How To Blog

Blogger now supports uploading of images

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“We've just launched Blogger Images. So now you can include photos and images in your posts. Just click the new picture icon and you can upload an image from your computer or from the web. Try it out!”

This is a great step in the right direction for Blogger, as users will now be able to have multiple images within the body of a single post, rather than 1 image per post as was required with Picasa and Hello Bloggerbot.

Still need categories and trackbacks before it is a truly competitive blogging platform – you listening Google?

(BTW, I’m sorry for the lack of posts and updates to this blog as of late.  My fiance lost his job last month so I’ve been working my butt off just trying to make my mortgage payments and haven’t been able to give “How to Blog” as much attention as I’d like to or it deserves.  Wish us luck with getting our feet back on the ground financially so I can breathe a little easier and get back to writing about How to Blog!)

Trouble logging into TypePad with Firefox browser? Clear your TypePad cookies

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I recently found myself unable to log into my TypePad account when using my web browser of choice, Firefox.  After asking them to resend my password (which was just as I’d remembered it), I finally tried logging in using MS Internet Explorer – and had no problem.  Tried again in Firefox – no go.

What gives?  Well, the SixApart team recently made some huge changes to enhance both TypePad’s functionality and user experience (more about that in a future post), but those changes require you to reset your cookies in order to access TypePad from within Firefox.

How to fix it?  Clear your TypePad cookies by doing the following:

• In Firefox, in the Tools menu, choose the item “Options”
• Click on “Privacy” on the left side of the dialog box that pops up
• Expand the section entitled, “Cookies” and then click the “View Cookies” button
• A new dialog box will popup entitled, “Stored Cookies” – scroll through the list of sites until you find www.typepad.com, and then, for each cookie from www.typepad.com, select it and click the “Remove Cookie” button
• Click “OK” to close the ‘Stored Cookies’ window, and then click “OK” again to close the Options window.
• You should now be able to log into Typepad from FireFox

 

Fighting TrackBack Spam - WordPress beats TypePad by a mile

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Once you have a blog that gets any amount of traffic, you will eventually get bombarded by TrackBack spammers (people who send a fake trackback ping to your blog to try to increase links in to their site when their website doesn't even mention your post, your blog, or anything to do with the subject).

Over the past few days, some jerk has gone wild with sending hundreds of trackback spams of a really offensive nature to all of my TypePad blogs - and while I once posted an article (now updated) on how well TypePad handles TrackBack spam, that's *definately* no longer the case.

I have to say that it's been a royal pain going through and deleting all of the trackback spam in TypePad.  The spammer is using a proxy system such that their IP address is different for every TrackBack, so I can't block them by IP address.  And sadly, that's the only method TypePad gives you for prevention of TrackBack spam - this is an area where WordPress blows TypePad away.

In TypePad, I've had to manually go and read through the list of trackbacks and check each one that is spam and then click the 'Delete' button, and I can only do this 20 trackbacks at a time, so I have to go through several pages (this jerk is sending them every few minutes - and whoever you are you are wasting your time as well as mine, because I'm deleting them almost as fast as you can post them - I monitor my TrackBacks very closely, so do us both a favor and just stop it already!!!)

WordPress handles TrackBack spam MUCH better.  Almost none of it gets published to my blog - instead it is put in a moderation queue where I can click a button to say 'Mark all as spam' and then one click deletes them all.  In order to get TrackBack spam to not be automatically published to your blog in WP, click on Options and then click Discussions.  Where it says Comment Moderation, use the default of 'Hold a comment in the moderation queue if contains more than 2 links'.  Next click the link that says "Common spam words", which will take you to the WordPress Codex (online manual maintained by the WP community) where you can copy and paste the spammy words into the edit box " When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URI, e-mail, or IP, hold it in the moderation queue".  And if you want, you can even add certain terms, IP address, URLs, etc into a blacklist area where you'll never even have to deal with the spam.

Hey, SixApart - how hard would it be to implement a 'hold comment/trackback for moderation if it contains any of the following keywords or x or more links" feature in TypePad??  Because as much as I love TypePad (I'm still torn between TypePad and WordPress as my blogging platform of choice - they've got different pros and cons which I'll write up in a future), I am sick of spending a portion of every day sorting through and deleting trackback spam!

Update: TypePad now gives you the ability to have all comments and trackbacks be put in a moderation queue, requiring your approval before any comments or trackbacks appear on your blog.  Thanks to the horrific nature of what these fools  have been trackback spamming me, I've turned Commend and Trackback Moderation ON so stop spamming me because it will NEVER appear on my blog now.  This doesn't mean I've changed my opinion of WP being better than TypePad about handling comment and trackback spam -- it's still the hands-down winner for being able to recognize spam on it's own and put ONLY that in the moderation queue, while allowing real comments and trackbacks to appear instantly.  With TypePad, I've got to be regularly monitoring my comments and trackbacks and either approving or deleting them constantly, so it's still a hassle.