15 Years of Blogger

I started using Blogger 15 years ago, in April. I did some meta-blogging about the Blogger platform last year when I was feeling particularly unhappy with Google and their limited support for the Blogger service. In this blog post, I want to reflect on my blogging experience.

And Twitter, too

Twitter anniversary (click image to enlarge)

I also began using Twitter in April (of 2009). This blog, (wikifiction) was not my first Blogger blog. I started the wikifiction blog just about the same time when I began using Twitter. Almost all of my tweets are related to science fiction.

However, as can be seen in the image to the left, I do respond to other people's tweets that have nothing to do with science fiction.

Going Viral

April 5th - Traffic to the wikifiction blog

Here in 2020, as a science educator, I have felt the need to link some folks on Twitter to good sources of information about the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of the people who visit this blog are from the USA, but today there is heavy traffic from Italy (see the map, to the right).

The wikifiction blog has a special connection to Italy. In the Exode Saga, I imagine that in the Ekcolir Reality, the Etruscan civilization dominated Europe, not Rome.

Map source: CSSE at Johns Hopkins University

Also, in my story "Fru'wu: Our Alien Prometheus", I imagine that the young Mary Shelley visited Italy during an outbreak of malaria. That experience brought her in contact with an alien visitor to Earth.

Little did I know while writing that story back in 2016 that Italy would become a hot spot for the Covid-19 pandemic. While viruses have been a topic of discussion here at this blog prior to 2020 (example), I've only made a few virus-related posts to Twitter (example).

A viral tweet, March 22nd 2020

While I'm linking to past tweets (Related: the end of Twitter.), I must say that Twitter has now made it more difficult to obtain a link to tweets. Now you need to click on the tweet's ˅ button and select "Embed Tweet". Then scroll up and you can see the link in a hidden display box.

There are a few options for how you can adjust the appearance of an embedded tweet. The image shown below is an example of the "dark" option.

I began tracking the number of Covid-19 cases in the USA on January 26th. The "dark" image shown below illustrates that towards the end of January my thoughts turned to my science fiction story Exodemic, which features the world-altering effects of a virus.

The dark side. January 28, 2020 viral tweet.

Here in 2020, my usual style for blog posts is to include many images along with the text. I have Blogger image archives (example) that go back to the old days when Picasa was used to collect all the images that are used in blog posts.

Now, I routinely link each blog post to a Google Photos album that contains imaginary book and magazine covers.

I've tried to make the old Picasa-generated albums visible in Google Photos, but that does not seem to have worked.

Ghost of Picasa: image "comments" from 2010.

The controls provided by Google for the old blog image archives (like this one) are totally non-intuitive. There is a "MANAGE ACTIVITY" button that when clicked displays the list of "image comments" that I added into Picasa back in 2010.

Bottom Line
After 15 years of using Blogger, I'm still confused by the interface. Right now, there is a "Try the new Blogger" button, but I generally wait until Blogger forces me to use their new versions.

                                                                                Dear Diary

the new Blogger

Even with all the trials and tribulations of using Blogger, it does provide a workable (and FREE) way to keep an online diary. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to migrate this blog to WordPress should Google terminate the Blogger service. 😔
Related Reading: the new Blogger

Next: a complication for Nirutam

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Interesting item from Twitter

Slideshow Sideshow

Slideshow gadget running in the sidebar

Exactly one year ago I blogged about the fact that I like to include images in my blog posts. For many years I have used the Blogger Slideshow gadget to display a minimovie of thumbnail images from this blog in the right hand sidebar.

When clicking on those Slideshow images, you were taken to the full sized image in an image album (example).

Escapists

With Google shutting down the old Picasa Web Albums, I believe that my old Picasa images have been migrated to an "album archive page". (see this Picasa blog post) There are sub-archives for each of my blogs. I've never understood how it turned out that after years of using Picasa, I ended up with several different "eras" of archived images from the wikifiction blog (see the image below).

Three sub-albums for wikifiction blog images archived to Picasa Web Albums (most recent).

A while back, there was word from Google that the Slideshow gadget would not work with https connections.

