2013-10-18

2013-10-18 How to format blogger comments

There are quite a few blogs based on (the principles) of blogger.com.

As a visitor you can read the articles aka. posts,
in many cases you can also add your own comments to those posts,
sometimes even anonymously - not using an account.

If you have commented on blogger posts, you probably know you can structure your input
using line breaks - at least that was the case on the blogger sites I have visited up to now.

There is another feature of those blogger sites, that is perhaps not yet that widely known:
You can use a limited set of HTML code to format your comments.

2013-09-08

2013-09-07 YouTube bookmarklet (for chatango)

About bookmarklets

I recently discovered a new level of usefulness of the concept of bookmarklets for myself.

Bookmarklets are bookmarks, that can perform special functions,
often times acting upon the currently loaded page in some way.
Otherwise they are handled very similar as any other normal bookmarks.

Instead of a http or https url, bookmarklets use references of the pseudo type javascript.
So bookmarklets are basically scripts, that are executed when the user clicks on them.

Apart from not starting to run by themselves, bookmarklets offer about the same possibilities
and suffer about the same restrictions, as other client sided scripts running on or by web pages
currently loaded in the browser.

2013-05-12

2013-05-12 Blogger: Posting comments no longer works (with Firefox)?

I did not even try posting any comments to blogger posts for the last few weeks if not months.

Just recently I encountered a problem when trying to post comments to blogger posts:

After entering the text and selecting a profile f.e. "Google Account" or "Anonymous",
the comment form was reset - the text cleared and the profile returned to "Select profile..."
upon clicking on "Publish" or "Preview" regardless.

That happened quickly and without any kind of other feedback - no captcha, no nothing.

Looking further into that, I found that the comment form was not delivered in the html
of the post in question directly but inside an iframe.

I also found that the post request was sent to "www.blogger.com/comment-iframe.do"
but entcountered a redirect (http status: 302 Moved Temporarily)
to "http://www.blogger.com/comment-iframe.g?blogID=...&postID=..." (I replaced the ids with "...")
and of course a post request does not work with a redirect...

I found that some people could still post comments, while others - like me - could not.

Then I found that I did not experience that problem with the browsers QupZilla and MS Internet Explorer.

Unfortunately at the time of this writing I don't know for sure, why that occurs and what can be done to correct it.

As you may not be able to comment in this blog - because of the problem described here,
you may use the - non post specific - chatango group chat to post comments,
or try another browser to comment here.

I found another Solution:
 Apparently blogger now requires 3rd party cookies enabled!
Checking "Accept third-party cookies" solved the comment posting problem for me.

- Even though, I may think, it has given me a problem with my browsers privacy settings now!

2013-01-02

2013-01-02 Get simple YouTube urls tool

This is a tool to create the most basic/simple form of a url showing a YouTube video
and/or an even shorter youtu.be url to that video:


input url (paste or enter here...):


simple url (copy from here):


youtu.be url (copy from here):



Sometimes, you may want to share a YouTube video (url) with others,
but the url you acquired is much longer and more complicated than it needs to be
- because it contains extra parameters and data not required
and not appropriate to use for the one[s] you want to share it with.

This overcomplicated form also causes problems in some cases,
f.e. with tools that help you embed such videos.