G+/Blogger integration, still not there, can we get some real features please?

// It's amazing what insignificant updates make news these days. Up until now, after hitting "Publish" on a new Blogger post, you were prompted to also post it on G+. Now you have an option and this will be done automatically. That's it. That's a new feature, announced on the official Blogger blog, filling up tech news sites and my G+ feed.

Left: post on Blogger. Right: post on G+

So here I am, testing Blogger again, and not much has changed since the last time I was here. I see that some problems remain:

1) Comment management: There is no central place to see all comments (on Blogger and G+ since these are (or more accurate, you can set it this way) the same thing now). You only have a list of posts an a comment count next to them. So you do not have a way to find if an old post has a new comment recently.

That said, if you had shared a Blogger post as a G+ post you get a notification on G+ for new comments but that's it. Comments from re-shares do not produce notifications (from what I have seen, correct me if I'm wrong). Finally, from what +Jean Abraham reports you get a G+ notification when someone comments directly on a post and +Gideon Rosenblatt reports that you get a G+ notification for shares (even if you didn't share it initially on G+?)

2) Smaller real estate on G+ feeds: Your full post (the text of it) is not posted on G+, forcing people to click through to get to the article. Unless you learn to write amazing first paragraphs, you've just lost a large part of your audience (Yes, people love easy stuff! Amazing insight: the easier you make it for people to read your content, the more people will read your content :)). In addition, your smaller thumbnail image has to compete with large photos from "real" G+ posts, some even taking up both columns of the feed.

I really can't see what's stopping Google from doing a full integration of the two services. Full Blogger posts on G+. Your blogspot.com can remain are your categorised archive and holder of "static" Pages content. A real comment management control panel (see WordPress, Disqus, etc). Am I asking too much? :)

Social media cross-posting with Friends+me

// I've recently posted about +Fotostat (http://bit.ly/g-fotostat) , a new service for cross-posting within several social networks, with focus on images. I have been using it with great success for a site I manage. But if your main network is #Google+, you are out of luck, because #Google has only given write access through the G+ API to selected third-party services like #Hootsuite.

An alternative service is Friends+me, currently in beta. The concept is that your source is Google+ and you can cross-post anything you publish on G+ to #Facebook, #Twitter and #LinkedIn. Both personal profiles and pages are supported, you automate at the same time your G+ profile as well as any page you administer.

The good thing is that it comes with quite a few settings for customising when and what's posted. You can set manually to which networks a post will be copied using hashtags or have some networks as defaults. You also have choices on how the post will be made and how it will or not link back to the original post. Finally, links posted through Friends+me on Twitter have support for Twitter Cards, so followers can have a preview of the linked post/URL.

The devil is in the details though. What really won me over to use Friends+me instead of Hootsuite for a site I manage was that links to pages on the website are actually posted as link-type posts on Facebook. Meanwhile, Hootsuite's automated posting to Facebook creates status-type posts which are less click-friendly.

+Friends+Me is now in beta and free. Some (really cheap) plans will be available in the next months (they are announced on the website but you can't purchase them yet - an interesting approach). Check it out! http://bit.ly/friendsme

Newton's playground: Javascript physics engines

This awesome animation is actually the recorded output of a real-time #Javascript-powered physics engine. There has been quite a lof of progress in this field lately using technologies like #canvas and #WebGL, here are some recent developments:

The "dragable/tearable cloth" demo above comes from lonely-pixel.com. Play with it live and get the code here http://bit.ly/15wyK0F There are more demos on the developer's website, like this "ball curve collision" http://bit.ly/1078otN (balls fall through the curves which you can re-arrange as you like :))

Then we go to Verlet-js http://bit.ly/XY0okC a simple (according to SubProtocol, the developer) Verlet integration physics engine written in Javascript by. Check out the "spider" demo
http://bit.ly/ZGWIy6 where you can push a spider around on it's web (yes, the spider moves around on it's own as well :))

Finally, CoffeePhysics (http://bit.ly/11XpGxF) by +Justin Windle. Yes, every bubble there moves around in a frantic manner :)  More experiments by Justin here http://bit.ly/XYfjeJ

Links via +Veljko Sekelj , +Lo Sauer and +Steve Mayne. Many thanks! :)

Blogger and the Holy Grail of unified comments

// So yesterday Google announced a further integration of Google+ comments and Blogger. If you enable the related setting, if your Blogger post is shared on G+, any comment on the G+ post with your post will also be shown in the page of the Blogger post in the comments section.

