Google Checkout is the ideal solution for secure eCommerce shopping; with the ability of the buyer to use any major credit card, and maintain privacy for the buyer and his or her supplied credit card information from being shared with any seller.

Online Privacy And Security of Financial Information is Extremely Important For Consumers and Corporate Buyers Alike

With the concern for online privacy and keeping one’s credit card information secure, choosing the most secure form of e-Commerce is at the highest priority level for consumers and business’ buyers wishing to shop at online e-Commerce wholesale and retail websites.

More and more eCommerce websites and online retailers are using the Google Checkout system for secure online transactions. This is making it much easier for any consumer making purchases, and for corporate buyers to shop online with full assurance of privacy of personal and business financial information, and quickly being able to make future purchases at other online retailers that accept the Google Checkout system for payment. Look for the “Google Checkout Buy Now Badge” of acceptance, for online retailers that accept the Google Checkout payment processing system.

Google Checkout is the Most Secure Payment Processing System

In my opinion, Google Checkout is one of the most secure forms of eCommerce available to the consumer or buyers for large or small businesses. An order can not be processed without first being initiated on the buyer’s end, and with first having full approval from the buyer (the purchaser), also initiated only on the buyer’s end. The seller can not charge more than what was originally approved by the buyer. The seller simply receives the order, and fills it for shipping. The seller can cancel orders or refund full or partial amounts only. Just like at any brick and mortar store, each retailer has their own return policy and refund policy. So, it is always a good idea to read the retailer’s return and refund policies closely before making an online purchase.

Google Checkout Option to Keep eMail Address Confidential

Google Checkout also provides the option of private emails too by using secure forms of email communications with online retailers. When making an online purchase with the Google Checkout system, simply select, “Keep my email address confidential” from the available check boxes, and your email address will not be shared. So, any forms of email communication with that retailer will automatically forward your email through the Google Checkout system, and keep it private from the online retailer.

You will see exactly what your account will be charged. Descriptions, Quantities, Prices, Taxes, and Shipping Charges will all be documented and verifiable before the “Place your order now” button is clicked.

Sign Up For Google Checkout

If you are a first time user of Google Checkout, you may sign up for Google Checkout prior to, or right at, the order process. Sign up for Google Checkout at: http://checkout.google.com. I also suggest reading the FAQs and key details of how the Google Checkout system works.

Once you are signed up for Google Checkout, you can then purchase any product or service, from any other retailer that accepts the Google Checkout payment processing system, and not have to fill in all your information again and again.

I personally am one that is super concerned about privacy online. So, I can vouch for the integrity of the Google Checkout eCommerce payment handling system.

Yes, I know there are other systems out there, but to me, the Google Checkout System seems to be the best fit for both parties involved. The buyer and the seller are joined together in an unbiased middle man role that keeps the buyer’s information private and secure, while at the same same time provides a great payment processing system for the retailer to conduct secure eCommerce online.

Marketing Hand Shaking

While you still may be leery of using any form of eCommerce for buying or selling goods or services online, it is wise to understand how business operates in general. The world of business operates on the exchange of products and services. Everything has to begin with trust and a hand shake at some point along the way. The buyer has to trust that the seller is providing the product or service they are purchasing. The seller has to trust that the buyer is going to pay for the product or service being rendered. What better way of encapsulating that trust factor than with a secure form of payment processing that is not only secure, but is also private, easy to use, and with verifiable handshaking going on between the buyer, the seller, payment system, and the delivery system. Google Checkout is really marketing at its finest. Marketing is defined as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The term developed from the original meaning which literally referred to going to market, as in shopping, or going to a market to sell goods or services.

Jim Warholic
President, Professional Web Services, Inc.

Get your business established on the online market place today. Get the Internet marketing business solution now. Increase your online sales. Contact Jim Warholic for his company’s Internet marketing solution for your business today.

This is a how to guide for importing and exporting your Blogger blog to other Blogger blogs. Carefully follow the import and export online documentation below. Procedure works for Blogger Classic (HTML), Blogger FTP Publishing, Blogger New (XML), and Blogger Custom Domain Names.

On my online post for Blogger Dashboard – Hide Show All Problems – Missing Blogs; as of 12/14/2008 I discovered a do-it-yourself fix for this peculiar dashboard problem. I made a discovery when doing some Google Searches for free blog editors for Blogger that started me thinking of a possible solution for my particular missing blog in the dashboard problem.