Today I got this message from Google:

"announced" (click image to enlarge)

Google+

So, just 10 8 more days for the Slideshow gadget! (it was removed on the 27th)

Other news. I finally allowed Google to set up a "custom URL" for my Google+ account. I'm still not sure what the advantage is over the old number (which now re-directs to the "custom address).

Next: looking at expiration dates on old stories

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Images in the Cloud

Alphabet Inc.

I occasionally blog about Google, mainly because this blog is hosted by Google under the "blogger.com" brand. I like to put plenty of images into my blog posts, so I've always been intrigued by the question of where the images end up being kept.

Back at the start of this millennium, there was an image sharing website called Picasa. Like the original Blogger service, Picasa was taken over by Google and then it was integrated with Blogger. After that point, images that were inserted in Blogger blog posts ended up being added to Picasa Web Albums.

My Picasa albums

I have three different Picasa albums for images from this blog with a total of over 4,000 images that I have uploaded for use in my blog posts (current album). How much of my available storage space am I using?

____________________________________________

The heroic struggle of a lone blogger.

In 2013, Google tried to integrate Picasa images with the image archiving system that is associated with their Google+ service. I've never really understood Google+, but its photo albums had some advantages over those of Picasa, so I started archiving some of my images from this blog in a few special purpose Google+ photo albums, particularly my Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers.

Google Photos interface

Now in 2015 we have Google Photos. The online "user" interface for Google Photos is a wonder of modern "web app" design, complete with minimalistic and unrecognizable icons (see the image to the left). I put "user" in quotes, because it is not at all clear that Google made Google Photos for human users. It might better be described as their system for collecting data from the photos that people take with their smart phones (and the stray images of a few people who use Google services like Blogger).

If Google Photo had a real user interface then there would be a help button.

Upon my first visit to the Google Photos website, I found that they already had some of "my" images in Google Photos. I guess when dealing with Google Photos, I should re-conceptualize "my photos".

According to Google, "Any photos and videos you uploaded to Google+ are in your Google Photos library." However, I can't access my Google+ photo albums from within Google Photo unless I first navigate to Google Photo by way of my Google+ user account (see the menu to the right). Although my Google+ account is "linked" to my main Google account, it seems to lead a life of its own.

Google+ photo albums  (posters).

One of the interesting settings for Google Photos is shown below:

With luck, you can opt out of sharing the location of your photos.

I don't upload photos from a camera to Google's cloud, so I don't personally care if Google is scraping user data such as where photos were taken, but still, it seems like their default could have been set to not capture such user data unless a user opts in.  Instead, users have to shut off such features.

Search "results" in my Google Photos library

Search
It was about the time when Google Photos went into use that I lost the ability to easily search through my Picasa albums for old images that I want to insert into new blog posts. Google claims that it is easy to use Google Photo to search for images, so I'm wondering if maybe the day is coming when Picasa will be replaced by Google Photo as the image management system for Blogger. However, I suspect that there might not be anyone remaining on Google's staff who has responsibility for maintaining and updating Blogger.

Google Photo does seem to have access to all of my Picasa and Google+ photo albums. If I click in the Google Photo search line, I see some of my old images. My favorite such "search results" is an imaginary pulp science fiction magazine cover that has been labeled by the Google bot as being located in Dubai (see the image to the right).

However, if I click on this "search result" then I get the helpful search page shown below (No Results):

My Google search result!

Example of Google Photo's
image recognition software

I suppose I need "Google Photo for Dummies" in order to make sense of these "search results".

Here is one more example of output from Google's algorithm for locating and classifying images (see the "car" in the image to the right).

visit the Gallery of Book and Magazine Covers

Google Sucks
Just sayin'...

Google revolutionizes artificial intelligence: anyone looking for the pilot episode of The X-Files really wants airline ads!

2018

2016 update. For years google sent email notification for every blog post, then that feature stopped working. After months of email notificationn not working, it finally (April  2016) seems like they fixed that problem. During about the same time period, there was a bug in the blogging software that messed up the positioning of images in a blog post. I guess the intern who is responsible for blogger does eventually get around to fixing the bugs that he/she creates.

2018 update. Current archive of images from the wikifiction blog. October 8th: "We are shutting down Google+ for consumers."