This is a Holy Grail for comments on Google+ for people like who use Google+ as a blogging platform, as you can have all (public) comments from re-shares on your original post both to read (if you have many re-shares usually you just don't follow discussion there) as well as respond to.

So this is a post written and first post on Blogger at mgiannopoulos.blogspot.com. I'm not sure where this will lead as not everything is peachy.

First of all, I've been looking for some good premium themes that would have the same look as my current setup at giannopoulos.net but have not found anything decent. Any suggestions here would be great.

The other issue I see is that, when you share a new post to G+ at the time of publishing (while you're on Blogger), you actually create a G+ post which contains a link to the blogger post. This mean that my current G+ followers, who were used to seeing my full posts (complete text and image) on their stream, will now see just a link (and perhaps some intro that I write while sharing). This is less compelling to click through.

On top of that, I would not be able to share a Blogger post on G+ communities without being marked a spammer :) Currently it is generally acceptable to share your own G+ post in a community since you're still keeping people on the platform and they can read the full post inline. See the screenshot above for a terrible "inception" effect :)

So as it is, I'm sceptical on whether this could work. My G+ audience is well, on G+. Sending them to Blogger in order to have all discussions in a single place could actually be counter-productive. Thoughts? :)


[Update] When someone replies directly on your Blogger post (not through a share), you get a notification on Google+ :)

Now this IS parallax!

// I'm not a big fan of parallax scrolling sites. Mainly because it is CPU-intensive which means that you will have people with a bad experience and by definition you are constrained to a small number of "pages" which means that you can only use it for small sites and you can't upgrade such a site easily (you will end up re-designing it). 

But this 2012 wish card mini-site of Soleil Noir is simply beautifully done: 
- Vertically scrolling that makes sense: the content is linear (you're supposed to read each page after the other) and extremely short so quick flipping through it is actually needed as opposed to clicking on a menu where the use pauses to think about what he needs to do
- Animations are not only part of the scroll but continue after you've reached a key point giving the impression of a "live page", an element of nature that you're there to experience 
- URL changes according to where you are and a navigation menu is on the right (for some implementations, these are details to be ignored as not overly needed)

See the site here http://bit.ly/Zt4srn
Got any good examples of parallax scrolling that parallax is just used because it's trendy? :) 

This is not how HTML and CSS should be used!

// Some fun coding by Peter Westendorp: "Tunnel vision 3D" with CSS. As Peter writes: "This is an experiment to demonstrate the power of CSS and modern browsers. This is not how HTML and CSS should be used." :D

See it live here http://bit.ly/10SvqbK

This is the Internet!

// Openly accessible data + open source development + open technologies = awesome :) 

The people at Teehan+Lax have developed a method to create timelapse videos using imagery from Google Street View. They call it Google Street View Hyperlapse and you can see the amazing video that you can produce as well, along with links to the source code here http://vimeo.com/63653873

Full size photo uploads: G+ winning the tech war on Facebook

// In the latest #googleplusupdate, you can now upload the full-sized photos and G+ will serve them accordingly: Initially you get a reduced (but great quality) version but you can zoon and pan to see more detail!

How to have this: To enable full-size desktop uploads, just visit your settings at https://www.google.com/settings/plus, and check "Upload my photos at full size." Afterwards, any files larger than 2048px will count towards your Google storage (up to 5GB free). Photo storage at 2048px or smaller remains free and unlimited.

