Future-Dated Posts

Blogger now supports future-dated posts.

Of course I had to make a post just to see if it really works. If you see this (10 minutes from now), it worked!

Sites that are essential to my day

Bryan Person asks: Which 5 sites are most essential to your daily workflow?

For work, the key sites for me are:

• Gmail. Always the first one to be opened on my browser. I start and end every day with a 'mail run' but I don't have it up all the time.
• 30boxes. I usually have the mobile version loaded because the view defaults to today's activities and it's easy enough to add new events to my calendar. I only switch to the web version when I'm moving things around because the drag-and-drop feature is perfect for that.
• Google Search. I typically use the search toolbar in Firefox, and rarely does a day go by without me performing at least one search.
  
• Dictionary.com. I do a lot of writing and editing in my job, so having ready access to an online dictionary is absolutely necessary.
  
• TwitBin. For the times when I just want to clear my head, I keep TwitBin, a Firefox extension for Twitter, open on my browser.

Once I'm done with my work day, my focus shifts to sites that are more in line with my personal hobbies and interests:

• Blogger. My blogging platform of choice, simply because it's easy and I'd much rather leave the management of the whole blogging infrastructure to Google.
• Google Reader. An indispensable tool for keeping up with conversations all over the web. When I'm on the road and stuck somewhere with nothing to do, I can also fire up the browser on my Treo phone and read my feeds using the mobile version.
  

I expect to eventually reclassify Google Reader as a work-related site because I'm starting to find feeds that are directly relevant to my work -- a trend that is quite gratifying to see.

New: Blogger in Draft

Via Jason Goldman: Blogger's got a new playpen called Blogger in Draft

It's a special version of Blogger where they try out new features before releasing them to everyone. Think of it as a sandbox, or laboratory, or just “Blogger + new things.” [FAQ here]

The very first thing I noticed -- it changed my language preferences! I literally did a double-take when I found myself reading text and instructions in Tagalog! haha! That was just way too funny. A bit strange, too, since the language option is available even in the production version of Blogger, but it only "asserted" itself in the draft version.



Obviously, I switched right back to English as soon as I figured out how (hint: there's a drop-down for languages in your dashboard's sidebar).

Will definitely explore this later, when I have more time.

Feedburning in Progress

Thanks to a recent post on the Google Reader Blog, I finally went through the trouble of signing up for a Feedburner account and adding RSS subscription buttons to my sidebar.

Doing this was a lot easier than I thought it would be, thanks to some lovely widget integration between Feedburner and the new, improved Blogger.

I don't really expect to have a lot of subscribers, but I like getting a feel of the different nuances involved in running a blog, without the pressure of actually managing a professional one.

Finally!

It's taken what feels like forever but I'm finally able to log into Blogger from my home Internet connection.

Since the Taiwan earthquake knocked out Internet connectivity to and from the Philippines, it's been an absolutely horrible online experience surfing the 'Net. I try every night to log into Blogger but it's almost as if it's been blocked off.

So finally, here I am, able to log in again. It's late, but what the hey -- Happy New Year!

Migrated!

I'd been longing for quite some time to migrate my Blogger blogs to the new Beta version, especially since my initial exploration into the new Beta was such a positive experience.

Well, after three months of waiting, I finally saw a link on my Blogger profile today inviting me to migrate my blogs to the new Beta! Of course I clicked yes right away! The whole migration must have taken less than a couple of minutes.

Turns out that I couldn't be invited to migrate earlier because I am a member of a team blog, and that was among the last of the features to be migrated to the new Beta.

So with the migration completed, I literally went through all 60 of my blogposts on this blog to apply labels (aka tags) to each post. If you're following this blog on a feed, some of my old posts may reappear as "new" entries (my apologies for that).

It helps that I had just recently viewed a video interview with Eric Case, a Google developer who's been working on the Beta version. Watching that interview gave me a lot more confidence about the migration process (especially since there was a warning that there's no turning back after migrating). haha!

After publishing this post, I plan to explore the layout options with the new Beta. So don't be surprised if you see a few changes to the look and content of the template. :-p

Updated 8:30pm: Happy with the new look. Also updated my Twitter color scheme to match. Woot!

Blogger in Beta

Looks like Blogger is in the process of beta-testing a new version.

From the initial cursory look that I got this afternoon, I think I'm really going to love this new release.

Was hoping to get a little more exploring done this afternoon, but I think new changes are still being uploaded even as I type, so it's probably best that I wait until later tonight or maybe tomorrow evening before I go full blast exploring all the new and nifty features.

For the curious, you'll find my initial uber-positive impressions on the test blog that I created.