#Blogger and #twitter #fail the open #Internet

When I publish on my blog, it is published to an international public. Once I have blogged, a tweet on #Twitter is produced to make more people interested in reading the article. When I tweet, it is intended for a worldwide public.

The moves by Google and Twitter to publish my blog, my tweets in country specific domains upsets me. By publishing it on for instance "http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com.au/" upsets me. It upsets me because it allows for easy censorship of Blogger and Twitter. It will be Google or Twitter who decide what gets published where. Their excuse that the governments of countries ask them to do this, does not impress me much.

I am not amused with the situation. I like Blogger, its functionality is great. However, I categorically deny Google the right to box me in, kettle is now the word that comes to mind. It is not okay to restrict my access to the Internet for what I blog. It is not okay to restrict the access of the readers of blogs what they can read.

We have had our SOPA moment and like with SOPA, this is how the Internet is damaged. As this is not acceptable, I will have to reconsider what to do next. We will have to consider what to do next.

Thanks,

      GerardM

#TwitterFeed for communicating the chapter

When a #Wikimedia chapter wants to get its message out, there are all these networks to choose from. Often it is only a matter of configuring your social network. Sometimes you need a tool like TwitterFeed . It helps me by creating a tweet. By using hash tags in the first two sentences, people are likely to find my blog post.

There is a nice article at ehow that explains how you have to set it up. An added extra of TwitterFeed is that it allows the use of OpenID.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Google supports the latest browsers

Supporting old old browsers is expensive. Not only are many old browsers less compatible with standards, they also do not support emerging standards like HTML5. The continued support for IE6 in MediaWiki prevents the adoption of new technology.

People who blog using Blogger have been informed that only the latest two releases of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari will be supported from August 1. It also states that this will also affect popular Google applications like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites.

Let us hope that Google will be able to force people to use an up to date browser; this will make the development of MediaWiki a lot easier and a lot less expensive.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Alternate view of my #Blogger blog

#Illustrations are not only attention grabbers, they also help get the stories read. What many bloggers do not realise is that when stories are too long, chances are that people will not finish reading them. Illustrations break the text and invite people back to a next paragraph.



Blogger has a novel way of looking at a blog. It shows for instance a mosaic of the illustrations used. The fun part starts when you guess what a story is about. There are more views that are nice to play with:

• flipcard
• sidebar
• snapshot
• timeslide

Thanks,
       GerardM

Experimenting with the Reenie Beanie #font

#Blogger has its own blog.  Obviously and their latest story was "More Fonts Means More Choice". Through the advanced settings of the Blogger Template Designer, you can select the type of text you want to change. I changed the title as per the example and fiddled around with it.

My readers do not need to have the font on their system because it is a web font. When they use the translation feature and the language uses the standard characters of the Latin script, they will get translated headings still in the "Reenie Beanie" font.

 


Most fonts are for the Latin script, but there are seven fonts for Cyrillic, four for Greek and one for Khmer as well. These fonts are of particular interest as they demonstrate that there are fonts for the "other scripts". Fonts that do not have to be loaded on the local system.

I wonder what it takes to get fonts added for other scripts, scripts like Myanmar or Thai.
Thanks,
GerardM

My blog now with #mobile telephone support

#Blogger has improved its service a lot with the new mobile support. Given that it is important to me to have my blog available as effectively as possible, it is a huge thing.

So check this beta offering out when you are bored on the train or when you are just interested in the latest thing I have commented on.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Plotting numbers on a map

One recent improvement in #Blogger are its new statistics. The visitor numbers are accumulated per country and this is projected on a world map.

Looking at this map, I need to concentrate on the USA because this is where my audience is.

Feedjit uses the same data and in stead of accumulating the numbers per country it shows my traffic as dots on a map.

Having traffic projected in this way, I find my audience in Europe. There is nothing for me in Alaska but there are some people interested in what I write in Africa.

The Wikimedia Foundation is experimenting with geo-location. It would be interesting to see if Wikipedia's traffic shows a similar distribution.
Thanks,
       GerardM

A solution for now for my #Blogger problem

The "draft" interface for Blogger is typically great. For some time now, it prevents me from uploading images to my blog. This is hugely frustrating and as a result I did not blog as much as I used to do.

The old interface is however still available and, it apparently allows me to upload images. This image is from the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and is one of a series of Dutch proverbs.

It is quite interesting because the proverb seems to be the two last lines of a rhyme. A rhyme that few people still know. Having such resources on line is great; it makes a cultural heritage available.

To some extend, if you cannot find it with Google, it does not exist.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Software sucks .. sometimes nicely

Uploading pictures to #Blogger and #Commons is broken for me. I uploaded a poster about our collaboration with the Dutch National Archive and Spaarnestad photo and it looks awful on the Dutch Wikipedia.

Blogger is still broken and it does not allow me to link to images either. I feel very frustrated BUT I now have the impression that they are trying to fix things.

It is quite obvious that people at Google and at the Wikimedia Foundation are frustrated as well. They can do well without such hassles. However, problems with software that is used by many people is bound to break every now and again.

I will happily post a picture of a Buddha when the techies have stopped suffering.
Thanks,
      GerardM

A big boost for the #MediaWiki localisation in #Farsi

There was a big boost at #translatewiki.net of the localisations of the extensions used by the Wikimedia projects. Several new people started localising and within a day it grew from 66% to 87%. This is quite impressive. Farsi will be the 20th language in the top 50 languages of the world to have virtually complete localisation in a Wikimedia context.

The reason; possibly the message came through that the language committee does not consider any request as long as the localisation is not complete. Whenever a request is considered, the first step is always the current state of the localisations.

With a bit of luck, the fa.wikinews.org will be created at the same time as the ko.wikinews.org. That is, luck for our Iranian friends.
Thanks,
      GerardM

PS no pictures initially because Blogger is broken
PS on IRC  I learned about the png version that is used internally

#Google blocks use of #Wikimedia #Commons pictures

I want to write about a domain provider. In order to illustrate this I selected this picture from Wikimedia Commons. I get the message:

Uploading

-

Stop upload

Only select images for which you have confirmed that you have a licence for use.

I make a screen print in order to illustrate my blog post. I try to upload it and I get the message:

Uploading

-

Stop upload

Only select images for which you have confirmed that you have a licence for use.

The page on Commons about the picture is quite clear:

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

I am equally sure that I am allowed to feature a screen shot using either the Chrome or the Firefox browser, if only because it is fair use.

Google, what are you thinking, are you intent on killing your blogger service ?
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Google, where are my #blogger images?

MIA

Most of the images that I placed so carefully on my blog are missing. The image that should show here is removed from my view. It shows that even the picture that I use as my avatar do not show.

While we are at it, uploading the pictures to the Picasa web version is in itself a good idea. You will find that a picture has been uploaded again and again. I am quite happy if you reconcile them. I hope that a process like this is the reason why my blog looks so bare..
Thanks,
     GerardM

Update: they are back at 22:36

Draft blogger

It is nice when software gets new functionality. Blogger, the software environment that I use to blog has a "Draft" version. This is where new features are exposed to the people who dare to live dangerously.

On this blog you will now find a "blog list" it shows a link to the latest entry of a specific blog. I have them sorted by blog with the most recent blog entry first ...

This blog entry I will post tonight at 11:00 PM. It is really cool that it is now possible to post at a specified date and time. This is particularly good when you have news that is under embargo until a specified moment...

There are more features pending a general release. These are the ones I like best.
Thanks,
GerardM