Tuesday, September 6, 2011

My Google+ Wishlsit

Ok you might find 100 pages on google search containing g+ wish lists. But as a unique entity, I like to voice my opinion and add a tiny miny wish list to existing ones.
  1. I hate animated gifs. There should be a way to block such posts. Mind it, the posts not the person. ;-)
  2. There should be a way to connect my blogspot blog to G+ account. So I can share my feed on it automatically. And it should NOT be like Buzz, which copies whole post as a new entry. I hate such solutions, I want people on my blog not that they read all of it on their G+ stream.
  3. There should be Applications. :-D Well, some might say it will add only crap as it does on Facebook. But it feels good to have Applications. You consider yourself having more liberty and choice. :-)
  4. There should be a groups kind of thing. Or at leas they should integrate existing google groups in g+. I am afraid that won't be a good idea though. Google groups are not meant to be integrated, they are stand alone service.
  5. There should be Professional Profiles or Pages. So the sites or brands can promote their business. But it looks like as Google's real name policy is kind of strict, its not gonna happen so easily.
  6. I want Translation of Comments and Posts on the fly. I hate when my foreign friends write in their native tongues and that is shared on my stream. What the HELL, if I can't understand those posts why they appear in my stream (same with Facebook activity feed, but they are gonna add on the fly translation support for comments). Damn Google Translate is the best freely available translation software I've ever known. They can easily integrate G+ with Google Translate service.
  7. A descent way to Send Messages. Yeah yeah I know that one can send your friends email based messages through their profiles, they'll appear in gmail as a profile message. I don't like half solutions. There should be a way to interact with someone who is not in your circles. You should be able to send him/ her a message, or at least ask him/her why s/he bothered to add you in his/her circles. That's not possible through gmail based service.
Ops lucky seven :-). I am unable to remember any further 'wish'. Well, technically it should be in G+ feedback. But just to change the way, let them search on Google what their users say about their + service ;-).
Enjoy Googling and Enjoy G+.

How to Add Pics in Table in Blogger

The new Blogger interface is really cool and provides lots of features to handle image uploading. But the editor is still a pity and you cannot arrange the images. Last day I struggled for 1 hour to arrange a few pics in my post. The aim was to arrange 2 or 3 pictures in one row so they may be looking nice and cleanly arranged. But I could never do it in Blogger's post editor. You can change the size, you can change the alignment but you cannot change the position of the picture from 1 row to another. I tried another solution, i.e. to put each picture in a table cell and thus to arrange them. But again, we cannot insert a table, if we create one using HTML mode we cannot put our pictures in it easily. That's for geeks folks. So for an easy way to put pics on blogger. Follow me.
  1. Download Windows Live Writer.
  2. Install it, afterwards you will be asked to setup blog account.
  3. Enter your Blogger.com credentials and setup for the blog you want to post on with Live Writer.
  4. Now open up the pictures folder in a new Explorer window.
  5. Start writing a new post in Live Writer name it Test Post.
  6. Go to Insert tab (the interface is familiar for Office 2007, 2010 users: Ribbon Interface).
  7. Here you'll find Table function. Click and it'll open up a new dialogue for table configuration.
  8. Select number of cells and rows as per your arrangement scheme. Select cell width, default width worked well for me by the way.
  9. Click OK and a table is inserted in the blank post body section.
  10. Now Drag and Drop each picture (from pics folder) in each cell. The picture will be automatically adjusted as per cell width.
  11. When you are finished. See in Home tab, second separator Publish. There is an option Post Draft to Blog. Click it and Live Writer will start publishing your draft post to your blogger account. It will not minimize but you can do other things in meanwhile.
  12. As soon as it is finished, go to Posts section of your blogger dashboard, and see there is a draft named Test Post.
  13. Click on Edit and the pictures are in front of you arranged cleanly in table cells. You can see the Preview to make sure that they'll look nice on your blog. And now you have two ways.
  14. Continue editing this draft, rename it and add your other content and Publish it.
  15. Or you can copy the pictures code by clicking on HTML mode in post editor and paste that code in your original post (of course through HTML tab). And you are done :-)
You may decide to use Live Writer as your default post writing tool as well but I like to do online things in my browser and leave it if it is absolutely necessary. Enjoy Blogging!