Meanwhile, Facebook still can't keep up, probably not having enough servers/storage to handle better quality in their photos. See also this experiment by +Mike Elgan http://bit.ly/10y7JUH 

Finally, a reminder on how to zoom (try it on this 2448 x 3264 pixels photo from snowy Luxembourg :))
- use your mouse wheel to zoom in or out
- click and drag to pan right, left, up or down

Have fun!

Social media cross-posting with Fotostat

I've been expanding the number of social networks I use, almost like an addict lately :) So I've been looking for a way to administer my addiction in an easier way. I had an automation between G+, Twitter and my Wordpress blog (so I was only posting on G+) and additionally was cross-posting to Facebook and LinkedIn through Hootsuite.

Today I'm trying out Fotostat, a new service currently in beta for posting your photos (but also text, this post was written on fotostat) as well as gather statistics about them. To copy the service's description:
- Save time by scheduling your uploads to multiple social photography sites, blogs and merchant facilities.
- Discover how well each photo is performing by seeing all available statistics from each of your networks.
- Interact with your followers by commenting across all your sites from one easy to use location.

The service works very nicely: you first connect to your networks and your existing photos are imported to the service so you already have statistics on your content so far. You then can post new content, selecting each time to which networks you want to post to.

Currently supported are Google+ (Publishing to albums only, no post creation as yet.), Facebook, Flickr, 500px, Smugmug, Tumblr and WordPress. The effort is headed by Daniel Treadwell, developer of the G+ to WordPress plugin I have been using for over a year now, so I'm sure there are lots of improvements to come.

Try it out for free at http://fotost.at/

BP Imperial

A fun display font by George Triantafyllakos. Get it at http://www.backpacker.gr/font.asp?m=1&font=bp13

Just because you can: GUI icons with pure CSS

// Inspired by an elegant piece of CSS code by +Lea Verou, creating the WiFi code (see it here http://bit.ly/wificss), I searched for other examples of this and found this little gem: A demo of 84 icons created with just CSS by +Nicolas Gallagher.

Nicolas calls it's a "technical exercise" but given that this was done back in 2010 and support for the methods used is much wider now, the code should be working in all modern browsers. 

You can see it in action and dig into the code here http://bit.ly/css-gui-icons

Charts with Javascript: even more ways to kill Flash

// Javascript-powered chart solutions is a favorite topic of mine, so here are a few more options for you- NVD3 (http://nvd3.org/) builds upon the powerful D3 library and currently supports 11 different interactive chart types

- Rickshaw (http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/) also built on D3, can be used for live-data time graphs with 4 customisable chart types

_ gRaphaël (http://g.raphaeljs.com/) is based on Raphaël and has 4 different chart types including a dot chart

- YUI charts (http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/charts/) is part of the YUI library and supports 7 chart types

- Polychart.js (http://polychartjs.com/) has 5 chart types which can be combined.

Depending on your situation and needs any of this could work, but surely NVD3 stands out. For more on the topic, see here http://bit.ly/g-chart

Draft: cloud text-editing for any anything anywhere

// I've written about #Draft already a few days ago http://bit.ly/g-draft when it was "just" a web-based text #editor for #Dropboxand Google Drive with version control and collaboration features.But I need to write again as a #Chrome extension was released that redefined how you can use Draft. I'll just copy the developer's (+Nathan Kontny) description:

Any webpage that you can write on, you can now use Draft with. Your blog, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, even comment boxes on websites like Reddit and Hacker News. Just place your cursor in the box you want to write in, click the Chrome Draft extension, and Draft will open up in a new Chrome Tab. Choose an already written document or something new to write in Draft (any text from the original text box will carry over). When you're done, there's a menu button to paste your work back into the text box you came from.

As I write this post on Draft, it's a much better experience of writing without all the noise of Google+'s interface. Highly recommended, get Draft here http://bit.ly/draft-chrome

Twitter Cards: Engage!

