Blogger Comments not appearing

A client had an issue: he put up a post, like any other, and the link for comments wouldn't appear. SEE BELOW:

It is supposed to look like the following:

The first thought was that somehow the embedded youtube video was causing a problem. It was commented out and, lo and behold, the comment link reappeared. But what could be wrong? The youtube video was the same as any other. The coding was the same, no closing tags were missing.

Blogger puts in the following code whenever one uploads a graphic.

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
</div>

I put it around the video and now the comment link worked.

Why you need this div around some videos and not around others I haven't figured out yet.

Was Internet traffic hijacked to China?

If you were at all interested in China hijacking the world's internet traffic take a look at this report from renesys.com

Did China's government really divert 15% of the Internet's traffic for eighteen minutes in April, effortlessly intercepting sensitive traffic in flight, and generally creating a massively embarrassing man-in-the-middle attack on vulnerable global communications?

Well, yes and no. Mostly no.

Yes, this event really happened. No, it probably wasn't a deliberate attack, or if it was, it wasn't a very effective one, compared to what might have happened, but that's where the story tends to bog down in technical detail and lose most readers.

It's far better information than what CNN and other major networks provided.

Netflix is Swallowing all of America's Bandwidth

It's not just Canada. Netflix is swallowing America's bandwidth, too, and it probably won't be long before it comes for the rest of the world. That's one of the headlines from Sandvine's Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena Report, an exhaustive look at what people around the world are doing with their Internet lines. According to Sandvine, Netflix accounts for 20 percent of downstream Internet traffic during peak home Internet usage hours in North America. That's an amazing share—it beats that of YouTube, iTunes, Hulu, and, perhaps most tellingly, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol BitTorrent, which accounts for a mere 8 percent of bandwidth during peak hours. It wasn't long ago that pundits wondered if the movie industry would be sunk by the same problems that submarined the music industry a decade ago—would we all turn away from legal content in favor of downloading pirated movies and TV shows? Three or four years ago, as BitTorrent traffic surged, that seemed likely. Today, though, Netflix is far bigger than BitTorrent, and it seems sure to keep growing.
Will Netflix Destroy the Internet?

Every so often a new subsection of the market "takes over" and dominates the market. ISPs complain as it puts "too much" demand on their infrastructure, the inevitable clamoring for tiered markets arise and there are new fears regarding net neutrality.

Currently video "hogs" bandwidth in today's market but it won't in tomorrows. This discussion will continue for the rest of this decade and on. Until we have enough bandwidth for both business and personal uses; until we have enough for live HD sport broadcasts, gaming and Netflix to run concurrently with business applications such as HD conference calls; where remote location engineers and architects are able to look at problems at a construction site; and doctors at a remote location are able to assist in a surgery - until we have the bandwith for that (and more) this debate will continue.

Tatoeba

If you've ever been interested in languages - this is a site for you. It's unique concept is linking sentences together, not in the usual table format, but in a form of a neural net (their FAQ calls it a graph structure). People add sentences in one language: "It's a beautiful day." And people who are bi-lingual, or polyglots, translate it into other languages. One person may translate it into French and Russian; and another from French to Vietnamese; and yet another from Russian to Tagalog. Presto - you have the beginning of an English-Tagalog dictionary.

Blogs and Articles

I'm not much of a fan of Slate for technical articles but they have an excellent article on the changing face of blogs and magazines.

While Gawker is dropping the blog format, sites of magazines like Wired and The Atlantic are embracing it. (At both outlets, all articles, other than those that first appeared in print, are published in a blog-like format.) Or check out Newsweek, whose home page lists headlines and snippets in reverse-chronological order, just like at your friend's Blogger site.

The design shifts—with blogs looking more like magazines, and magazines looking more like blogs—aren't just superficial. These changes in presentation are collapsing all distinctions between "blog posts" and "articles."

Slate, This is Not a Blog Post

Why am I waiting so long for some websites to download?

Too many sites I go to take a long time to render - often times over 30 seconds. The page displays but freezes so that the user is unable to scroll down and often the site temporarily freezes the browser so that one is unable to go elsewhere. (I find this issue to be more prevalent with IE than Firefox. It also applies only to the tabs and windows associated with that particular session.)

I've looked at the coding of these pages. Most of them are professionally done. The coding is fine and the graphics of reasonable size. So why do the pages take so long to render?

These pages had one thing in common. They had dozens of external javascripts for content scrollers, assorted widgets, jQuery, analytics and dozens more external CSS calls. Many of these .js and .css calls were unnecessary. The lesson here is that developers need to pay more attention to these external HTTP calls and limit them to what is necessary. It may be necessary to recombine the css and js to optimize the page loads.

Another big offender is the practice of preloading videos and podcasts. Developers cannot make the assumption that users will want to view these items. In delaying the page rendering in order to pre-load the videos they are alienating viewers. It may be a tough decision but pre-loading may not be an option.

See an earlier article: @Font-Face and Page Rendering

How to Add Different Meta Tags for Different Posts in Blogger

This is one of the questions I get very frequently.

One trick of the trade used by all developers is to save a back-up. This way, if you can't undo your changes, for whatever reason, you can still revert to the original. After saving a back-up to your harddrive find the following piece of code: all-head-content

(In Windows do a CTRL F)

It will take you to the following:

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

Just after the above code add the following.

1. Tell Blogger which page you want to give the unique meta tags.
2. If you want to use the META Description Tag describe your content in a sentence or two.
3. If you want to use the META Keyword Tag put in your keywords and separate them with a comma.

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://yoursite.blogspot.com/someYear/someMonth/fileName.html"'>

<meta content='How to add different meta tags for different posts' name='description'/>

<meta content='meta tags, blogger' name='keywords'/>
</b:if>

You can repeat this step as often as you want to.

It is my opinion that using these tags is not worth the effort. Ten years ago, yes, they were useful. Today, after all the abuse by SEOs, these tags are close to useless.