Blog News
Google Profiles Gone Secure & Blogger Getting A Facelift


If you found this or any of my other posts helpful, don't forget to +1 or share the posts to your favourite networks using the toolbar below or by using the "+1" and "Share" buttons located at the bottom of each post.

As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

You can also follow me on Twitter @djones1509, Google+ and on Facebook at:
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Until my next post, enjoy the rest of the week!

Google Plus, Facebook Chat & Blog News

It's been a busy week on the news front, what with announcements from Facebook for example. Here's a quick rundown of some of the topics that's hit the news recently and what's been happening on the blog...


Google+ Private Profiles

Google have announced that they will be deleting all private Google+ profiles after 31st July 2011. If you have your profile currently set to private, you will need to make it public before this date or it will get deleted. Here's an explanation from their help section on why they are doing this:

"The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. Today, nearly all Google Profiles are public. We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don't allow this, so we have decided to make it a requirement that all profiles are public.

Keep in mind that your full name and gender are the only required information that will be displayed on your profile; you'll be able to edit or remove any other information that you don't want to share. If you currently have a private profile but you do not wish to make your profile public, you can delete your profile. Or, you can simply do nothing. All private profiles will be deleted after 31 July 2011."

Do you think this will have a negative impact on Google+ when it finally launches to the public? Let me know what you think.


Facebook Group Chat and Video Calling

Last Wednesday (6th July 2011), Facebook announced three product announcements: Video Calling, Group Chat and a new Chat Design.

The new chat design includes a sidebar that lists the people you message most, so it's now even easier to find your friends and start a conversation. The sidebar adjusts with the size of your browser window and will automatically appear when the window is wide enough. The Group Chat is an exciting feature. Within the chat window, you can easily initiate Group Chat by simply adding friends to the conversation by selecting "Add Friends to Chat".

The Video Calling feature which is powered by Skype, is built into chat. To call your friend, you simply click the video call button at the top of your chat window. Facebook have indicated that Video Calling will be available to everyone over the next few weeks in over 70 different languages. However, if you cannot wait until then, you can get it now at: http://www.facebook.com/videocalling

Do you like these new Facebook features? Let me know what you think.


Blogger's New User Interface

The popular blogging platform Blogger have just made available to all users the new user interface in draft. This new interface is clean, easy to navigate and most importantly, has good statistics reporting. If you have your blog hosted on Blogger, you can see the new interface by visiting: http://draft.blogger.com

I'm not entirely sure when this new interface will be rolled-out, but given the fact Blogger have now made the draft available to all users, it shouldn't be long before it replaces the current interface.

What's your thoughts on the new user interface? Please let me know.


Google Blocks 11 Million Websites

Google has blocked all .co.cc websites from its search results because the domain has been found to be too "spammy".

In a statement from Matt Cutts, head of Google's web spam: "We absolutely do try to be granular, but I wanted to mention that if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality, we do reserve the right to take action on the freehost as a whole. I think most savvy search/SEO folks would understand this completely, but I figure it's better to over-communicate than under-communicate."

The .cc top-level domain (TLD), which belongs to the Cocos (Keeling) Islands and regular .cc websites are unaffected by Google's changes.

The company said in a recent post on Google's Online Security Blog: "Over the past few months, Google's systems have detected a number of bulk subdomain providers becoming targets of abuse by malware distributors. Bulk subdomain providers register a domain name, like example.com, and then sell subdomains of this domain name, like subdomain.example.com. Subdomains are often registered by the thousands at one time and are used to distribute malware and fake anti-virus products on the web. In some cases our malware scanners have found more than 50,000 malware domains from a single bulk provider.

Google's automated malware scanning systems detect sites that distribute malware. To help protect users we recently modified those systems to identify bulk subdomain services which are being abused. In some severe cases our systems may now flag the whole bulk domain."

