Pages

There are four lights

There should be more fictional blogging. As a guide I suggest you check out Jean-Luc Picard's blog:

A vital part of engineering has broken down on the Enterprise.

It's the laundry machine.
Maybe we should implement a stardate option for date headers ...

Read more

Awesome Blog: David Weiss

Just wanted to point to David Weiss's outstanding blog; David works on Mac apps at Microsoft, and posts about fascinating (uh, to me at least) behind-the-scenes stuff:

Read more

Alaa

See Ethan Zuckerman's blog and Anarchogeek for details.

Read more

FIRST

Back in March, the Google Research blog posted details about our sponsorship of this year's FIRST - "For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" - tournament:

"Google jumped at the opportunity to sponsor this organization after Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway and the first implantable dialysis pump) spoke to a packed Google audience about his lifelong crusade to improve education in the United States. Dean founded US FIRST over 15 years ago, and from humble beginnings in the Northeast, FIRST has now grown to involve over 60,000 high school students all over the United States and the world."
Blogger's been able to play a small but significant role in helping the teams share their experiences and accomplishments with the world, in the form of team photoblogs. Here are a few that are loaded with great photos and posts:

Read more

Wandering Scribe

The BBC posted an interesting article about Wandering Scribe, a Blogger user in London who's currently homeless yet managing to reach an international audience with her writings. According to her blog, it's sounding like things are looking up:

Not out of the woods yet

But getting closer...

There have been meetings and it looks like there might be a publishing deal. Nothing is settled...and don't know what else to say for now, feel everything, and sometimes nothing, just walking around in a daze...my fingernails bitten down to the quick.
Related Buzz post: Homeless in Greensboro

Read more

Sitemaps and Blogs

Google Sitemaps is now a whole lot easier to use for bloggers:

"Some of you aren't able to use our existing verification method, so we asked for your feedback on an alternate method of verification that uses a meta tag on the root page of your site. The response was overwhelmingly positive, so we've added this method as an option."

"To verify ownership of your site using this method, simply click the Verify link for your site, choose Add a META tag as the verification option, and then copy the tag provided to the <head> section of your home page. Once you've done that, select the checkbox and click Verify."
To use this new verification method in Blogger, simply edit your Template and republish your blog.

Update: A Consuming Experience has posted expanded instructions and info about this.

Read more

I <3 L.A.

We're doing some user studies about how folks work with photos online. To participate you must:

  • live in West Los Angeles, Santa Monica or the surrounding area
  • post photos online
We are looking for all levels of users to take part in this study and will pay up $150 for your participation.

If interested, please email blog.study.la@gmail.com to learn more.

Read more

Sanskrit Quote Category: Mind

साधोः प्रकोपितस्यापि मनो नायाति विक्रियाम्।

न हि तापयितुं शक्यं सागरांभस्तृणोल्कया॥


English Translation of Sanskrit Quote:

Even when instigated by others,
the mind of a pious person never hesitates (to take the right decision).
It is not possible to heat the water of ocean by a torch of dried grass.

Read more

Word Verification For All

One of our most effective tools for preventing spam and automated abuse of Blogger is our word verification image. We require it to be solved to create a blog or post to blogs our automated spam classifier catches, and offer it as an option for you to include on the comment form on your blog.

Word verification (sometimes called a CAPTCHA™) is designed to be a simple puzzle that a human can solve easily but a computer cannot. Sadly, that has not been the case for Blogger. A ton of humans cannot solve our word verification simply because they cannot see it.

Today we’re very happy to add an audio verification alongside every word verification in Blogger. Now almost everyone will be able to create blogs, post comments, and prove to our spam classifier that they’re not a robot.

If you cannot see a word verification image, or if you just want to change things up a bit, click the accessibility icon next to the text field to hear a series of digits. Just type what you hear (in Javascript browsers we set the form field focus automatically) and you’ll be good to go.

If you’re having trouble hearing the audio, try the tips in this help article. We’ve found that the QuickTime plug-in works well for playing the required WAV file. Also, the digits will be spoken in your preferred language. Go to our choose language page to set yours if you haven’t already.

Read more