// Just 6 days after my submission for inclusion on the #TwitterCards program, I got in and in the screenshot you can see the result: whenever someone tweets a URL of my blog, an "expanded view" will be available with a title, short description, thumbnail, my name and #Twitter handleIt also works on the mobile (iOS at least) app. See it live here http://bit.ly/t-cardtweet and read more about it here http://bit.ly/g-twitter-cards

Improve links to your site on Twitter with Twitter Cards

// Announced since last July, Twitter Cards is Twitter's equivalent (or "answer" if you like tech drama) to the Open Graph. By defining a set of #meta #tags in your #HTML code you can provide instructions to #Twitterin order to display an "expanded" preview of your page, when your page's URL is included in a tweet.Twitter Cards come in 3 types:
- summary: The default card, which includes a title, description, thumbnail image, and Twitter account attribution.
- photo: A Tweet sized photo card.
- player: A Tweet sized video/audio/media player card.

Basically, you can use the first for article pages (think of blogs), the second for pages where the main content is a photo (e.g. Instagram) and the third one for pages of videos (e.g. YouTube).

The structure of the meta tags are similar to #OpenGraph and you can read about it in the official documentation (http://bit.ly/twittercards). While Twitter re-invented the concept of meta tags for describing a page for social media consumption, they acknowledged that having duplicate meta tags is kind of silly, so if you already have the OG tags of title, image, url and description in your code, they will be recognised for their twitter equivalents (you still need to add a couple of twitter tags though).

The feature is still in development, simply adding the tags on your site will not do anything yet. You need to submit a form (http://bit.ly/t-cards-form) asking to be included in the beta.  Twitter promisses to respond to you in "a few weeks". Until then, you can try out your page on the preview tool (http://bit.ly/t-cards-preview). If you have a WordPress blog, you can use the Twitter Cards plugin (http://bit.ly/wp-twitter-cards) which does (almost all of) the job for you.

If you have gone through the process and can share some feedback on how this worked for you, post in the comments :)

Tracking shares before they happen (or even if they don't happen)?

// A tricky question poped up in my Quora home page: Is it possible to check, if somebody requested your site's #meta #tags ?The logic behind this is that you could track social shares even if the user doesn't complete the process (load's up the URL on Facebook or a sharing widget) and then quits.

My suggestion and response on Quora was that one can use the og:image tag. Declare a specific image that is only used on the og:image tag. Then check the Apache logs for requests to that image.

You will have when someone started the sharing process. You won't have when the shared page is shown in Facebook, because what is shown is a cached thumbnail that Facebook keeps. On that thought, you might want to have a dynamic URL for the image because the first time someone starts the sharing process, Facebook creates the cached copy (which is stored for some time)

Alternatively to the Apache logs part, you can set up some PHP/whatever script as the URL, allowing you to create a dynamic URL but also keep track of the requests in a database (easier than running analytics on Apache logs).

I haven't tried this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work, at least in part. It all comes down to Facebook/Twitter's cache systems and how often their cache is refreshed. It might also be worth looking into adding a random variable at the end of the og:url so that when someone tries to share the page (from a FB/Twitter button on the page for example) it would be a new URL and it would not be cached. Of course this would probably mess with share/like counts of the page.

That said, Twitter has their own set of  meta tags (because using the OG tags would be a discrace apparently), described here http://bit.ly/twittercards

Further thoughts on this are welcome :)

HTC cloned Jony Ive!

// The "evidence" :)
1) Video of Jony Ive on Apple's unibody process http://youtu.be/lJx6cF-H__I
2) Video of HTC's zero-gap process http://youtu.be/pDjfh5mFWUc

Quora, a Google+ blogging alternative?