In response to the block, the General Manager of Korea-based CO.CC, James Kim has today posted a message on Google's Webmaster Help Forum stating that the decision to block .co.cc is unfair because out of the 10 million domains that are registered, only 0.01% are malicious. He also challenged Google to block Blogger (blogspot) and Facebook pages from search results since it chose to do the same with all the .co.cc websites. You can read more on this here.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) recently released a 29-page report, "Global Phishing Survey: Trends and Domain Name Use in 2H 2010" (PDF) which revealed that the .cc top-level domain hosted 4,963 phishing attacks in the second half of 2010, almost twice the number found under any other extension.

It is unfortunate that quite a lot of innocent people are going to be seriously affected by this move...I do have some idea of how it feels. Given the fact that my blog was once hosted on a .co.cc domain and the problems I had with Facebook because of it back in February (see post: Facebook Website Blocking Update: All CO.CC Domains Blocked), it was lucky that I moved my blog to the new purchased domain (http://www.derekjones.co) before this happened.

Have you been affected by this? Please let me know.


Blog News

1. Blog Gets Google PageRank 3: Since the recent update, I am pleased to announce that Derek's Home and Business Blog has now got a Google PR3. It looks as though all my hard work is finally starting to pay off! Let's see if I can get it higher :)

2. Increase in Traffic: I've noticed a major increase in traffic to the blog over the past 2-3 weeks which may have something to do with my newly acquired PageRank. This is good news and therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all the new visitors to the blog.

3. Google+ Icon: I've now installed a Google+ icon on the blog which will enable you to connect with me on the new social networking platform. You can find the icon with the rest of the social icons on the top of the side-bar under the heading "Follow & Share".

4. Business Network Tab: With the creation of the new Facebook page for small business owners and affiliate marketers (see post: Introducing The Mirage Business Network), I've now added a Business Network tab to the top of the blog. This tab gives information on the new page and how to access it. If you're a business owner or affiliate marketer and have yet to advertise your business on the page, you can do so now by visiting:
http://www.facebook.com/MirageBusinessNetwork

5. Blog Directory: If you're a blog owner and have a good quality blog, you can now list your blog in the newly created directory page. Information on how to do this can be found on the Blog Directory tab above. Don't forget to also join the Bloggers Network at: http://www.facebook.com/groups/BloggersNetworkGroup

6. Guest Posting: I'm always on the lookout for good quality, informative articles to offer my readers. If you write business-related articles or articles on the topics of Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Blogging, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM), I would like to hear from you. Please use the Contact tab above to get in touch.


Finally, the sun is shining here in the UK so I'm off for a long bike ride...doctor's orders :) If I take any more scenic pictures while on my travels, I'll upload them later on Facebook under the album: Bike Ride Photo Collection.


As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

You can also follow me on Twitter @djones1509, Google+ and on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/djones1509
http://www.facebook.com/DereksHomeandBusinessBlog

Until my next post, have a great week!

Blogger Outage: Why You Should Regularly Backup Your Blog

During scheduled maintenance on Wednesday 11th May 2011, Blogger experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger's behaviour. This resulted in all blog owners who use the blogging platform unable to publish for over 20 hours.

According to Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager on a recent post on Blogger Buzz, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (they estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts.

To resolve the problem and to get the service back to normal, Blogger returned their system to a pre-maintenance state on Thursday 12th (temporary removing all posts/comments since 7:37am PT Wednesday 11th May) and placed the service in read-only mode while they worked on restoring all content. This is the main reason why blog owners were unable to publish for over 20 hours.

Although now finally back online and bloggers being able to publish new content, Blogger are still hard at work restoring posts and comments which could take some time. Hopefully, all these posts and comments can be retrieved as the added dilemma of losing data could in fact, seriously impact users confidence in the blogging platform. There have been reports that some bloggers have already moved their blogs to WordPress due to this outage.


