Obscure Fix: Blogger / Blogspot Posts Not Showing Up In Google Reader (or other RSS Readers)

The problem: You have a blog at Blogger (or Blogspot), and all of a sudden, new posts aren't showing up in your favourite RSS reader (like Google Reader). A few older posts may show up, but no new posts. New posts still show up on your main blog page, but your RSS feed remains stagnant.

Robyn's blog fell victim to this problem this month, and there were very few useful resources to fix it. Google's help forums are completely useless on this front because most of the search results redirect to the main Google Group for Blogger.

The check - this step will determine if my solution will fix your problem:
1. Go to http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds when you're logged into a Google session with your Blogger/Blogspot account.
2. You should see the name of your Blogger or Blogspot blog under "Feed Title" - click it.
3. If you see a message anywhere that says "Error: Your feed filesize is larger than 576K", this solution can fix your feed.

What's broken:
Something is making your RSS feed WAY too big. What we found with Robyn's blog was that she was copying and pasting PNG images directly into the rich text editor from Windows instead of using Blogger's image upload tool. For some reason, these images were being encoded as raw data in her RSS feed, which takes up thousands of times more memory space than a hyperlink to an image on a Blogger server.

The Fix, Option 1:
1. Go through all of your recent posts with images.
2. Right-click on the image(s), save it to your computer.
3. Edit each blog post you downloaded an image from. Delete the image from the post. Re-insert the image using Blogger's image upload tool, NOT by copying and pasting it from Windows.
4. Save your posts and check your RSS feed - chances are it will suddenly start working.

The Fix, Option 2:
1. Go here: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/myfeeds
2. You should see your blog title, click on it.
3. Click "edit feed details" just below your blog name
4. Replace everything in the "Original Feed" field with http://yourBLOGnameHERE.blogger.com/feeds/posts/default?maxresults=10 (if you're on blogspot, substitute "blogspot" for "blogger")
5. "Save Feed Details"
6. Check your RSS feed. If it isn't fixed, change the 10 in the above URL to a 5. This number tells Feedburner to grab fewer posts at once.

The Fix, Option 3:
Something is still making your blog feed WAY too big. You probably have accidentally encoded a huge file into your feed. Go back through all of your recent posts and remove any large embedded files. Tip: Start at the first post AFTER the last post in your RSS feed (does that make sense?).

Hope this helps, friendly internet strangers! Leave me a comment if it did :-)

(one helpful source was located here)

Products that are Awesome: NoLED for Android

I've had an Android phone for the past 9 months or so and I've really grown to love it. There are times, though, that I miss certain features that my old BlackBerry did so well. Take BBM, for instance. It's still the best instant messenger out there, despite competition from iMessage and Google Talk, not to mention cross-platform offerings like WhatsApp (which is awesome!) and Kik.

Another feature that some Android phones lack is a notification LED. The little LED on the BlackBerry was a great, quick visual indicator of unread messages or emails. You could customize its behaviour with an app - blinking blue for Robyn, solid green for Matt, etc. I really missed that feature when I bought my Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant. Instead of looking to an LED for notfications, I have to press a button and wake up the display.

I recently found a very niche app called NoLED that fixes this problem with a clever solution. As it turns out, the display on the Galaxy S Vibrant is of the Super AMOLED type, which is an advanced enough display that no electricity/battery is consumed to display the colour black, since the technology doesn't use a backlight.

When you receive a notification with NoLED and your display is off and/or locked, a tiny pixel of colour will appear in lieu of an LED lighting up. The colour corresponds to an app, and is user-customizable. So maybe red means Gmail, orange means SMS, and blue means missed call/voicemail.

If you don't understand this idea yet, watch the first 15 seconds of this video.

To avoid "burning in" an image into the display, the pixels dance around the display, changing position every second or two. I find this feature useful for another reason - it's easy to spot the movement out of the corner of your eye.

The pixel size is customizable, and you can even choose to use app icons for notifications. For a WhatsApp message you see the little green icon dancing around, and for Gmail you see the classic envelope icon. NoLED makes this feature even better by allowing you to use contact/profile pictures for SMS and Voice call notifications! So if I get an SMS from Robyn, her contact picture jumps around the display.

