[bloggage] Hallo, EU! Cookies Ahoy!

3206.

Today, when logging in here, I was blessed with a small orange bugle horn next to the "Overview" tab of my Blogger dashboard. This does not happen often.

Going to the dashboard, I'm presented with a notice that according to laws in the European Union, Blogger blogs have to display a notice that cookies are being used and give the end-loader a chance to acknowledge this. Since you're not in the EU if you're in America (though some would probably suggest otherwise), and Blogger insists that it's your (that's you, Mr or Ms Blogger, of Anytown, USA) responsibility to ensure the banner shows, you have to pretend you're not from here to see it.

Gladly, this is not a hard thing to do. If you have a Blogger blog and you don't have a custom domain, your blog's url ends in blogspot.com. To view it like a tourist, just change the url ending to an appropriate form. Instead of zehnkatzen.blogspot.com, for instance, I tried zehnkatzen.blogspot.co.uk and zehnkatzen.blogspot.fr. Easy as that.

When I did this, I got this big banner:

Clicking the Got it button caused it to shrink, thusly:

… and clicking the Got it button again caused it to disappear entirely, revealing the search bar. Back to normal.

Anyone reading this and who has a Blogger blog probably has seen the notice on their dashboard and all the links you need to make sense of this are thereupon. But, in the spirit of community, heads up.

[bloggage] Blogger On The New Blogger Interface

2682.Blogger Product Manager, Chang Kim, on the new Blogger interface …

It’s been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger’s look and feel, and there’s a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics. We’ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient for you—and easier for us to update and improve over time.

That pretty much nails it. The new Blogger interface has a ton of good mojo working through it. As I earlier mentioned, I'd used a number of other offline-blog posting software, some stand-alone, some browser based, with a variety of experiences.

Why? Because the old Blogger interface was tired and non-intuitive. When they rebuilt this thing from the ground up, my friends, they did it right. Photos are now easy-peasy-lemon-crushy to place. Text formatting is now very word-processor-like, with the familiar CMD-I for italic, CMD-B for bold, CMD-U for underline. I don't have to go looking for things, and everything is where I need it … even labels are quick and easy.

This Blogger gives the new interface an enthusiastic thumbs-up, and I'd encourage every other blogger to at least give them a try. They did them up right.

[bloggage] Blogger ist gefloogle

1168. Weirdness at Das Blogger: the wheels have come off of whatever is supporting images. At first in complained that the clicker was suspciously like spam; then it stopped delivering images altogether (unless they're hosted on, say Photobucket or some other provider).

Judging by the uproar in the Blogger Help group, this is happening to a bunch of us folken.

Standing by whilst Google un-gefloogles itself.