Google webmaster tools

I've made my first change to the default template (or rather the Son of Moto theme) to change the HTML output from Blogger slightly. There are some fancy features in Blogger for changing the page layout by moving boxes around, but I haven't really looked in to that yet. All I did was edit the page template as raw text.

What I wanted was to verify my site in the Google webmaster tools thing. I thought I might as well have it there along with my other websites. Normally you do this by adding an empty file with a certain name to the root of your website, but since you can't do that in Blogger you have to add a <meta> element in the header instead.

While I was at it I added Google Analytics code to this site as well, just to give that a try really. Sorry about the JavaScript, but since it gets loaded right at the end of the page it shouldn't slow things down much.

Posting by email

If what the Blogger documentation says is true then this message should get published as a blog article automatically. It's a neat idea, and I think it could be quite convenient being able to post from anywhere you can get webmail or wahtever without having to remember your Google account details.

It should (in theory) be possible to implement something like this on Daizu, but it wouldn't be trivial. I'd have to have some program (run from procmail or whatever) which creates a new article and commits it to the Subversion repository. I suppose as long as it had some way of picking an appropriate filename to use, and making sure that it wouldn't clash with anything else, there's no reason why it wouldn't work.

Spelling checker bug

Well, I think I've found a bug in this beta version of Blogger already. If you turn on the spell checking feature in the WYSIWYG editor, it adds markup to highlight spelling errors (which is fine), with some JavaScript magic to provide nifty little pop-up menus with suggested spellings. The trouble is, if you don't correct what it thinks are spelling errors (like the word ‘daizu’, which obviously isn't in the spelling dictionary), the markup gets left behind and ends up on the web page.

My article yesterday has this in the HTML output from Blogger:

<span onclick="BLOG_clickHandler(this)"
      class="blsp-spelling-error"
      id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Daizu</span>

(I've added newlines to make it more readable).

Checking out the competition

I'm creating this blog to see what Blogger is like to use. I'm mainly interested in what the user interface is like, since I'm planning to write user interface code for my own content management system (Daizu CMS).

Well, so far so good. It's easy to get this thing set up, and the WYSIWYG editor seems to work quite well. There doesn't seem to be a way of inserting special characters like   though, except for doing it by hand with the ‘Edit Html’ option or pasting them in from elsewhere. Still, if I was using this regularly I would want to write stuff in a proper text editor anyway and paste it in.

I'm using the beta version of Blogger. That's partly so that I get to see the latest and greatest version, and mainly so that I don't have to bother creating a new account and keeping track of yet another password. This new version just uses a general Google account, which I had anyway.

OK, that's enough for now. I'll post if I have anything worthwhile to say about how Blogger fares as a CMS.