The menus are packed with features and settings which can be overwhelming. The advantage is that you can get your phone displaying notifications exactly how you want them to behave - everyone has different preferences.

I have been using this app for a few months and have not noticed any excess battery drain due to NoLED running. The app can use the phone's proximity sensor to know when it's in your pocket or face-down, and will turn off the display completely to save that tiny extra bit of juice.

One last thing - if I haven't sold you yet, it's a FREE app. It's under active development and it's updated regularly - not too much, not too little. The developer is also receptive to feedback - I emailed in a feature request and received a reply the same day (my idea couldn't work!). If you love the app, you can donate with in-app purchasing. I sent $5 to the developer - it's one of the most clever Android apps in the market and one of my favourites, and I felt it was well worth it.

Download here.

Awesome Products: Google Picasa

I purchased my first digital camera in 2002. It was a cheap EZ-Pics (or similar) sketchy brand that lied about its megapixels - it was 3.0 MP "with software extrapolation", which meant that it was a 1.5MP camera that used software to double the number of raw pixels in the photos, and coloured those pixels with the "average" colour of the two adjacent pixels. Suffice to say the pictures were terrible.

I'm just about the farthest thing from a professional photographer, but my photos are still very important to me! My first crappy camera took lots of pictures of our dog Yogi as a tiny puppy:

Most of my photos live on my home server (see first two images here), a computer that does nothing but sit there and hold files. However, I'm very conscious of the disaster scenario of my apartment building falling down (I do live in Montreal, Quebec, and infrastructure seems to be failing lately!). If my server were to die, I'd lose 10 years of digital memories.

Rather than print all of my photos out to albums, I've chosen to use Google's Picasa software as a backup solution.

I pay a flat fee of $5 per year for 20GB of online photo storage with Google Picasa Web Albums, which is enough for 5,000 high-quality photos, or many times more lower-quality photos. Every time I load photos onto my computer, I've set up Picasa (the desktop software) to save a copy on my laptop and immediately upload a copy to Picasa Web Albums.

Actually, lower-quality photos no longer count towards the storage limit on Picasa anymore (thanks to Google Plus!) . All photos under 2048x2048 pixels - a respectable resolution, for sure - are stored for free! It's possible to configure Picasa's desktop software to automatically re-size all of your photos to under these dimensions and upload them for free, so that you always have a safe backup copy of your digital images.

It's important to note that the online backup doesn't happen automatically, you need to be logged into Picasa (the desktop software) with a Google account and explicitly tell it to save images to Picasa Web Albums. You need a Google/Gmail account to do this, but it's not difficult.

It is also important to keep an eye on permissions when uploading to Picasa Web Albums. By default, my albums are private and un-searchable, but you can also set albums to be public, shared with specific users (requires Google login), or only accessible with a link (good for emailing).

A year and a half ago, before the unlimited upload of lower-quality photos, this service was still a bargain at $5/year. I found it was the best backup solution out of Picasa, Flickr, Dropbox, and a few other web archive solutions at the time, and I'm interested to hear if anyone's got a better solution.

If you use other Google products, you will want to check out Picasa. If you buy extra storage space, it counts for your whole Google account, so I really have 20-some GB of storage for pictures in Picasa, emails in Gmail and documents in Google Docs. Picasa Web Albums has been nicely integrated in Google+ and makes sharing with Circles very easy, and it's also easy to share private albums by email with friends and family.

If you've got a free afternoon this summer, back up your photos! My sister lost all of her photos when her laptop died suddenly - it could happen any time. Hell, if you're too cheap to afford $5 per year, at least burn a DVD (under $1) and keep it at someone else's house!

Google Transit, Where Are You?

In March of this year, the Star Phoenix reported that Google Transit was going to roll out in Saskatoon. At the end of June, to be exact.

It's now the end of July, and there's no Google Transit in sight! A careful googling for clues reveals nothing - there's literally no mention of Google Transit and Saskatoon on the internet except for that one article (and on Wikipedia, citing the same Star Phoenix article). Is it really coming?