I found this one article that talked about the new features of Blogger Beta, with one of those features being that of importing blog postings from other blogs that a person owns and has the publishing rights to. Other blog platforms such as WordPress have for some time been able to import postings from other blogs, but until recently Blogger did not provide that feature. When I read the write up about this new Blogger feature, it was the old proverbial light bulb going off in my head. I thought, this might be a solution to the missing blog in the dashboard.

Some background information is required for understanding the Blogger technical problem to begin with. When I first created this blog, www.jimwarholic.com, and posted it the first time on the Internet, I believe I did it strictly under FTP publishing, and did not assign a Blogspot.com to the blog at first. I created the website, www.jimwarholic.com back in the year 2006, and started publishing directly with FTP publishing at my webhosting domain using my own domain name.

It was the later part of the third quarter of 2008 in which Blogger did an update to their system, and my blog disappeared completely from the dashboard area. It wasn’t in the hidden mode, or the cookies were not causing it to be hidden as some suggested, it was just gone. I could still gain access to it from the quick edit buttons when logged into my Blogger account, and navigate backwards into the back end of the template settings and publishing setups. I tried everything I could think of to get it to show up in the dashboard, though it was always displayed on my profile page. I assigned another email address for writing on the blog as an administrator. However, the blog would not even show up at the dashboard of the other profile account. I was scratching my head for months on trying to figure it out. I posted information at Blogger Help Groups. I searched online for solutions. I tried to leave a message for Blogger, but they no longer have a contact page online. But, I could not find a fix, that is until 12/13/2008 – 12/14/2008 rolled around.

Sometimes you have to take Internet matters into your own hands. Importing and exporting blogs to Blogger is now a mouse click away on the settings area of each blog control console. You now have three options available to you. Import a blog, export a blog, and delete a blog. To import posts and comments from a Blogger blog, you must first have exported the blog to your local computer desktop or folder on your PC.

I must warn you here. Take some precautions before you attempt to export and do an import of your complete postings and comments from another blog, especially the blogs that are missing from the Blogger Dashboard area. Note also, that if you export your content from one Blogger account, and then import your postings and comments to another Blogger account, with a different name on it, you will end up having all your posts republished with the new Blogger account name.

Additionally, I would recommend before doing the online procedure is having two windows open in your browser, or better yet, having two different browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, or Internet Explorer) open when exporting a blog from one Blogger account, and importing it to another Blogger account.

*Very important note here. It is highly recommended to have an Internet quick link from your desktop to the old Blogger missing dashboard blog, to that blog’s setup page. To do this, you can use Google Chrome, and create what is known as “create an application shortcut” to your desktop. Once you do that, then you can click on the Internet link in the future to gain access to your blog. Or you can use Firefox and drag the tab to the desktop to the specific page for the postings, settings, and template area of the old blog that has been navigated to with the quick edit links in the postings themselves. You could also do a bookmark or Internet Explorer favorite link too. However, I would not trust just one way only. If you do not do this link step, you will have no way of getting back to the old Blogger blog that remains hidden from the dashboard area. You will be lost forever. The reason for this is that once you publish using the new blogspot.com address, and then change it to your old FTP published address and click publish, your quick links will now be linked to the new blog instead of the old blog. Which means the old quick links used to navigate to the settings tab for the old blog will not work anymore.

Here is what I did for my particular FTP export and import blog solution.

This procedure is written for Blogger FTP publishing but most of these steps should work for other non FTP blogs such as blogspot.com address and custom domain names for Blogger too. The new XML Blogger template files can also be exported and imported too and you should export your HTML Blogger Classic template or XML template file too.

