Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Blogger Tech Talk
(Sorry about the long dry stretches of text here.)
Almost a year ago, I started to write a post to explain why my blog doesn't have all the modern features that readers have come to expect. It proved to be difficult to write. I wanted to explain a technical issue in a non-technical way, struggled with different ideas for doing that, and then gave up.
I did write a blog-history post on my 5-year anniversary back in April 2008, and that generated a lot of good comments. I was moaning about the difficulty of finding time to garden AND blog AND maintain online friendships all at the same time. That hasn't changed and that was BEFORE I joined Twitter and MyFolia and Ravelry and Tomatoville and Flickr and..... what was I thinking???? But that's another post.
This post is about Blogger dragging me out of my comfort zone.
The short version is that on January 22, Blogger announced they would no longer support FTP publishing and my blog is published via FTP. If that doesn't mean anything to you, I'm sure you're in good company. Let me try to explain.
Way back when I began this blog, Blogger was not owned by Google. The only way to have a Blogger blog that didn't carry Blogger advertising was to publish to your own domain (usually something dot com) via FTP (file transfer protocol), which meant that the software used to create and organize blog posts was located on Blogger's servers (computers which serve up info over networks), but once those posts were created they would be copied to the user's domain (different server) for viewing by the one or two people who knew about the blog and wanted to read it for some reason. So being a control freak, and not wanting to display advertising, and already having my own domain name (tangledbranches.com, which I registered to have a place to publish my family history info) I chose that option.
That was all well and good for several years. But time passed and the world changed. There were NO social networking features in the original Blogger, not even comments. No newsfeeds either. My blog started looking outdated when Blogger (since acquired by Google) introduced "Layouts" intended to replace the original "Templates". Those are the bits of software that control the appearance of a blog and all the cool stuff that people put in headers and sidebars. Layouts rely on additional software on Google/Blogger servers to control and display the newer social networking features, such as Google Friend Connect and feed widgets (displaying your friends' latest posts in your sidebar). And Layouts are not available to me, as a user who publishes via FTP to my own domain. So I don't have any of that cool stuff in my sidebars. Also, there was/is a problem with displaying this blog's latest posts in Google widgets on other peoples' blogs. I thought I had taken all the necessary steps to resolve that, but it still doesn't work.
I'm still a control freak and I don't see any good reason to let my writing reside on server space which I'm not paying for. In my mind that creates a question of ownership, even though the Blogger Terms of Service currently claim no ownership of individual blogs (Item 6). Terms of Service can and do change. "Google may, in its sole discretion, modify or revise these Terms of Service and policies at any time, and you agree to be bound by such modifications or revisions."
But with the suspension of FTP support, Google will no longer allow the option of having Blogger blogs reside anywhere other than Google servers. That is completely understandable when you consider that they are currently providing a valuable service FOR FREE. I assume they somehow need to make money on the venture at sometime.
So, one way or another I have to change the blog or stop blogging altogether. During the writing of this post, I convinced myself that rather than switching to a Blogger Custom Domain (meaning that the blog's address would still be somewhere on tangledbranches.com, but the blog would actually reside on Google's servers) I will most likely switch to WordPress hosted under my own domain. Wish me luck.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Snowdrop Update and Blog Tinkering
Thought I'd show you how the snowdrops fared after my Bloom Day post.
We got a surprise snowstorm on Thursday - about 4 or 5 inches. Oh well.......it is winter.
Shirl kindly provided a link to a video showing how to plant snowdrops in-the-green, and that got me started snowdrop surfing. I turned up some interesting web pages. Several of these mention Hitch Lyman, who is seemingly the only purveyor of snowdrops in-the-green in the US. If you know of any others, please share.
- Cold Climate Kathy's post about snowdrops and Hitch Lyman prompted me to send for his catalog a couple of years ago.
- Last March the Washington Post's garden editor wrote about snowdrops, Hitch Lyman, and The March Bank at Winterthur.
- The Transatlantic Plantsman has a photo of a very enviable stand of snowdrops - escaped from cultivation. Maybe that's the secret - toss them in a ditch and see what grows.
I've been doing some tinkering around the edges of the blog. My right-column blogroll had gotten very out of sync with my reading habits - I had been using Bloglines but came to prefer Google Reader and so didn't keep the Bloglines list up-to-date. I'm still working on merging the two lists. And I changed the format to try to make it easier to read, but that typeface looks rather small to my aging eyes.
Yesterday while looking for something else, I came across a snippet of Blogger template code to display the name of each commenter on the main page (i.e. you don't have to click the "comment" link to see who has commented). I tried it out, but I'm not sure whether I like it or not. One of the things I don't like is that the commenter's name isn't linked to the comment, but to the commenter's Blogger profile page (or some other web page in the case of non-Blogger commenters). We're getting into the political season here in the US and polls are all the rage everywhere, so how about helping me decide this issue?
Labels: blogroll, snow, snowdrops, template
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Tinkering
Don't look now, but I'm tinkering with the layout of the blog. I want to add a third column on the right so I have room for a blogroll, and some other things.
This might be a good time to explain why I don't have a blogroll. When I started the blog almost 4 years ago, there were hardly any other garden blogs. I think I didn't even know about those few that were around then. Time passed and eventually I came to know that there were many many many garden blogs. In order to have a blogroll, I would have to judge which blogs to include and which to exclude. Too much pressure. And besides I'd have to change the blog template or have a very long column of text on the left. And I had to create my own template, because I wanted it to be unique. So I just didn't do it. But now, with so many kind souls having linked to my blog, I think at least I ought to reciprocate.
And I'd kind of like to add some links to various other favorite sites, or maybe put a LibraryThing widget there, or...? So....the blog may look a little odd before I'm finished playing with it.
