I’m special, Google told me so…

Below is my notification e-mail from Google regarding the shutdown of FTP support next month.  I always knew I was special, but now Google quantified it for me (0.5%).  I’m not one in a million, but five in one thousand isn’t bad.

I’m moving to WordPress (wordpress.org), but the import (Blogger, and RSS) both failed.  I took a break and will revisit the issue this evening.

Dear FTP user:

You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog),  and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement. We will be following up with more information via e-mail in the weeks ahead, and regularly updating a blog dedicated to this service shut-down here: http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/. 

The full text of the announcement at Blogger Buzz follows.

Last May, we discussed a number of challenges facing[1] Blogger users who relied on FTP to publish their blogs. FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing.
Three years ago we launched Custom Domains[2] to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP[3] and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview[4] of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users.
For that reason, we are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010. We realize that this will not necessarily be welcome news for some users, and we are committed to making the transition as seamless as possible. To that end:

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• We will be providing a dedicated blog[5] and help documentation
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released.

We have a number of big releases planned in 2010. While we recognize that this decision will frustrate some users, we look forward to showing you the many great things on the way. Thanks for using Blogger.

Regards,

Rick Klau
Blogger Product Manager
Google
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

[1] http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/05/ftp-vs-custom-domains.html
[2] http://buzz.blogger.com/2007/01/blogger-custom-domains.html
[3] http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/05/ftp-vs-custom-domains.html
[4] http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55373
[5] http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/

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This e-mail is being sent to notify you of important changes to your Blogger account.

 

Technorati Tags: Blogger,WordPress,PaulIsSad

Bye Bye Blogger

Blogger is eliminating support for FTP publishing as of March 26, 2010.  For once in my life, I’m not waiting until the last minute to change.

I previously experimented with WordPress, then had the mySQL database explode when I attempted an upgrade, so I reverted to Blogger, and have been fat, dumb, and moderately happy since.

After a quick review, I’m looking at WordPress (again), and Movable Type.  I considered using Drupal, and it looks interesting, but I don’t have the bandwidth this year to go deep geek with Open Source. 

I have installed WordPress 2.9.2, and I’m having issues importing ten years of Blogger posts. I don’t want to retain 150 Meg of redundant posts, so I’m looking into alternate methods of exporting and importing Blogger data.

Any input is appreciated. 

Technorati Tags: Blogger,WordPress,Internet,blogging

Droid Apps

I have a few minutes and wanted to tabulate the Android applications I have installed on my Droid.

The more I use the Droid, the more I appreciate the integration and utility it offers on a daily basis.  As an example, today a co-worker sent me an IM through Google Talk asking me to call him along with a phone number.  I touched the phone number, which cross referenced the phone number and it was the office phone for another co-worker.  So I knew where he was before he picked up the phone.

Applications I’m using on a regular basis

• Google Apps
  • Google Maps – are just awesome, and is the basis for navigation, Latitude, and other features
  • Latitude – very neat, people can track your location in real time.  The tracking is granular enough to show me walking through a town.
  • Google Talk – Google IM client
  • Google Mail – seamless integration on the Android; Contacts sync automatically
  • Google Calendar – automatic sync
  • Google Contacts – configurable sync, supports tags, can merge with ActiveSync contacts
• Find Starbucks - self explanatory
• twidroid for twitter - Twitter Android client
• Google Voice - VoIP phone calls and manage Google Voice account
• Periodic Table - yes, it's a periodic table for your Droid
• PdaNet free edition - tether your laptop for Internet access
• gTasks - beta - Google Task sync
• My Tracks - use Droid and GPS as a training tool – bike
• Tone Picker - MP3 ringtones - I have Star Trek and Star Wars alerts
• GDocs - Google Docs sync
• Barcode Scanner - scan bar codes (UPC) and look up product info and compare prices on web

Applications I’m testing or are just interesting

PaderSyncFTP - FTP sync tool - still testing

Key Ring Reward Card - scan reward cards

Applications I tested and uninstalled

SugarSync - sync files from desktop to phone.  Documents are read-only, and I have some minor issues with file formats (line wrapping, and tabs).

Technorati Tags: Droid,Android,apps,software

Google Sandbox closed

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ is now offline.  We have to take our toys and go home.  I enjoy using the various beta products from Google and Microsoft.  For the past few years most of the ‘beta’ tools, with a few exceptions, have been production ready.  Participation in beta programs provides insight into new product features helping define best practices and roadmap technologies for my clients.

Thank you!