1. First read the Blogger information on, How do I import and export blogs on Blogger? Read it twice and make sure you comprehend all aspects of how to do it before proceeding.
2. Created favorites – bookmarks, and quick launch buttons using Firefox and Google Chrome on the desktop to the old blog setup page to be safe.
3. Saved old HTML template file on to my local computer from the old blog website. I used the following procedure for saving the old template file. Opened Template, Edit HTML, and copied entire html text to a notepad plain text file. Notepad is part of the default Microsoft Windows Operating System simple text editor programs available from the lower left of the screen. Go to Start, All Programs, Accessories, Notepad – and Don’t forget to do this and remember where you have saved the file!
4. Opened Firefox and Google Chrome Browsers next to each other. It’s nice to have a bigger screen, but not required.
5. Logged into one Blogger account in Firefox. Logged into the other Blogger account in Google Chrome. Though I used two different Blogger accounts, you can do the same thing with a single Blogger account and have two windows, tabs, or two web browsers open at the same time with the same Blogger account but with different blogs in each tab or window.
6. Navigated to the control area of the blog, using the quick edit links in the old blog postings, and followed the links to the settings tab for the old blog.
7. Exported the old blog to the desktop or folder on your computer’s hard drive which creates a (.xml) file.
8. Created new Blogsopt.com webblog. Went to the other browser, and created a new Blogspot address using the “Create a Blog” link from the Blogger Dashboard. I used http://internetjim.blogspot.com as the blogspot.com website. You can create your own name for your blogspot.com website. Note, it is going to change to your own domain name in the next steps.
9. Verified the new virgin site was live online. (I may have done one test posting to begin with, but am not sure on this point.)
10. Changed the new site title and description to reflect the name of the old blog. Note: I changed the title slightly to quickly visually verify on which website I was on at the time. Because, once you do the import of the posts, comments, and HTML template file, you will not be able to tell the difference from one blog to the other.
11. Switched to FTP publishing on the new blog by first switching back to classic templates mode.
12. Opened both the old and the new blog tab areas and copied the FTP publishing information from one settings are to the other. Went right down tabs: Basic, Publishing, Formatting, Comments, Archiving, Site Feed, Email, OpenID, and Permissions. It is important to get everything the way it is on the old blog to the new blog. Keep the publishing, archiving, and site feed absolutely the same, otherwise, you could end up with new urls, which won’t match up with the search engine results or result in broken links back to your website.
13. Copied from the HTML text in the Notepad template file previously saved in step number 3 and pasted the old HTML text into the new Edit HTML section of the new blog. (This makes the new blog look like your old blog, but not completely until you publish FTP publish it. Important! Don’t publish it yet. Wait till the next step. If you publish before the next step, you will write over all your postings at the hosting server for your blog for a period of time until you repost with the imported posts and comments.)
14. After double checking and comparing all of the settings with the old to the new, it was now time to do an import from the saved (.xml) file located on the computer desktop. Note, there are a couple of options on the import. You can either choose to import and automatically publish all posts immediately or import and save them as drafts to be published later. Your choice at this point. I automatically published at this point in the import process.
    
    

    Import posts and comments from a Blogger export file. Imported posts will be merged with any current posts, sorted by date.

15. Success! At this point in time, I verified all my posts were properly posted to the server. I navigated to each online to verify. The new blog was now showing up in the dashboard area.

Blogger Notes and Observations

I was still trying to figure out how my blog went missing in the first place. I still think it had to do with when I first created the blog without a blogspot.com address. I went straight to FTP publishing. Another possibility, is I may have created this blog at about the time Blogger still allowed you to use a different email address or Blogger account name other than a Gmail account. Blogs under the old Blogger accounts required a different login screen and are part of the legacy claim for claiming old blogs to be part of your new Google account name. I had however, claimed my blog under this legacy link a long time ago.

Somehow, when the most recent changes occurred with the Blogger Dashboard area, was when I first noticed my blog had disappeared. It seems as though a few other folks have experienced the same problem too. I haven’t heard of a fix from Google as of yet about this particular situation. It may be part of a database glitch for old FTP blogs that were created without a blogspot.com address to begin with that got overlooked when Google Engineers updated the Blogger system and dashboard areas.

Another important point to note when doing an import from one blog to the other, is that if you posted any of your old posts at the old blog account, and then changed the title of the blog postings and re-published the blog at the same spot, the URL would not have changed on this old posting, but when you import the blog postings into a new Blogger blog, the URL is updated to reflect this change. That change in the URL creates a small problem however.

