Vanity of vanities; all is vanity

A victim of my never ending tinkering, I noted that of the two blogs using my custom domain, the naked domain was being redirected to the ‘blog’ rather than the ‘www’ sub-domain. On the face of it this is easy enough to fix in Blogger settings, yet when I changed the setting on one blog this was reflected on the other; either both were set to redirect or neither were. Whatever order I unset and then set I seemingly couldn’t change the destination of my naked domain. Until I remembered to clear the cache; fool me once, Blogger, shame on you, fool me twice ... actually, I think this is the second time.

Nonplussed one

I can’t believe I’m spending so much time on this; it’s a little bit obsessive. I noticed recently that the “share” part of “Recommend on Search, Share on Google+” had stopped working on the blog. What am I talking about? Why the Google +1 button of course!  For a while I assumed it was tinkering by the people at Mountain View, and then took a look yesterday because, even if it’s never used, you want to know it would work in the unlikely event of a click.

It was tinkering - at least, I think it was - though not in the way I’d thought. I assumed the code behind the button had changed whereas I discovered a run-time error in the JavaScript, and only because I happened to look using IE. How can I get Chrome to indicate there’s been a JavaScript error without spitting all over me; an extension no doubt?

Cue a bit of tinkering, moving the script to the bottom of the HTML before the </body> tag - where I realised it should be, but to no avail. Then out of curiosity I removed the script altogether. I expected to lose the button since without the script how would it be generated, but there it was. What’s more, the “share” part of the button’s function was now working. So all I have are the <g:plusone> elements and Blogger, a Google property after all, does the rest; until they change it back again. Stay tuned for more exciting adventures.

A touch of ordinary

A shop, a walk, exercise (either that or I have to stop eating), two good films later - Il Postino and Garage - and a sudden realisation that I can use Blogger to create a basic “online business card”, as various services such as flavors.me and about.me are sometimes described, or a home page. Curiosity (vanity?) persuaded me to buy a custom domain when setting up my blog; so I could create another and assign the “www” subdomain, and since it’s Blogger it would also (unlike Google Sites) be able to handle naked domains.

Specify the favicon, hide the navbar with a bit of CSS and hack/edit away at the Template HTML to hide almost everything else and I had a blank canvas to work with. The trickiest part was remembering my login credentials for changing the DNS settings - mine were buried away in Google Apps - then undo an existing mapping for “www”, change the CNAME and add some A records. The result is admittedly light on functionality and I only needed to cough up a measly $20 for a whole set of features, but where’s the fun in that?

Getting social

Two good things happened yesterday; the problem with the house alarm was sorted, and courtesy of Mickey I received a Google+ invite. I should probably take a thorough look first, but whilst I’ve got the urge I may as well post now, haphazard though the result may be. At first sight it looks cleaner, though this is in part the ‘lick of paint’ affect, more space and less clutter; placed on another tab I flicked between Google+ and Facebook and not surprisingly they’re somewhat similar. In functional terms however, Google+ wins hands down.

Privacy on Facebook has always been a bugbear. My own concern is less with how much is public (it is a social network after all) but their strange inability to match privacy settings with the layout; the sections on the configuration page are as if for a different version of the UI, it’s that bad. Google+ on the other hand, allows me to configure the privacy in-line with the layout, and combined with Circles it becomes not only easier but more flexible. For example, my telephone details are only visible to people in my “Family” circle.

Circles are how you organise your contacts; Google+ defaults with “Friends”, “Family”, “Acquaintances” and “Following”, but you can create your own. It’s intuitive, you can tell they’ve spent a lot of time on the UI and it’s at the core of everything; who I share to and what I look at, the default is ‘Public’ but it’s very easy to change. I also like that the share function is plumbed into the Google toolbar at the top; Gmail, Documents and Picasa (soon to be re-branded Google Photos), to name a few, have got it so far.

Hangouts look like fun, though I'm not sure how I'll use them, and I can’t quite see how Sparks fits. With Google Buzz... at the moment my Buzz is a Twitter reader; once Google+ is fully featured I expect it to disappear. And one of those features not yet (but surely soon) available will be some kind of search function, combined with the possible use of hash tags, though with tags I’m not so convinced; of course I'm basing this on how I personally use Twitter.

What I’d really like is a level of integration - or shared functionality - with my blog, which given it’s hosted on Blogger (soon to be re-branded Google Blogs) may one day be possible. I read a post where one brave soul had decided to move their blog to Google+, and if you’re only concerned with content I can see how that might work; but blogs aren’t only content, they provide a personalised look and feel, your own brand as it were. Essentially I’d like to be able to share my blog content on Google+, and to share the Google+ comments within my blog; Google+ and my blog would thus become different frameworks for the same blog data, and my blog data one source to my Google+ stream. I wonder how long I’ll have to wait.

Reason

I remind myself; every time I find something that isn’t working I’ve found something to do, as opposed to wondering about my choice of font. Since discovering that embedded comments are causing a problem - in that you can’t comment - I’ve switched to a pop-up window; it looks rubbish, but it works. Slightly more difficult will be unravelling the customised HTML, started when I knew next to nothing and continued through various stages of ignorance; it’s more ‘fun’ that way.

How long has it been broken? Possibly only a week, and since I don’t remember tinkering in that time I wonder if Blogger have done something to interfere with my ‘enhancements’. I should probably update to the latest designer, but that would mean starting over which... would give me something to do.

There are better goals. Absurdism may not be the easiest of subjects but I am determined to finish Camus, albeit not ‘finish with’ Camus since it’s well written - or should that be those bits I can understand are well written - as I dare say are the many bits I can’t. I’ve heard The Outsider is good too. And there’s a host of other stimulation to be found from people who I’ve never read. Small steps, something a little more accessible next; and I don’t say that to knock my intellectual capability, only that I’m a little slow.

The last post

This may be my last post. Earlier today I migrated my Google Apps account to become ‘more like a full’ Google Account, whatever that means. Doing nothing would have meant an automatic transition a few weeks from now; this way (I reasoned) I could at least deal with any problems at a time of my choosing. Ever the pessimist I did wonder about the custom domain name on my blog, the setting up of which had resulted in my Apps account. On the other hand, I’d done this within Blogger and there must be numerous such examples. Cue a few uncomfortable hours unable to log in at all, wondering if that was that and not sure I wanted to ‘start again’, followed by a desperate ‘clear the cache’, as if that was going to work... which it did, and millions breathed a sigh of relief. Well, eleven at the last count.

To search, or not to search

If there’s one function you expect Blogger to nail it’s 'search'. Blogger after all is owned by Google whose raison d'être is the search engine. So in addition to the long standing query over whether blog searches reliably return all they should, I’m bemused that for the last few days the search widget they provide has failed to load. It’s a “known problem” apparently and Google are “working on a fix”, though I got fed up waiting and had to search for one myself. Thanks to Vagabundia the problem with the search widget was solved by signing up for an AJAX search API key then adding the following script into the head of my blog:

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi?key=API_KEY" type="text/javascript"></script>

An alternative to the widget, and something that works like the search function in the Blogger Navbar, would be to add an HTML/JavaScript gadget and write a little code of your own:

<form id="search-this" action="BLOG_URL/search" style="display:inline;" method="get">
<input id="search-query" maxlength="255" name="q" size="19" type="text" />
<input id="search-btn" value="Search" type="submit" />
</form>

Should I feel inclined it’s an option that allows me to style the display to my own ‘taste’ but personally I prefer the output from the widget - when it works.