Why You Should Regularly Backup Your Blog

Given this recent outage with Blogger and the disappearance of some bloggers posts and comments (although temporary), backing up your blog regularly is more important than ever. Like all sites/services on the internet, Blogger (even WordPress) isn't immune to problems, so you really need to get into the habit of backing up your blog, especially after each post and when you receive comments.

Full details on backing up your blog on Blogger (and WordPress) can be found on following post: Have You Backed Up Your Blog?

Please Note: When you do a backup of your blog on Blogger, all your blog comments (along with your blog posts) are automatically saved in the XML file that you download. These comments can be found near the bottom of the document which can be viewed using a standard text editor such as WordPad etc.

Don't forget to regularly backup your template as well, especially if you make changes to your blog design or page elements. Full details on how to do this on Blogger are on the above post.

On a personal note, I was quite lucky as the outage didn't effect me apart from missing comments on my last post...I do have these backed up though just in case Blogger cannot retrieve them.

How did the outage effect you? Please let me know.

Related Articles:
Have You Backed Up Your Blog?


As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

You can also follow me on Twitter @djones1509 and on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/djones1509
http://www.facebook.com/DereksHomeandBusinessBlog

Safe blogging everyone!

Blogger Introduces Dynamic Views For Blogs

Blogger have just introduced dynamic views for blogs. By simply adding "/view" (without quotes) to the end of your blog URL, you and your visitors can view your blog in 5 different formats.

Although still in a preview stage and according to the recent post on Blogger Buzz, you'll soon be able to customise the templates and use one of them for your blog. These new views use the very latest in web technology (AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3) to deliver a host of benefits to you and your readers.

Here's the 5 views that's available:

Flipcard: [blogURL]/view/flipcard
Example: http://www.derekjones.co/view/flipcard

Mosaic: [blogURL]/view/mosaic
Example: http://www.derekjones.co/view/mosaic

Sidebar: [blogURL]/view/sidebar
Example: http://www.derekjones.co/view/sidebar

Snapshot: [blogURL]/view/snapshot
Example: http://www.derekjones.co/view/snapshot

Timeslide: [blogURL]/view/timeslide
Example: http://www.derekjones.co/view/timeslide

As these views use the latest in web technology, you will require modern browsers such as Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox 3.5+, Chrome or Safari as many elements of these views will not work in older browsers. You will also need your blog to be set to public and your feeds fully enabled before these views are visible on your blog. For more information, visit the help pages: Dynamic Views for Authors and Dynamic Views for Readers.

At present, these views do not support many of the features your original blog may have, such as the display of advertisements. For this reason, Blogger have provided the option for you to disable dynamic views in your Settings page. They intend to add these missing capabilities over the coming months as well as to let you personalise these views, including providing an option to set a particular view as the default.

With the introduction of these views, it looks as though Blogger are one-step closer to moving towards the new blogging platform (See post: Google Profiles Gone Secure & Blogger Getting A Facelift). However, with these views only in the preview stage, it's hard to tell how they're going to fit within my current blog design...only time will tell :)

What do you think of these new views? Comments welcome.

UPDATE 4TH APRIL 2011: Google have just released a Chrome Extension to support the dynamic views. Once installed, this extension will automatically detect when you are viewing a Blogger blog and then display a Blogger icon (the orange "B") in your address bar which lets you select and view the blog in one of the five new dynamic views. For more information on this, visit the Blogger Buzz post: Dynamic Views, the Chrome Extension.


As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

You can also follow me on Twitter @djones1509 and on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/djones1509
http://www.facebook.com/DereksHomeandBusinessBlog

Have a fantastic weekend!

Google Profiles Gone Secure & Blogger Getting A Facelift

Google have recently updated the profiles pages to secure. They have also introduced a new interface which is cleaner and easier to update and navigate than the old interface. If you're using the non-secure profile link on your blog or website, it will now automatically forward users to your new secure profile page.

Another, but not quite so noticeable change is with Blogger. When uploading images within a post, the URL to the image now starts with "https" rather than "http". Why the need for the images to be secure I'm not entirely sure but it could be something to do with Picasa Web Albums as all images uploaded via Blogger are automatically stored on this platform.