Let’s take a look at a web page example. Let’s say I published a blog at the old account titled “This Is a Test Example” for the title of a new article. The URL at the old account would be the following: www.jimwarholic.com/2007/02/this-is-a-test-example.php. If however you changed the title at the old blog to “Internet Testing at My Online Sandbox Beach” or simply “Test” the new title in the Blogger Title Field would be updated on the old blog posting, but the URL would remain the same. This would not affect any links to that particular posting. But, when you import the name, “Internet Testing at My Online Sandbox Beach” or “Test” for the title of the posting to the new blog, the resulting URL would change to www.jimwarholic.com/2007/02/test.php, which is completely different than the original URL and will break hyper-links to that specific page, unless you create some permanent redirects (301 Status Code) in your (.htaccess) file. If your website hosting provider provides the easy-to-use cPanel website control panel for setting up redirects, or other website hosting control panels that provide for quickly configuring permanent (301) redirect solutions, then each URL can be quickly entered into an online input form. Otherwise, you must manually write a new .htaccess file by including the redirects for each particular file that needs to be redirected to the new URLs. Once the redirects are established online, after a period of a month or two, then you can remove them to make your website run more efficiently, and speed up the web page renderings. I suggest a search on Google for more information on .htaccess files to understand some of the finer points in configuring temporary (302) and permanent (301) redirects.

For the moment, I am a bit leery of deleting the old blog by using the “Delete Blog” from the settings page. However, I changed the FTP publishing user name and password, so it would not publish if I accidentally happened to click there for some reason. I also gave myself a note on the HTML template area to reflect what the status of that blog is. I might have missed a redirect, and if I saw an old page and thinking it needed to be edited, the old edit quick edit link will still be in affect for the old online posting. You would not want to republish from that old blog, otherwise you will change all your Internet postings back to what they were in the past.

I know this is a rather long Blog posting, but I feel it’s important for everyone out in Internet land to understand what is going on online with your web site, when a procedure like this is implemented on the Web.

Good luck everyone. If you happen to take the plunge into importing and exporting, take your time, and think about what you are doing. Print out these instructions if you wish. Feel free to post your comments or questions to either the comments section of this post or email me directly using the appropriate comment or email form below.

Best regards,

Jim

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Blogger Import Export Blog Update 12/18/08

After serious consideration about a few things related to possibly maintaining the old blog online, I decided it was in my best internet interest to delete the old blog completely from the Blogger system. There were a number of very good reasons not to save the old blog. For one, if I forgot to do a redirect of an old Blogger posted page, a commentator would still be able to post a new comment to the old blog. This would not be good, since all the old comments were exported and imported into the new online blog, and I really want people to comment on the new blog, not the old blog. Additionally, I found myself accidentally logging in to the old blog through quick edits, on web pages that I forgot about. By deleting the blog completely from the Blogger system, I will no longer have to worry about that. If I forgot a page or two on the permanent redirects, the Search Engine Spiders will eventually figure it out, and gather the proper pages to add to the online search directory database.

Warning about deleted Blogger Blogs!

I was however a little nervous when I went to delete the old blog from my Blogger account. I did not want to accidentally delete the wrong Blogger blog. It paid off and was good that I had two slightly different names for each of the blogs for identification purposes. There is no recovery if you accidentally delete the wrong blog in your Blogger account. Deleted Blogger Blogs are gone forever and Google will not be able to get them back for you.

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Open Letter to Google And Blogger,

Reference: Blogger Buzz: Updates and Bug Fixes for August 14th

According to this posting from Blogger the new feature was to provide more functionality. “There’s a new look for the Blogger Dashboard, which we think you’ll find more attractive and functional. If you have a ton of blogs (as we do) try out the “hide” and “show all” links to help manage the list.”

Well I tried it, and here is the hidden scoop.

Missing Blogs in The Blogger Dashboard

I am having a problem of the missing blogs in the Blogger Dashboard area ever since the Blogger dashboard update. Some readers have suggested that it is a case of not clearing the cache and cookies in the browser. I can assure everyone out in Internet land that it is not the clearing the cache and cookies problem in my browser(s) and computer(s) that is causing the problem.

What happens is that when “Show all” is clicked, it shows all and then when I click the “Always show” button next to the blog itself, it toggles to “Hide” except I still have one blog that is hidden permanently from the dashboard. However, the number count of the blogs shown is never updated. When I do a refresh again, the blogs are hidden again no matter what I do.

