Mobile Blogger Templates

This year, Blogger's team added so many new features that it's difficult to count them: dynamic templates, comment spam filtering, a new way to manage comments, real-time stats, better post preview, static pages and so much more. Blogger is one the few Google products that have improved dramatically this year, after many years when it was neglected.

Since a lot of people use phones to browse the Web, it makes a lot of sense to add a mobile interface for Blogger and to create mobile versions for Blogger's templates. There's no mobile Blogger yet, but all Blogger blogs have a mobile version optimized for WebKit browsers. Just add ?m=1 to the URL of any Blogger blog, and you'll get a simplified version that works well on an iPhone, Android phone and probably other phones that use a browser based on WebKit. Here's an example: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/?m=1.


Bloggers can enable the mobile version of their blogs, so that visitors are automatically redirected to this version when they're using a supported mobile browser. This option is only available if you go to Blogger in Draft, click on "Settings", switch to "Email & Mobile" and enable "Yes, On mobile devices, show the mobile version of my template." This didn't work for me, so you'll still see the regular mobile version of this blog that uses a custom stylesheet.

Google says that the new feature only supports 12 existing templates (6 variants of the Simple template and 6 variants of the Awesome template) and that all the other templates will be rendered as the Simple template. The mobile version drops the sidebars and most of the gadgets, shows small excerpts from the posts on the homepage, hides the comment form (but you can still post comments), resizes images and videos, adjusts fonts and converts AdSense ads into mobile ads. Unfortunately, you can't customize mobile templates, at least not yet.

Pennyblack Challenge

Phew, just making the deadline for Pennyblack Saturday challenge this week. Used Exhilarating stamp and Debz I have used Promarkers, what you think of that then!! Just a beginner but who knows! Used the greys I won the other week on the Penny Black Saturday  challenge, whoo hooo!  Seems to be easier if you have the colour range so do I buy more, we'll see. The challenge is to see some foilage,

YouTube's Watch Later Feature

YouTube's embedded player has a new feature that lets you add a video to a special playlist and watch it later. This only works for the videos embedded using the new iframe-based code.



After clicking on "watch later", the video is added to your homepage, so you can quickly find it.


It's not very useful for Read it Later or Instapaper fans, but everyone else will probably enjoy the new feature. What's surprising is that YouTube doesn't add the videos to the queue, which is "a list of videos to watch later in your session".

{ Thanks, Stefan. }

Pennyblack Snowman

Snow is back with a vengence here so wont be going anywhere. Must get out in next few days, microwave has given up the ghost and need another. Missing it to reheat my coffee so often forget about it while I'm crafting. More inportantly I really need to fall back on it on Christmas day. Still muddling along, don't seem to be any further on, organization is not a word  I would use to describe

Google Translate's Beatbox Easter Egg

Last month, a Reddit user found an unexpected way to use Google Translate: as a beatbox.

1) Go to Google Translate
2) Set the translator to translate German to German
3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch
4) Click "listen"
5) Be amazed :)

You could also use this permalink, but it's less exciting. There are many other variations you could try.

Google decided to make it more obvious that this is an Easter egg by replacing "Listen" with "Beatbox".


Here's a YouTube video featured in Google Demo Slam:

{ Thanks, Zachary. }

Google Translate Shows Alternate Translations

No translation is perfect, and that's especially true for a machine translation service like Google Translate. From now on, when you translate a text using Google Translate and Google finds some reliable alternate translations, you can pick one of them.

"Just click the translated phrase and you'll see a pop-up menu of possible alternates for that phrase, as well as the original phrase highlighted in your original text. Not only can these alternative translations give you a better understanding of a confusing translation, but they also allow you to help Google choose the best alternative when we make a mistake," explains Google.

It's interesting to notice that the new feature helps you better understand the technology behind Google Translate. "Typically, when we produce a translation, our system searches through millions of possible translations, selecting the best -- that is, the most statistically likely -- translation. With this feature, we expose more of those possible alternatives."


Right now, Google only shows alternate translations when you try to translate a text, so this doesn't work for web pages.

Easter Egg in Google Books Ngram Viewer

Rickrolling seems to be Google's favorite prank. If you try to search for [never gonna give you up] in Google's recently launched Ngram viewer, you'll have a pleasant surprise: a YouTube video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up".

Never gonna give you up,
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry,
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you...

{ Thanks, Federico. }