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

©2009 Google

Thank you!

Technorati Tags: Google,beta,internet

Droid Day 3

1. First full business day of use summary
2. Droid recharge issue (possibly operator error)
3. ActiveSync error with Corporate Calendar
4. USB Sync with Windows (tested Win7)

First full business day of use, I had a very light day of e-mail, text, and web use. 

Phone configuration – Bluetooth, mail sync (GMail and ActiveSync) enabled all day. 

Use – 5-6 phone calls, ~15 texts, Twitter post and review morning, lunch, and evening.  GMail checks real time, about 100 messages total.   The battery level 40% at 8PM.

Another odd observation is that the Droid turns on when you charge it.  I turned it off on the charger, but if the power is cycled (turned off and on), the phone turns itself on again. Not a big deal, but not expected behavior.

ActiveSync – works fine with e-mail and Contacts, and I’m getting an authentication error with Corporate Calendar.  Not sure how e-mail is working and Calendar sync is not, but I’ll look into it and see if I can enable logging to debug the issue.

USB Sync with Windows 7 is not well documented.  Connect the Droid to your computer with the USB cable, a USB icon is displayed on the status bar.  Pull down the status bar, select USB and select “USB connected”, then Mount the Droid SD card. 

You can transfer files manually, or use DoubleTwist (http://www.doubletwist.com/dt/Home/Index.dt) to automate synch of media files.

Technorati Tags: Droid,USB,review

Verizon Droid

I went to the Mount Laurel Verizon store at 6am this morning to buy a Droid.  Oddly enough, I was the only one in line over the age of, oh, 30?  Lots of customer service people and they even had a photographer and some marketing folks.  Bill was my customer service person, and he did a great job – he knew the Droid and even took some time to walk me through the interface and apps a bit, even demonstrating how to search the App Marketplace for a Twitter client.

I was the first person to complete my purchase, so they took a picture of Bill, me, and the Droid with the time displaying.

My first impression is very, very positive.  I will wring the hell out of it this weekend and post my comments. 

I bought a set of screen protectors, but the Droid fits in my Samsung i760 holster as well as my car holder.  I’m amused that the Droid manual has fewer pages (it’s actually a gatefold) than the Product Safety and Consumer Information brochures.  The only accessory is a 115V USB wall adapter and USB/mini-USB connector, but this fits into my existing car charger, so I’m ready to go.

Current Favorite Apps

• TwitDroid – twitter client
• Advanced Task Killer Free – task management utility
• Google Voice
• Car Home – GPS navigator
• Barcode Scanner – scan barcode and web lookup
  
  

Technorati Tags: Droid,Android,Google,mobile,communications

Apps Status Dashboard

After the Great Google Mail Outage of 9/1/2009, I looked into a Google Status page.  The link below is for the Google Apps Status Dashboard and it displays a current status (No Issues, Service disruption, Service outage, and information available) for each of the Google Apps (Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Talk , Google Docs List, Google Documents, Google Presentations, Google Sites, Google Video for business, Admin control panel).

Apps Status Dashboard

Technorati Tags: Google,Apps,status

Nick Bradbury: FeedDemon to Sync with Google Reader?

What is RSS and why is it important?

RSS = Real Simple Syndication. It is an internet standard for publishing HTML based content that allows end users to receive summary information published to a site without making a browser connection to the site.

I have a list of 100+ sites that I visit for work, to receive news, and personal interests. Using an RSS aggregator, I can skim through all my feeds very quickly, flag the ones I’m interested in, and review them later. FeedDemon let’s me manage the flagged content and optionally synch it with a server for an annual subscription fee of $15.

Now, it looks like they will offer a synch capability with Google Reader. I think this is where Google has an edge on Microsoft. Microsoft tries to offer turn key solutions, but users like me are looking to pick and choose ‘best of breed’ solutions and integrate them into the cloud (Google, Microsoft, others).

Nick Bradbury: FeedDemon to Sync with Google Reader?

Google Experimental Search

http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html

Keeping track of new features in Google is almost a part time job.  I stumbled onto the Alternate View for search results and thought I should post the Experimental Search page.

A comprehensive overview with examples was posted on Ars Technica

My first week at Unisys, I took an accelerated Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 course. Craig (the awesome Unified Communications Instructor) pointed out you can narrow searches to just Microsoft or Linux topics by appending 'microsoft' or 'linux' to google.com to get an alternate, filtered search view.

http://www.google.com/microsoft

http://www.google.com/linux

Technorati Tags: Google,beta,Microsoft,search