When Blogger added the “Show all” and “Hide” blogs Javascript from the dashboard, this is when my blogs started disappearing from the dashboard.

To check out some other blogs in my account, I tried hiding other blogs from the dashboard. This did indeed hide them, but now they stay hidden permanently. “Show All” works temporarily but does not latch to “always” when clicking the “Always show.” Now, only a few of the blogs “Always show.”

I tried several other computers (both Mac and PC) to verify that the problem is not the cache.

I tried four different browsers. (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome)

Nothing I have tried makes any difference what so ever.

Note: I have blogs that are both FTP setup with blogs hosted on other servers, plus blogspot.com

Also note that this “According to Jim” blog that you are actually reading which completely disappeared from the dashboard, (except I can still get to it with the edit tool from a posting, at the actual url address) was setup with ftp publishing to begin with, and did not assign a blogspot address when originally created. I tried changing it to a blogspot url address but it still would not show up in the dashboard area. I subsequently switched back to my own custom domain name. I also added the blog to another Blogger account (see link below), but it will not show up at that dashboard either.

However, this blog does show up in the Blogger profiles pages of both though. This is really strange that it will show in the profile but will not display in the dashboard.

It really seems that the new javascript is the main problem.

I’m at my wits end.

Blogger used to have a contact form for problems, however they have discontinued that service. It’s frustrating not being able to contact Blogger anymore. Note: I have posted this on the Blogger Help Groups too, with no response.

Blogger please help.

Thank you

Jim

PS To post this posting I had to do the end-around link (through the quick edit link on a blog post, when logged into my Blogger account) to the Posting, Settings, and Template area of this blog, and then create a new posting.


Addendum

12/14/08 I took matters into my own hands. The hidden blog in the Blogger Dashboard fix is quite involved and there are some precautions that must be taken into account before tackling the problem.

12/16/08 For those in Internet land, I have now documented the procedure online of how to do it, with the complete details. This detailed how-to procedure for Blogger is posted at My Blogger Update. Hint, importing and exporting blogs are the keys to technical success.

———

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Do you work from home? Do you have a business email account? Do you have a personal email account? Would you like to keep your business and personal emails separate, but easily read and respond to both at the same time, and with the same software email client program? If you answered yes to any of these questions, the following will give you a quick overview of what you need to do on your home office computer.

Many options are available for just about any email address today. Most free online service providers of email have the option to be able to write and respond to emails online and on a home office computer using POP. POP is a type of protocol for sending and receiving email. Don’t worry what POP exactly means, but any email client can be used to set up POP email. Email clients are software email programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Netscape, Eudora, Apple Mail, and others. If you have a free Google Gmail account, which I highly recommend, you can use POP mail to send and receive on your local computer, in addition to also being able to send and receive email online.

For some excellent examples of how to configure POP for Gmail, take a look at the following:

Mail Clients

• Outlook Express (Windows)
• Outlook 2002 (Windows)
• Outlook 2003
  (also available: Gmail POP Service animated demo)
• Entourage 2004
• Entourage X
• Eudora 5.1 ^{(and higher)} (Sponsored & Paid Mode)
• Eudora 5.1 ^{(and higher)} (Light Mode)
• Eudora for Macs
• Netscape Mail 7.x
• Netscape Mail 6.2
• Netscape Mail 4.5, 4.6, or 4.7
• Apple Mail
• Mozilla 1.7
• Thunderbird 0.x
• Thunderbird 1.5
• Other

If I am using one of these email clients, how do I respond using my business account when it’s a business email, and how do I respond using my personal account when it’s a personal email?

Once again, there are many options on each specific email client. Depending on the email client, you can have separate identities, and have separate accounts under each identity. Typically separate identities as in Outlook Express are completely different viewable login areas within the the email client program. This means that you would have to switch identities to be able to read and send emails from each specific identity. Each identity can have more than one account, with multiple email addresses being imported to the specific identity, but this requires quite a bit of filtering and sending a message will not necessarily be the email address that you really want to use to send a specific email from a specific address. For example, if you use one identity only to receive all your emails from both a personal and a business account, into one inbox, then it is most likely that the header of the email, (the part that shows the “Send From:” and “Sent To:” information) will not be exactly the correct addresses that you want to show for a business account response or vice versa.