// I generally detest article headlines that pose questions rather than provide a definite position, but I'm undecided on this one.Recently, #Quora upgraded their Boards feature, renaming the Blogs. The standard features include:
- a quora.com subdomain of your choice
- set a title, logo/avatar image and #blog description
- choice of set of basic categories that show up on the right side of the pages, acting as navigation links to your blog's archives
- categories are linked to Quora existing set of topics
- your blog posts can be linked to either your main categories or other Quora topics
- limited HTML editor for your posts
- statistics on views per post, with monthly archives, including which specific users viewed your posts
- multiple authors per blog allowed
- easy posting via the mobile app
- you can use your Quora credits to promote your posts
- your posts show up in the home pages of people who follow the topics of your posts
- up/down voting and comments on posts
- choice of 2 quite elegant themes (see the default one in the screenshot of my blog)

I've been using #Google + as a blogging platform, so here's how it compares:
- an existing audience: no need to build up a fellowship through Circles or join #Communities (to which you can't cross-post). Tagging to Quora's topics will give your posts a chance to being visible to hundreds if thousands of topics.
- a topic-based audience: the G+ experience is based on following people, while on Quora on following topics
- a different audience: while G+ tries to market itself as everything for everyone, it is mainly focused on images, from great photography to silly GIFs. Quora is focused on text and analysis (top currently trending topics are "smart people", "human behaviour" and "computer programming") which, as you can imagine, has implications on the topics that have the bigger audiences. Quora also has a small army of admins and reviewers who have created a culture of quality content. If you have such content, it should thrive on Quora
- a better editor: although limited ( no source editing), you have an actual HTML editor, can add multiple images anywhere in your post and can have actual links not just drop URLs in your text.
- social propagation: on G+ people can re-share your posts, increasing your audience. Comments and +1's though are mainly done on the copied posts. On Quora, there is no sharing feature (posts have Facebook and Twitter share buttons of course) but when someone follows your blog or a post (similar to subscribing to the comments) or comments to / votes up a post, a related "story" is shown on the user's followers home page as well as the user's profile page.
- statistics: on G+ you have no statistics on whether your posts where read at all. You can only get a total view count on your photos based on third-party sites that use the G+ API or through Picasa. On Quora you get a full listing of who viewed (if they have turned on the related privacy setting) each posts, and how many views you have today as well as per month.

So where do all that leave me with the original question? As you can guess from all of the above, I'm quite positive about it. Of course, I'm not replacing G+ with Quora, I'll be cross-posting though, you can find me (and see a live example of how the system works) here http://bit.ly/g-quora
In the end, I think there is indeed a big difference in the audiences of the two platforms, so there is no harm done from the "both" choice. What do you think? :)

How to create an infographic from your Google Analytics data

// Well, there's not much to say here. People love #infographics for visualising information and numbers in an easy to consume manner. People also love #GoogleAnalytics for an endless amount of #statisticsabout their website.Now you can combine both with a few clicks on the free tool by Visual.ly. The process is relatively simple, you connect +Visually with your GA account, select the website you want the report of, and you're done. You get a result for the last week, like the one shown on the screenshot (you get the typical long form, but I've re-arranged it to fit better on a page). You can also set to have a weekly report sent to your e-mail address.

Try it out here: http://bit.ly/visually-ga

Found via +Jules Stuifbergen

Does your company know what the internet is?

//_UPDATE_: The situation has been sorted out, the project is back online normally http://bit.ly/chartjs

// Yesterday I wrote (http://bit.ly/g-chartjs) about Chart.js, a new library for javascript/canvas-based charts. A day later, the site is down with a note shown in the screenshot, basically explaining how the developer's employer doesn't like the idea of #OpenSource.

Here's the outcome so far after a few hours:
- The code was removed from the original Github repository but of course has been copied (here http://bit.ly/chartjs-fork along with at least 92(!) forks) and it's not about to be ever deleted completely
- The angry commentators at Hacker News are already looking for the name of the company http://bit.ly/chartjs-hackernews

This is bound to get some press soon...

That said: this wasn't a ground-breaking piece of technology. There is no case that it was any kind of competitive advantage for the company (plus the whole IP issue is ambiguous as this was a university project of the developer). The company had nothing to lose with this being released as open source, only to gain from the publicity of one of their employees releasing a successful open source project.

But if you don't know what the internet is, you're bound to act like an idiot...