There will also be another major change sometime this year with Blogger. In a recent post on Blogger Buzz, Chang Kim, Product Manager announced that Blogger is getting a brand new design that is not only cleaner and more modern, but it also uses Google Web Toolkit, delivering the latest in web technology.

According to Chang, they'll also be showcasing the new content discovery feature that lets you uncover interesting and related content based on the topics of the blog you’re currently reading. More features will be unveiled throughout this year.

This is exciting news and the changes mentioned so far can only improve what has become a solid and reliable blogging platform.

What do you think?

NOTE: If you're a blogger or website owner, please consider putting a widget and/or banners on your blog or website and help support the Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami Relief Effort. Full details can be found at:
http://www.derekjones.co/2011/03/help-support-japan-earthquake-relief.html


As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

You can also follow me on Twitter @djones1509 and on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/djones1509
http://www.facebook.com/DereksHomeandBusinessBlog

Have a wonderful Sunday!

Have You Backed Up Your Blog?

Sometimes there are just not enough hours in the day to do everything, what with doing blog posts, administering Bloggers Network, visiting blogs and websites, answering questions, research and marketing etc. What I do have (and make) time for however, is to backup my blog on a regular basis.

What are the things that you HAVE to do when it comes to your blog? The chances are that you have these things on your list:

- write on a regular basis
- pay attention to SEO practices
- get other people to visit your blog

But is backing up on a regular basis part of your must do list? Probably not! Backing up your blog is something that should be automatic and it's a practice that you shouldn't forget, whatever happens.

Just imagine...what if your server crashes or your site gets hacked? Maybe Blogger's automatic spam detection software accidentally considers your blog as spam and blocks (or possibly deletes) your blog. What will happen to all the data that you have accumulated over the months or years?

This may not be a problem if your blog is relatively new as you might be able to reconstruct your posts, but just imagine losing all your data for 6 months, a year or maybe 2 years or more...now that would be disastrous!


Here's how you can backup your blog if you use Blogger:

1. Log into Blogger.
2. On the Blogger home page, click on the blog you want to backup.
3. On the left-side of the "Overview" page, click on "Settings" then on "Other".
4. Click on the "Export Blog" link under the "Blog Tools" heading.
5. On the popup window that appears, click on the "Download Blog" button.

Note: If you have modified your Template on Blogger, you can back this up as well by clicking on "Template" on the left-side of the Overview page then clicking on the "Backup/Restore" button on the top-right of the Template page. Simply click on "Download Full Template" to backup your blog's Template.


Here's how you can backup your blog if you use WordPress:

1. Use an FTP client (FileZilla for example) to download all the site files (the WordPress folder).
2. Log into phpMyAdmin and select your WordPress database.
3. Click on "Export" and make sure that all the WordPress tables are there.
4. On the "Structure" section tick "Add Drop Tables", "Add AUTO_INCREMENT", and "Enclose table and field names with backquotes".
5. On the "Data" section leave all the boxes unticked.
6. Tick "Save as file" and download the database (you can use compression if your database is big).

Don't leave it until it's too late, backup your blog NOW and continue to do so on a regular basis. Rule of thumb is to backup your blog every time you publish a new post.

NOTE: If you're a blogger or website owner, please consider putting a widget and/or banners on your blog or website and help support the Japan Earthquake and Pacific Tsunami Relief Effort. Full details can be found at:
http://www.derekjones.co/2011/03/help-support-japan-earthquake-relief.html


As ever, if you want to stay up to date with the latest blog posts, don't forget to follow via Google Friend Connect (button on sidebar), on Facebook or subscribe to our feed at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/DereksHomeAndBusinessBlog

You can also follow me on Twitter @djones1509 and on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/djones1509
http://www.facebook.com/DereksHomeandBusinessBlog

Have a wonderful weekend!