Thunderbird e-mail client, which is free and highly customizable, with multiple identities and multiple accounts, does things slightly differently when talking about identities and accounts.

Idenitities

An identity in Thunderbird is a collection of settings for sending mail. An identity is defined by:

• A name.
• An e-mail address.
• The account that the identity belongs to.

Note: Technically, an identity in Thunderbird is a collection of preference settings in your profile.

Thunderbird allows you to create identities that look exactly the same, but if you do that you might find them confusing to use.

Use more than one identity when you want to send mail using more than one From name or e-mail address, or more than one SMTP server, or more than one signature, or more than one choice for any of the settings that Thunderbird provides in identities.

Thunderbird e-mail client requires you to create a separate default identity for each account, but you can make these identities look exactly the same if you want to. For example, you receive some of your mail from Gmail and some of your mail from the company you work for, but you always want to send mail using your company From address. In your Thunderbird Gmail account, change the default identity to specify exactly the same details as in your work account.

If you receive mail that was originally sent to more than one e-mail address, then you might find it convenient to create identities for all those e-mail addresses. Then you can reply to a message from the same address that it was originally sent to.

Do not use more than one identity when one of your accounts already has an identity that you can use. This is because when you write a message you can change the From address to any identity from any account. There is usually no point in having duplicate identities in different accounts (unless they are default identities).

An identity specifies:

• Settings used when you start composing a message
• Settings used when you send a message

Read more about Mail Concepts.

If you want to create an automatic forward, using a business email address, and having emails forwarded to your personal email address, you can do that, but be aware that if you respond from your personal email address on a forwarded message from the business address, the Send From will be the personal e-mail address and that is what the person will see on the other end when the e-mail is received.

A solution to this situation, is to have two accounts, one for business, and one for personal information messages, and make sure you are using the correct one for business, and for personal use.

If you have multiple email accounts online, and don’t want to have to login to each specific account, you can set up forwards to one account, and just note where the email came from. Then respond using the appropriate e-mail identity or account.

Gmail Notifier is a notification program that runs locally on your computer that lets you know when you have a message at one specific account. Use this to monitor the main e-mail account, where all your emails arrive. Another option for automatic notification is to use ePrompter which runs automatically in the background, and can be configured to allow up to 16 e-mail accounts to be monitored at the same time, and will let you know with a small color coded circle (and/or sound) showing when an email arrives, and display the number of e-mails that arrived inside the circle. Both ePrompter and Gmail Notifier are very easy to set up and use. ePrompter’s wizard allows you to very easily create additional color coded account dots that will monitor all your different e-mail accounts.

Hope this helps, feel free to ask your questions.

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I like Blogger

I just wish Blogger had a simple way of creating static pages, that did not necessarily show up as a blog posted page.

Anyone that has been blogging for sometime will tell you, that there is certain information that a person or company would like to have readily available through a link on the blog itself to a separate page with the same branded template image as the main home page. Other times, it would really be cool if a person could have a unique page or pages that have a different template style. For example: maybe all the blogs posted under a particular label; a person would like to have a different image at the top of the page header to separate and visually identify the postings. There are Blogger workarounds and hacks that place in different pictures or images depending on certain parameters, but it would be nice to have maybe a different customizable template area for the static pages and/or labeled categories.

Additionally it would be cool if a person could easily blog to a different subdirectory area of the website when using Custom Domain Name Blogger publishing on another hosted account. While FTP publishing does allow multiple separate blogs under one domain name, custom domain name publishing does not provide the ability to create separate blogs under the main area of the website. Which means you can not have mondays.ws and mondays.ws/coolwidgets as a place to blog directly about coolwidgets. This would be a very handy feature to be able to easily add another subdirectory area under the current blog as a person would have with a unique category area and static pages on a regular website. You can however have other sub domain names with the same custom domain name using Blogger Custom Domain Name option. For example: backflag.com is the domain where I post short snippets using Tumblr as the free online publisher engine. But I use marketingstrategies.backflag.com as the custom domain name publishing option with Blogger to the sub domain marketingstrategies, for information about marketing strategies. Keep in mind that subdomains are typically viewed as separate websites and it is important to note from a search standpoint (see note below about having different websites).

