Posts tagged blogger

blogging_platform.jpg

Quick overview of available Blogging Platforms

47
4 years ago
by Benedict Herold in

blogging_platform.jpgBlogging has become a passion to lot of people these days (I can include myself). Technorati says a new blog appears every 2 seconds. And there are lot many novice blogger behind it. They will come across this question before they start a blog “which blogging platform to use?”

The options are wide open and choice is yours!

This article might not answer the question directly. However, I’d try to provide least information about most of blogging platforms that are available today either as a service or download.

WordPress.org
WordPress.org is the best and well-known open source Blogging platform. It is widely used commonly by popular self-hosted blogs around the blogosphere. It runs with minimal setup and it requires just PHP/ MySQL preferably in Apache. It rates high compared with other since it can be highly customized. In addition to this there are huge number of plugin authors and theme authors are there to help reduce bloggers effort. WordPress.org also has nice development community that ensures the WordPress core get better and better.

Blogger
Blogger is a free one-push blog publishing platform. Most of the novice bloggers starts Blogging with Google’s Blogger in first place. The new blogger comes in with Widget support that eradicated the use of HTML for templates. Setting up a blog in Blogger is painless and easiest of anything else. You can customize Blogger to certain extend only since they are not an open source solution. There are few popular blogs that still runs on Blogger.

WordPress.com
WordPress.com is a multi-user version variant of WordPress.org. WordPress.com have their own-hosted solution of newbie bloggers, who doesn’t have a hosting space. WordPress.com comes in with neat option for a newbie. WordPress.com comes with space restrictions; in addition to that you can monetize your blog.

Movable Type
Movable Type is a web blog publishing platform successfully developed by SixApart. It is the one who invented Trackback feature in the first hand that was later devised by other blogging systems as well and now it is more-or-less a standard. Movable Type is written in Perl and supports most of the Database as backend. Movable Type is best suited for business use.

Typepad
Typepad is a blogging service provided by SixApart and it is one of largest paid blogging service available now. Typepad is based on Movable Type and it shares most of its technical functions. Additionally, it also supports multi-user, mobile and photo blogging. Typepad is been successfully used by lot of professional writers.

LiveJournal
LiveJournal is a CMS that allows you to express your self by publishing your private journal, your blog or your forum or any of a social entity. It is the best in town for writing life journals.

Vox
Vox is a personal blogging service. It’s all about ease of use, privacy control, playing well with other web services, and staying connected to the people you care about. Vox is good platform when it comes to multimedia blogging.

Text Pattern
Text Patter is a flexible, elegant, easy-to-use content management system for all kinds of websites. Blogs works fine as well. Text Pattern also has its own list of plugins and templates.

Drupal
Drupal is a modular content management system and the blogging engine was initially indented for bulletin board system. Drupal is good for building online communities and those communities powers their blogging engine. It is written in PHP. It has a wide community support.

Joomla
Joomla is truly a content management system that forked from Mambo, a pretty good open source content management system. Joomla has won the best open source content management system of the year 2006. Joomla has a decent blogging engine and other extension.

Expression Engine
pMachine’s Expression Engine is not well know but it is a powerful and much extensible software that you may need to give a try. It is a complete content management system with much Blogging feature as well. In addition to Blogging module it comes with inbuilt gallery module. It is more suitable for heavy business blogs. Also the cost associated with it is high.

Nucleus
Nucleus is been around for sometime now and it is not much popular yet though. Nucleus is mature blogging software that comes with most of the required blogging features. Nucleus is also programmed in PHP and runs on MySQL backend.

b2evolution
b2evloution was developed from the same original code that spawned WordPress, b2Evolution is written in PHP and licensed under GPL so is always free to use. It comes with lot of features that you may need to check, which includes antispam, skins, multi-blogs, users, authors, integrated stats, its own plugin framework etc. etc.

TeraPad
TeraPad is hosted blogging solution which takes blogger beyond the blogging experience. TeraPad comes in with versatile blogging tools,  image gallery,  PayPal ready shopping cart, event calendar etc.  TeraPad places a its ad over the site which might annoy bloggers a little but may it is need for TeraPad to keep it service Free :)

This is not a comprehensive list, I might have left out few of them with or without my knowledge. You can very well indicate them by your comments.

Update (06/17) : Mayank has pointed out two more additional blogging service. I have added an overview of TeraPad; Thanks Mayank.

Blogger to WordPress

Migrating New Blogger to WordPress 2

43
5 years ago
by Benedict Herold in

Import your posts with comments from New Blogger to WordPress 2. New Blogger Import tool is ease and simple to use; no more manual pains.

My love with Blogger is over finally :) I have been planning for move to WordPress for a long time. I have been stopped since I did’t want to carry the pain in my butt with all the manual stuff involved in it previously.

After the announcement of new blogger import feature in WordPress. I thought to give a try and which now made me to take the final move. Now I’m proudly powered by WordPress and themed by Qwil

Blogger to WordPress

The new blogger import plugin is out of beta and is been tested with the current version of WordPress. The final version is available here. From the new release of WordPress this plugin would be present as default.

Features :-

  • Imports all Blogger Posts
  • Imports all the Comments
  • Imports the Post Author and Comment Author information
  • Imports Categories (i.e. Labels) from Blogger

Other Useful Utils:-

1. While you’re testing the blogger import feature you can try out WordPress Suicide plugin; this plugin will help you clear all the posts in WordPress.