I'd love to see Google Transit in Saskatoon. Anything would be better than Saskatoon's incredibly slow, complex Click'n'Go. I recall during the extremely cold week of January 2010 the entire City of Saskatoon's website was completely unavailable for several days due to the volume of people trying to access it. Assuming the buses weren't running, I skipped class (it turned out the buses were running).

The best feature that Google Transit would bring is Google Maps integration. Plug in where you are and where you're going, and Google Transit finds the best route(s). Google Transit also works with Google Maps on smartphones - iPhones, BlackBerrys, and Android phones. This alone has the potential to massively boost transit ridership! Making routes easy to access - and more importantly, easy to search for while on the go - has the potential to significantly increase the number of riders.

Google has a knack for organizing information and making it easy to use and access. Hopefully, Google Transit for Saskatoon rolls out soon, and provides us with a better solution than Click'n'Go, dialing 975-7500, or carrying around a massive stash of brochures.

Canadian Privacy Commissioner's Google Street View Probe: Let's Drop It

On Friday, May 14, 2010, Google announced that their camera-laden Street View cars had been inadvertently been collecting unencrypted wifi data:

"...we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products." (source: Google)

I recommend reading Google's entire explanation for an example of a perfect admission of wrongdoing and accompanying apology. Straight out of the good communication textbook, Google:

1. Acknowledged their wrongdoing (collection of unsecured wifi data);
2. Recognized feelings of anger, frustration, disappointment and betrayal;
3. Took full responsibility for their actions;
4. Explained their error without assigning blame;
5. Offered a sincere apology;
6. Offered an immediate fix for the problem (grounding of all Street View cars, contacting government regulators about how to dispose of the data).

In response, Canada's Office of the Privacy Commissioner is launching a full investigation into what happened (see link for news release).

Says Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart:

“We have a number of questions about how this collection could have happened and about the impact on people’s privacy. We’ve determined that an investigation is the best way to find the answers.”

But... don't we already have the answers? Google collects data, Google realizes mistake, Google releases details of exactly what happened and how, Google gets in touch with governments so they can delete this data properly. And because Google collected the data and not evil hackers, guess what the impact was: nothing.

I like the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. They're a taxpayer-funded office who promote and protect the individual privacy rights of Canadians - and I'm down with that. They've slapped Facebook into shape on more than one occasion. But do we need to be spending taxpayer dollars on an investigation where there isn't anything to investigate?

Canada isn't the only country getting up in arms. The Consumerist is reporting that 30 American states are banding together for an investigation of their own. 

Here's the real issue. The data in question that was collected by Google was pulled off unsecured wireless networks. In layman's terms, that's a network without a password and encryption. People were (in all fairness, unknowingly) broadcasting their internet interactions for the world to see. Yes, that includes emails and passwords!

Forget about Google, what about Wardriving? There are far less-responsible people and organizations than Google who are pulling information from unsecured networks all of the time. Suddenly, the fact that Google's sitting on information from our private networks is awesome - now that they have it, they can protect it, they know they have to get rid of it, and they can't use it maliciously. And they're good at security. When Chinese hackers hacked Google, Google hacked them back.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner should be helping Canadians by lowering the number of people who are accessing the internet over unsecured networks. They should be developing ways to make sure products like routers and laptops are safe (privacy-wise) to use out of the box, and to promote the use of secure protocols to websites that handle sensitive information (banks, social networks, email, etc). They should be finding ways to better educate the public on taking privacy matters into their own hands. They should be working with Google to dispose of that private data as quickly as possible, rather than work against them through an investigation. They should be developing programs so that everyone can understand privacy and data in the digital age.

Forget about this investigation. It should be the end-user's responsibility to take steps to protect their own privacy. No user is perfect - I've helped lots of people with different computer issues, and I've made plenty of mistakes myself. No hardware is perfect - many wireless routers are "broken" out of the box, in that their out-of-box settings are terribly insecure. Lastly, no software is perfect - Google's Street View cars were obviously flawed.

Still, individuals must accept a higher degree of responsibility for their digital privacy and security. Nobody would paint their SIN number on the side of their house, yet there are plenty of unsecured wireless networks doing just that.