Static Page Workaround for Blogger

Probably the simplest static page workaround for Blogger at this time is to go to the earliest blog posting date and post a new page with backdating it to this earliest time. Turn off comments and backlinks under post options for this posting if you want, and set the date to the oldest date. Then simply link to it.

The Strength of the Free Blogger Service

The strength of the free Blogger service is the ability to customize the html and css (cascading style sheets) code in order to create your own unique branded image. Other blog hosting services that offer free hosting such as WordPress, provide some of the features such as static pages but have severe limitations on what can be altered and customized with the css and the html.

The ability to use hundreds, if not thousands of free templates set up for the Blogger service is one of the features that I have come to love. Just about any webpage or website template can be converted to a Blogger template with having an understanding of the Blogger drive engine and placing the proper coding from Blogger into the template design area. This feature really makes it much easier to brand the blog to the current site design. Read about Blogging with Professional Web Services.

Additional Blogger Wishes

I love the new Blogger with XML. I wish we could use the XML features on the non Google hosting services. For example: currently one of the Blogger options is in the classic design template mode for ftp publishing to a paid hosted provider with full customization. We have our website at www.pwebs.net for Internet marketing services. We publish a blog using Blogger at: www.pwebs.net/internet-marketing.htm about the Internet marketing industry, in which we write about various aspects of Internet marketing. Currently we are using ftp publishing for the blog, and a customized classic template design. There are some pretty cool features that XML has, as compared to the standard ftp classic design template. If the XML new Blogger templates could be used for other than the free Blogspot account hosting or the Custom Domain option (see below), then it would make it much easier to customize and manage the information for publishing.

I know I said this before but it bares repeating. Blogger currently allows you to use the Custom Domain name option, but hosting still takes place on Blogger servers, and only allows one blog per main domain name without subdirectories as compared to ftp publishing (see above). A person can create Sub Domains for different blogs using the custom domain name option, but these are considered separate websites, and if information was substantially the same between these Sub Domains, the Search Engines would more than likely not look too favorably to having created additional subdomains. For example: www.jimwarholic.com could have a subdomain as info.jimwarholic.com with unique information at both areas and this would be OK. This is no different than Blogger hosted services with millions of subdomains at blogspot.com, such as eclectic-marketing.blogspot.com and professionalwebservices.blogspot.com.

One of the reasons I have come to really like using the Blogger service is because Google allows you to use javascripts in the templates themselves. WordPress free blog hosting restricts javascript from being added for additional features. WordPress states it’s because of security issues. I am not convinced that javascript is the problem as opposed to simply WordPress engineers taking the time to allow javascript to be used securely in the first place. Listen, I am not bashing WordPress, because I too have a WordPress blog with Jim West as the blog name, and I like posting there from time to time, but I am simply stating the main differences that I see between Blogger and WordPress.

One reason to choose Custom Domain Name Blogger publishing over FTP publishing is the speed at which a page publishes using the custom domain name option. Whereas on an ftp account, hosted somewhere else, it can involve quite a delay with ftp publishing timeouts on very large blogs. Custom Domain Name publishing is also easier to add widgets and other items for the novice blogger. Expert bloggers can also customize the templates quite extensively.

In this world, nothing is ever perfect as it is. Everything man-made can always be improved. Not everyone will have everything they want. What are some of your thoughts on the Blogger wish list? What features would you like to see added? One last thing that I forgot to mention is I would like the labels to be able to automatically show up when using classic template de
signs for ftp publishing, just like in the XML template designs provides the sidebar widget to display the labels. Currently for classic templates you have to create the list manually for the sidebar areas.

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I decided to tackle the custom domain name setup again for Google Custom Domain names for both Blogger and Google Apps. The instructions for setting up a custom domain name with Blogger seem simple enough, but when entering a CNAME record and having the WWW point to ghs.google.com produces only half the desired results.

Here is an actual example of what I am talking about. When entering www.wednesdays.ws, that takes you to one blog. But when entering just plain wednesdays.ws, it would say the blog could not be found or something like that. So I decided to see what would happen if I created a second blog, and using the custom domain feature to point this second blog to a nearly identical template, but with different blog postings. Now both blog sites work independently of one another. Take a look at wednesdays.ws.

The Blogger system allowed for independent blogs on both the www and without the www. This really is not an ideal setup because most people think of www.wednesdays.ws and wednesdays.ws as one and the same site. However, the WWW is actually a subdomain of wednesdays.ws.

