It's about time!
I use Google's free Picasa to import photos from our cameras, organize them, clean them up, and upload to this blog and Facebook.
The BlogThis! button in Picasa had a limit of 4 images it would upload at a time. Now the Google folks have removed this limit. They also fixed a localhost bug. My life just got a little easier.
Recently I heard from Rick and MOCougFan that they couldn't leave comments.
I haven't made any changes to this blog in many months so I assumed it was some temporary Blogger problem. But it didn't go away so I changed the comment style from Embedded to Full Page and comments seem to be working again.
I don't have a good way to test comments (I've always been able to leave comments) so if it isn't working please let me know by using the E-mail me link in the About section (upper right).
Update: It seems the change worked - those who couldn't comment before can now comment. After more internet searching it seems the problem occurs most frequently (exclusively?) with Internet Explorer and blogs with javascript widgets.
I've been blogging for two years and have around 130 posts. Not a ton of content, but it took time to write and it's of value to me. The thought of losing it all is troubling so I went looking for ways to backup this blog.
Sadly, Blogger doesn't have a backup feature. The advice they give for backups is to use a special template that will show all of your posts in one long page. Technically this would work, but it's not very elegant so I went searching.
The first solution I looked into was HTTrack, an open source program for copying websites. This tool will work, but not very efficiently for Blogger blogs because it follows every link and saves each webpage as it crawls the website. If the Labels or Archive tree elements are used, HTTrack will follow all of the links these elements provide and save multiple copies of each post. HTTrack has lots of options and it's possible it could be customized to efficiently backup a Blogger blog, but I couldn't find any info for how to do it and I didn't feel like spending a lot of time experimenting, so I kept looking for other solutions.
Another tool I found was Blogger Backup. It logs into Blogger, copies each post and saves them to your hard drive as XML files. It also has a feature to restore posts, which could be useful, but I haven't tested it yet. The program didn't work at first, but worked fine after I closed it and started it again. So now I at least have all the text, and supposedly the links and formatting, of my posts saved. Image backup is not yet implemented, but may be in the future (it's on the feature request list).
The Dummies Guide To Google Blogger Beta (a mouthful name and one of the most hideous styles I've ever seen) had some suggestions for making backups. One was to use a Firefox browser extension called ScrapBook to save copies of Blogger webpages. The interface is a bit odd, but it seemed to work. And the Dummies Guide had a good idea to backup chunks of your blog at a time by Blog Archive links - here are the steps:
Right-click an archive link for a month or year and then select ScrapBook's Capture Link As ... to save all the posts in that time period. The image below shows me about to save a copy of all 69 posts from 2007.
After ScrapBook analyzes the link it will present a dialog box of options (see below). I actually chose "KanyonKris - 2007" for the Title.
I chose to download Image, Movie and Sound files and it worked great for the MP3 file I had linked in one post, but the images were a mixed bag. ScrapBook did capture the smaller 400 pixel "thumbnail" images I use for the blog, but not the larger version of the image linked from the thumbnail to Picasa Web Albums because the link does not end in ".jpg". It would be nice if I could copy the larger images as well, but I can see why ScrapBook couldn't figure it out. At least I have the small images and the links to Picasa Web Album saved.
I used a depth of 0 to only capture my blog content, but I may do another backup with a depth of 1 to backup not only my blog but all the webpages I've linked to - this would also capture the Picasa Web Albums images that I did not capture as noted above. I include a lot of links in my blog posts so a depth 1 backup would take some time. If you select a depth greater than 0 you get another dialog where you can choose which webpages (manually or with filters) to backup so you can slim down what you capture.
After backing up each year my archive looks like what you see below. I can click on any of those 3 ScrapBook bookmarks and that year opens in Firefox. Pretty slick.
In the future I'll use both Blogger Backup and ScrapBook to make backups periodically of my new posts. Hopefully this strategy will provide good backups in case something goes wrong.
Blogger has a new Slideshow page element I added to my blog (top of the side menu). It's pointing to my Moab photo album now, but I'll change that to a new album of favorite cycling photos eventually. I've been meaning to put together a "best of" set of photos for a while, so this new slideshow will motivate me to actually get around to doing it.
Update: The slideshow is now of my favorite mountain biking photos. It took a while to put together. First I had to organize all my photos (create a better directory structure, rename files, then move them into the proper directory) then sort through 1,200 photos to pick out my 83 favorites. It took several hours, but it was worth doing. Looking through all these images brought back a lot of good memories and reminded me how thankful I am for all the joy mountain biking has brought me.
I added a Contact Me section - use the E-mail link to send me a message. I noticed UTRider has an e-mail link that uses some sophisticated JavaScript tricks to hide your e-mail address from spammers. It was developed by Syronex and is available for free. Here's how to add it to your Blogger blog:
Kevin Kelly posted about making a Life Countdown to motivate him make the most of each day. I thought it was an interesting idea so I made one for myself (look on the right side, down a bit). I followed Kevin Kelly's instructions, but did mine in Javascript so I could put it on this blog. I don't know if I'll keep it. My wife thinks it's morbid. Mostly it was just an interesting idea that gave me an excuse to do a little web development.
So far I'm impressed with Blogger. They make blogging and changing the layout and look of your blog easy, yet they give you access to the "guts" if you want to tweak. Recently I removed the Navbar, added my own search, added stats, and changed the favicon.
The Navbar is removed (hidden, would be more accurate) by adding some code to the Template. From the Dashboard click on Layout, then Edit HTML then look for the body { line in the template code and add this code before it :
The Navbar has a search function, so with the Navbar gone I created my own. Click on Page Elements, then click on the Add a Page Element link in the area you want the search to be. Select a HTML/Javascript element and name it Search and put the following code in the box, but change "kanyonkris" to the name of your blog:
/******* REMOVE THIS WHOLE BLOCK TO SHOW THE BLOGGER NAVBAR ********
** **
**/ #navbar-iframe {height:0px;visibility:hidden;display:none} /**
** **
********************************************************************
<form id="searchthis" action="http://kanyonkris.blogspot.com/search" method="get">Save and View the blog and the Navbar should be gone and a Search box should appear.
<input name="q" size="15" type="text">
<input value="Search" type="submit">
</form>
<link href="http://www.somesite.com/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut">If you don't use an animated icon, just use the top line. Replace the URL path above with the one where your icons are stored and you should be set.
<link href="http://www.somesite.com/animated_favicon1.gif" rel="icon" type="image/gif">
The first style for this blog was an HTML template I found. I liked it, but as I looked into Blogger's new Layout system and how easy it made customization, I had to switch to it. I think this style looks OK and it has a number of functional improvements. I'll probably tweak a bit here and there, but I doubt I'll make another big style change.
I made a few changes to the style of this blog. I added the banner image - yes, it's the Moab Slickrock trail, 2005. I created the bike chain pattern you see on the sides - it took a while, but I think it turned out pretty good. This template was one I found - I've made a few modifications to it. I'm having fun tweaking.
I have done a lot of cycling with UTRider this year (mountain and road) and he encouraged me to start a blog. I guess he thinks I have something of value to say, so I'll give it a go. I'll write a lot about cycling, because that's what I'm into these days, but I'll probably post about other topics that strike my fancy. Well, here goes...