2. By itself it does not support to import the images hosted in blogger, but you can use the blogger image import plugin.

The plugin is compatible only with new blogger so i would suggest to migrate everyone to migrate to new blogger. Since the old blogger import utility will not import post comments along with posts.

Here I will provide you the steps required to Import the post from New Blogger to WordPress.

Limitation:-

The import plugin won’t work with the blogs that are using FTP publishing. So before trying this import feature make sure you switch to Blogspot publishing.

Steps:-

  1. Make sure you got the id of Blogger which your tring to import( say bloggerid.blogspot.com).
  2. Make sure your blogger publish full feeds, if not modify the option to publish full feeds. ( In Settings –> Site Feeds –> Blog Posts Feed –> FULL)
  3. Download the latest plugin from here.
  4. Upload the plugin to the WordPress plugin location and activate the plugin.
  5. Make sure your web-server supports url_fopen or should have curl enabled.
  6. In WordPress, goto Manage –> New Blogger Import to access the plugin.
  7. Provide your blogger id which you’re trying to import.
  8. Select the default category and author, where you want the post to be imported.
  9. Also you have option to create the category and author corresponding to the post.
  10. If you’re blog is too large and you’re facing time out error, reduce the import cycles and unpick the import every posts in single fly option.
  11. If you’re using Haloscan comment in blogger, then enable the option and use the plugin in conjunction with this.
  12. If you want to enable permalink structure same as used by blogger turn this on. I would not suggest it.
  13. Click on import, you will be all set and it ask to import the author information.
  14. Save those changes. Now all the post and comments are imported to WordPress
  15. Now it’s time to say good bye to Blogger forever. See the redirection below.

If you have published the Blogger using FTP previously, you got good luck. Since you will be able to do a Permanent direct 301 using .htaccess using the syntax below.

RedirectMatch permanent ^blog/2006/07/old-post-link.html$ http://www.sitename.org/newblog/2006/07/new-post-link/

The posts redirected with 301 redirect will not loose search engine ranking or penalized.

But if you’re using blogspot publishing, you will left with no other option that using <META> tag redirect. You can make the required changes in the template and republish the blog. So that the blogger will redirect all the request to the newly hosted wordpress domain. See below a sample syntax of blogger template should be to enable the blogger redirect.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>My blog title</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;
url=http://www.sitename.com/newblog" />
</head>
<body><p>
If your browser supports Refresh, you'll be transported to our <a href="http://www.sitename.com/newblog">New Blog</a> in 5 seconds, otherwise, select the link manually. Thank you </p>
</body>
</html>

Now you will preserve your traffic as well.

Have fun. Say good-bye to Blogger soon :-)

Happily and Proudly powered by WordPress.

Update (04/26/07) : The above method doesn’t work anymore; since the plugin in broken as there was a change in Blogger’s feed. Better option would be upgrading to WordPress 2.2, which has inbuilt blogger import feature. Good Luck!

Lightbox JS v2.0 Integration with Blogger Template

53
5 years ago
by Benedict Herold in

Create a simple Photolog using Blogger.com and Lightbox JS. A step by step guide for photo bloggers; to Integrate Lightbox with their existing Blogger publishing system.

Blogger is a popular weblog publishing system, which supports custom designs and templates. Meanwhile Blogger is not much popular as other blog publishing system like WordPress, etc for its support to Plug-ins. In other hand Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It is lightweight and works with most of the browsers with Javascripts enabled.

Yesterday, I was trying to publish my own Photolog. I was looking for a good web serice so that it would ease my task. I am with Blogger for a quite time and still I have not moved my blog to WordPress, even I wish so. So I decided to go with Blogger again with the FTP publishing enabled. But blogger didn’t have any ready made plug-in for Lightbox so I had to hack the code little bit. Blogger with Ligthbox would give any blog a realistic Photolog look.

Step by Step Guide:-

  1. Download the Lightbox JS script from Here and copy the scripts to your web server most likely where your blog is been published.
  2. Login into Blogger system and go to Template –> Edit HTML
  3. Add the below line into the Meta section of HTML tag 
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen">

  4. Add the following scripts tag in the header section of the HTML template 
    <script type="text/javascript" src="js/prototype.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/lightbox.js"></script>
  5. Check the CSS and make sure the referenced prev.gif and next.gif files are in the right location. Also, make sure the loading.gif and close.gif files as referenced near the top of the lightbox.js file are in the right location.
  6. Once you’re done Save the Template.
  7. With Blogger, we will not able to tweak their system directly, since it is not open source software. So we need to have little manual effort every time before you publish a photo log entry.
  8. After creating a blog entry in Blogger system, do the following steps before publishing.
  9. Go to Edit HTML option in the Post window as show in the figure
  10. Once you have uploaded the image you will see an entry similar shown in the figure below.

  11. Replace the selected code above with rel=”lightbox” as shown below
  12. You can also add title tag in tag to enable Caption in the LightBox displayed
  13. Now you’re all set and you can publish your Photolog.

If you like to have image sets for each post entry then you need to add rel="lightbox[group_name]" for all the images that you which to show in that particular group image set. It should be similar to the below image.
Now you have a wonderful Photolog to start with as I do; Visit my PhotoLog at The PhotoLog

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