What’s The WWW Solution?

In the Blogger Help Group is a thread for Custom Domain. This particular thread talks about the very problematic issue, and unfortunately does not appear to have a fix at this time. I can’t help but think that there has to be some enterprising individual that has come up with a definitive answer to this CNAME record problem. Apparently, CNAME records are suited for subdomains and not the domains themselves. Here are a couple of articles that talk about the details of what is required.

Google Custom Domains – Elegant Yet Unreliable

Google Custom Domain – The DNS Referral

The interesting thing about CNAME records being for subdomains, is the fact that I was able to publish two different blogs using WWW for one and no WWW for the other.

Below is the actual GoDaddy Total DNS Control Panel screen shot. Click on the image to open it in a new window, with a larger view.

This has not been the only experiment with Google and the Custom Domain Names. Several months back, I had set up this website with a custom domain name and used both a blog for publishing, plus bring your own domain name at Google Apps. This was exceptionally interesting in the aspect that the WWW was being published at the blog, and the other without the WWW was being published at Google Apps. This does seem to work, but in my estimation is confusing for the person browsing from one location to another, even though technically the WWW is a subdomain, most people do not realize that, and expect to go to the same place no matter which way they type in the domain name. I am not exactly sure how the search engines take to having each go to a different location.

On one of the experiments, I believe I was able to get it to partially function, except the articles themselves would not render properly. If the article posting was being published using the WWW blog, then when someone tried to type in the article location without the WWW it would not find the posting.

Since that time, with the two different locations option, I have switched this website to publish with ftp publishing using Blogger as the Blogging engine. With ftp publishing there is an option to turn off the Blogger tool bar. Now, because the site is hosted at another location, both the WWW and the site without the WWW render to the same web page.

Additional Experiments Were Tried

Here are some other items I tried to see what would happen to try to alleviate the problem of dual personalities with Google Custom Domain name publishing. I located the IP address for where the particular blog was being published. I then created an “A” record which pointed to the location of the blog. I don’t remember all the particulars of exactly what happened, but I do remember there were performance issues. Additionally I tried to do a Meta Redirect in one of the blogs to go to the other. This also had performance issues, and the search engines probably penalized the website for having a meta redirect with little time involved before the page was redirected. Also, having a redirect places the person using a web browser, who wants to use the back button, in a position of not being able to easily get back to his or her starting point. Simply put, people do not like being hemmed in and not able to get back in their browser. So, that option was not ideal.

There has got to be an answer. If I only wanted to have a unique blog subdomain name on the front of my website, then using Google Custom Domain name publishing is no problem at all. Any suggestions from anyone? Google, do you folks have any answers?

Sincerely,

Jim Warholic the Internet marketing marketeer

Wow, Could This Really Happen?

It was reported by the New York Post that Microsoft had asked Yahoo! to enter formal negotiations for an acquisition which could be worth $50 billion.

Microsoft sees in Yahoo! the potential to leapfrog it’s development efforts in the area of search and online advertising revenue generation. Yahoo! meanwhile has suffered with lower earnings.

Microsoft and Yahoo! are both having greater difficulty competing against Google for the online advertising dollars spent. With Google being used by more searchers than any other search engine, Google has consistently increased their advertising revenue, while Microsoft and Yahoo! have both struggled to lure the kind of advertising dollars that shareholders would like.

The recent acquisition of DoubleClick by Google may be the straw that broke the camels back. DoubleClick was a company that specialized in online advertisements. Now that Google has bought DoubleClick, Microsoft is scratching their head, trying to figure out what is the next step they should take to improve their online presence.

Would a merger of Microsoft and Yahoo! be good for the consumer? I’m not sure on this one. With Microsoft making the bulk of their money on the selling of software and operating systems, and also heavily spending in the development of their own search technology and online advertising, it is likely that we would see a merging of technologies between Microsoft and Yahoo! Search, and also the online advertising systems.

The merging of Microsoft and Yahoo! might be good for the online advertisers. By reducing the number of main search portals down from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft to just Google and Microsoft, online advertisers could get more bang for their buck.

Is this deal worth $50 billion to Microsoft?

Time will tell.

Jim

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