Tag Archives: blog

Blogger Blogs and Google Products.

I just don’t know what’s going on with Google lately. More and more I’m moving away from their products. I find G-mail slow and clunky. Drive is useful but somehow I have issues downloading files on there from time to time. Then there’s Blogger! The first platform I started blogging on in early 2000. It’s always been buggy, and at times difficult. You really can’t understand unless you’ve used the product. Pages don’t format properly, images load funny, and you really don’t have a lot of control over the design.

So, I haven’t blogged on Blogger in a while. I’ve been on a weight loss kick and decided to do a blog about ketogenic dieting. My hosting company said I need to upgrade my service plan if I want to host any more blogs.  I really didn’t want to increase my overhead and figured I’d use Blogger for a bit. On top of that, I wanted to put together a blogging portfolio and thought it would be nice to add a couple blogger blogs to it.

OK, great. Blogger is super simple to set up. I register a domain, point it to Blogger and get started. I love the easy setup with Blogger. You pick a theme, choose your color scheme, upload a profile pic and you’re ready to blog! It doesn’t get much easier than that.

You would think after all these years, pages would format easier but you still get the same weird formatting glitches when captioning images and formatting pages. I can deal with that, I know how to get around them most of the time using the HTML editor.  It’s still a pain though!

So I’m starting to question whether or not I want to host the blog on Blogger. This morning I get an idea for a blog post. I only have my phone with me and decide to download the Blogger app to post it from my phone. I install the app, write my blog post, and I can’t get the image to load or the page out of draft mode. Complete frustration sets in! IMHO the Blogger app for Android is useless.

I guess the moral of this post is if you stop by here looking for advice and suggestions on blogging. My advice is, DON’T USE BLOGGER! Yes, it’s free but it just isn’t a good product!

I’m going to continue blogging there against my better judgment. I’ll have another blog to add to my portfolio, and I can always transfer it to a WordPress site down the road. If anything, it will be a good example of what not to do when starting a blog.  Google used to be such a great company, creating great innovative products. I honestly don’t know what’s going on over there.

If you want to check out my weight loss blog on blogger you can find it here:

https://www.my-keto-blog.com/

Here’s a screenshot. There’s not much there now but I’ll be posting regularly and adding to the design as time allows.

screen shot of a keto diet blog.

A simple diet blog about ketogenic dieting created on Blogger.

Earned A Steemit Blogging Certification on Udemy Last Year.

For the last couple of years, I got really sidetracked with learning about bitcoin and cryptocurrency. For the most part, I put my entire life on hold as I learned the ins and outs of cryptocurrency trading.

I discovered cryptocurrency by accident as I was looking for a payment processing option for New Aeon Design. I pretty much ended up putting this business on hold and went full-time cryptocurrency. I’ll post more about cryptocurrency in a later blog.

I ended up registering bitcoindood.com and began working for cryptocurrency as Bitcoin Dood.

During that time I began blogging on Steemit as The Bitcoin Dood. Steemit is a blogging platform where users get paid in cryptocurrency STEEM for their blogs. My account can be found here:

https://steemit.com/@the-bitcoin-dood/

After playing around on the site for a while I decided to take a course on Udemy. It was just a course that explained a little about STEEM the cryptocurrency and the Steemit blogging platform. It was a fun course to take, and I thought I would share the certificate here.

certificate of completion.

Udemy course certificate of completion on the Steemit blogging platform.

If you’re looking for consultation on blogging or would like some help with your blogging design, feel free to contact me.

Add A Twitter Feed To Your Blog Or Website.

I wanted to make my blogs, and websites a little more interactive, and also give people another way to interact with and or contact me. I decided on creating a twitter widget to put in the sidebars of my blogs, and also add to the front page of the website. The process was surprisingly easy. Here’s what you do.

If you don’t have a twitter account you want to go to twitter.com and create an account. O.K. we’ve got our account set up, now go to https://twitter.com/settings/widgets . If you’re not logged into your account, twitter will ask for your username and password and then it should open to a page that has a box that say widgets with a radio button that says “Create New”. Click on create new, and the next page that opens will be the configuration page. Put your @twiiterUserName where it asks for it, and then configure it. If you want replies to show up in your time line then uncheck that box, click whether you want your photo’s to auto-expand or not, adjust your height, theme color, enter your link color hex code or stick with the default, and click create widget. Thats it your done, when the next page loads, cut and paste the code into your blog or website and you’ll have a cool twitter feed, posting all of your updates in real time.

I placed the twitter feed on my Tumblr blog in the sidebar. It’s a custom theme I created so, you’ll have to read the Tumblr documentation to install it in yours. For Tumblr I basically just created another side box and pasted the code into it.

On my website, I did some rewriting of my css to make it responsive to both browsers and phone screens, and using the @media code the widget will even be omitted from smaller displays so the page still displays properly in most devices.

On this wordpress blog, using the 2012 theme, I just clicked on appearance, widgets, dragged a text box over to my sidebar, and pasted the code in the text box. It really couldn’t of been any simpler with wordpress and this is one of the reasons I’m really glad I decided to give WordPress a try. Between the website, Tumblr, and this WordPress blog, WordPress was hands down the easiest to install the widget in !

If you want to get a bit crazy with this project and really customize the heck out of the timeline and make it your own, you can check out the developers page here.

This was a really, easy, fun project, and I think it’s a great way to add a little interactivity to your blog or website. Any questions, please feel free to comment, or tweet it from the side bar. Thanks for reading and good luck !