Monday, October 24, 2011

Better Blogger Blogging!

So it's begun!  Part of the reason I moved my blog to Blogger and dropped my WordPress site was the hope of better integration between my blog and Google+, which I think is quickly becoming the social network of choice for just about everyone I know.  It's certainly mine, and where I get most of the discussion on my blog.

So the first thing you can do is to replace your blogger profile with your Google+ profile.  So when people visit your blog, they see your google+ profile, and your posts on Google+, presumably.  This is a pretty small change, but I can see it as an important first step.  In conjunction with this, you can add your blog (and any others you contribute to), to your Google+ profile.  So now your G+ profile points people back to your blog - well that's a good thing! And finally, and this is definitely a plus - your blogs posts show up as posts in your Google+ profile.  Or at least, that's what I'm led to believe.  This little microblog post, which typically would be something I'd just put in my Google+ stream and not actually generate a blog post for, is specifically designed to test this out.

The other thing Google has just added is this kind of cool new Dynamic Views view for the blog.  So for the moment I've eschewed my carefully formatted blog design, and am using this new format.  I'd welcome any feedback you have on whether you like it or hate it.  I'm pretty open to these sorts of things, so just let me know. And if you're interested in trying this stuff out yourself in your own blog, jump here to get started.

Finally, please leave your comments here, instead of in the Google+ thread, if you don't mind.  I know it's easier to generate the conversation right in G+, but I'm still trying to get a feel for how to sort out blog commenting and g+ commenting, so I'm trying some different things.

Next post will be back to game discussion.  I've been playing quite a bit of City of Heroes lately, and have more fun stuff to post up about that.  Plus a certain MMO we're all familiar with has all the bloggers frothing at the mouth about the recent changes they've announced, and I have a few opinions of my own.

6 comments:

  1. So I'm adding the first comment. Posting here did not immediately put anything in G+, as near as I can tell. I may be mistaken though. I do like that I can comment under my G+ profile name though - that's a plus. (get it? Never mind..) Supposedly though now this post should appear in G+ searches though. Dunno if it indexes previous blog posts into the search as well or not. Questions questions..

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  2. OK testing comments... I'll select my Google Account under the drop down.

    I thought it was weird, but vaguely neat (I'm such a nerd) that when I hit the blog from G+ the first thing I saw was a little gear turning...I guess as the dynamic page was built.

    OK so when I hit "Post Comment" I was taken to a page where I was asked to create a Blogger account (pretty sure I already had one but maybe not associated with my Google account). To do so I just needed to supply my Google password.

    Then I was redirected here into an old-style ugly-as-hell Blogger experience with nested scroll bars and a captcha that I had to scroll to see (scroll the outer scroll bar, not the inner one). It wasn't a great experience... I didn't actually enter the captcha because I came back to add this portion of the comment. Now I'll try to actually post the comment. :)

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  3. Okay so first, kudos for following directions and posting here in the comments! Unlike certain other bloggers whom shall remain nameless.. :D

    So it sounds like - as is the case with most of Google's new rollouts - their are still some kinks to work out with the transfer of blogger profiles and google plus profiles, and getting the reader to the right page. It probably is further exacerbated by the fact that this new feature and template design are still in the "draft.blogger" section of blogger, and aren't actually rolled out of beta just yet.

    BTW, what do you actually think of the layout? The "Dynamic Design" template thing. Approve? Meh? Bleh?

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  4. I kind of like the different layouts. It seems to default to Magazine -- did you choose that?

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  5. Yes I did. Again, I think we're seeing Google's predilection for the Metro UI. But it seems to work with with putting a lot of your posts up on the page in a manner that catches your eye. I'm a fan too, but I do wonder if in time it'll just start to look like everything else out there.

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