Tag Archives: web services

Google needs to do something about the import feature of Blogger

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Google has this great blogging platform in Blogger but they are hardly doing anything to make it easy for people to switch from rival blogging platforms to theirs.

I mean they do a pretty good job at data liberation. It is very easy to migrate from Blogger to WordPress but doing a reverse is a major headache.

WordPress too makes it very easy to export your blog content to a XML file. Blogger has a feature that accepts an XML file for importing blogs. But the two formats are incompatible.

There is a third party service available that converts WordPress XML file to Blogger XML file but it does not support files larger than 1MB in size. And most of the times the file exported is not even accepted by Blogger.

The new Blogger is a pretty solid alternative to WordPress and Google would probably attract a lot of people from WordPress if only they offer a solid importing tool.

And Google is considered to be the champion of cloud computing

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Apple iCloud has showcased how the cloud can be made to work with native apps. Google has tried similar stuff with their apps like Google Cloud Connect.

But the company really disappoints you when you end up facing issues with some of their core services. We all have faced issues with Gmail one time or the other.

The problem I have been facing is with Picasa Web. And I am paying for it. Google acknowledges the problem. Google developers even claim to have made some changes on their end to fix the problem. But apparently, it has not worked for anyone.

This thread showcases the entire saga. It has been more than a week and Google has simply failed to give an ETA on when they would be able to resolve this problem.

Image sharing is probably one of the hottest markets on the internet today. Flickr is struggling to compete against services like Instagram. Facebook is set to launch their own dedicated image sharing app for smartphones. And here is Google struggling to fix an error that prevents you from uploading your images to their servers from your computer on a wired broadband connection even when you are paying for the service…

Looks like even Twitter hates me!

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Update: I finally have the link shortening feature on Twitter.com!

Forget Google, even Twitter is slow in rolling out their latest features to my account.

I am not even talking about the photo sharing service that is currently available to a very small segment of their users. Twitter probably enabled it for tech bloggers and other high profile accounts.

I am yet to get their automatic link shortening feature on the web client. It is supposed to let me type a longer message converting regular links to t.co based links. Not working yet.

Experience buying from Letsbuy.com

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So, I placed an order for LG Optimus One for a friend at Letsbuy.com.

I decided to pay using Cash on Delivery option because I did not want to land in a situation where I made a payment but got a much delayed delivery.

It has been around 5 days now… My accounts page does not show any update on the delivery situation.

Calling Letsbuy.com customer care has been helpless. No one is picking up the phone since yesterday.

Their Facebook page does not allow me to put a message. I checked out existing threads and noticed that other users are facing similar problems with delayed delivery and customer care not responding to phone calls.

I guess not paying through the credit card turned out to be a good decision. From what I heard, they do deliver eventually but the process can take a week or even more. This is pretty sad considering timely delivery would ensure that I would consider them for more orders in the future.

I picked Letsbuy.com over Flipkart because of a discount coupon I found. I guess I would just wait and see what happens now!

I also mailed them a query through email… No responses to that too till now.

WordPress is a great blog software migration platform!

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I just realized how useful WordPress is even if you have no plans to use it as your blogging platform.

I was working on migrating a Posterous powered blog to Blogger.

Posterous does not have any export feature. Though they do offer an API for other services to fetch content from it.

Blogger does not have an importer for Posterous. They just support imports from an XML file.

WordPress was the tool recommended by the web. A Posterous import add-on is available that is pretty fabulous I would have to admit. It imported posts, comments and even images.

Exported an XML file from WordPress. This file does not directly import into Blogger but there is an online tool available that converts the XML file from WordPress to Blogger format. And it was done.

In my case however, the import of images did not really work well. Probably because I was using a WordPress MU blog for the migration. Images were supposedly imported but they were not working. The export file links to the images stored on the server so Blogger also linked to the same images. This became a small headache. Did some manual editing and it all worked out well.

Would like to add here why I decided to switch a Posterous hosted blog to Blogger. Two major reasons… Flexibility and Speed. Blogger gives you much more power in controlling what you want to run on your blog compared to Posterous. It is also much faster than Posterous.

My hatred for yfrog and ImageShack reaches new heights

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I was never a big fan of ImageShack. It remains one of the most popular web services for hotlinking images but it also remains one of the most annoying ones.

They own yfrog. I love the new yfrog. It works as a pretty impressive web client for Twitter with excellent user interface for conversations.

But ImageShack has managed to ruin it with a new policy that blocks hotlinking of images on certain domains.

The hotlinked image ends up showing an error message that the domain is not registered on their platform and it has to be done to enable the embedding.

I have noticed this problem on Trunk.ly (excellent service, you should check it out) and MetroTwit (excellent Twitter client for Windows 7! You should check it out too!).

I have been using Imgur (You should use it as your preferred image sharing service as well) as my preferred image sharing service for a long time now. I am a huge fan of it. I even have a paid account on it and I plan to continue renewing my account on it. The service offers pretty liberal hotlinking policies. The developer is a cool guy who responds to queries and suggestions. ImageShack on the other hand is this Godzilla that is ruining it for both webmasters and web users.

Facebook Mail and Support Queries

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I just got access to Facebook Mail earlier today. I have been playing around with it and I like it.

However, it seems to have failed in a real world test.

I sent a support query to mchek. They responded with an auto-response that is supposed to be connected to the query I raised.

For this mail chain to work properly, mchek requires the subject of the mail to contain the ticket number in a particular format.

And from my experience and tests, Facebook tends to follow with their own design which does not allow you to have a custom subject.

The test however passed as mchek guys called me up and resolved my problem on the phone itself.

Victory to good customer support! Freecharge folks’ loss as they are not supporting airtel recharges currently. What a freaking disappointment.

Google search showcasing possible typos with MS Word like red curly underline?

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Just noticed this while Googling my own name on Google.com.

Google Instant does not seem to like Sushubh and it ended up displaying results for Shubha.

Today, I noticed that Google had put a red curly underline on my name as soon as I entered Sushub.

Google showcasing possible typos with MS Word like red underline?

Looks like Google is using it to highlight potential typos. My name isn’t one sadly. But then Google does not have it in its records. Which makes me very very sad.

And no… This is not Chrome running its own spell checker!