Especially, if you are new to blogging and using Blogger as your blogging medium then you should be aware of this limit in Blogger blog. You can only upload up to 1 GB of photos in total for your blog. Blogger uses the Picasa Web Album to store the photos that you upload for your blog posts. The maximum size limit is 1GB for free account. So if you post high-resolution photos from the beginning indiscriminately for your blogspot blog posts, you will run out of space in the long run. Then you have to buy extra space to accomodate your new pictures or you have to delete pictures from your old blog posts.
So obviously you will try to make your blog look good and attractive by showing pictures. But if you intend to use the blogspot blog for long time & don’t intend to pay at all, use your space cautiously.
1 GB is quite a large space at least for pictures 
Yeah, just few hours ago I got a mail from Google Apps team. In 2010 they are planning to phase out support for several old browsers that are not supported even by their own manufacturers. And that includes Internet Explorer 6. This is what they have said in the email:
Dear Google Apps admin,
In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.
We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.
Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.
Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.
In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.
Thank you for your continued support!
Sincerely,
The Google Apps team
So if you have any webpage created with Google Apps then I hope you have no issues with the old browser users having problem with your site. Besides it will show them message to update their browsers. I know as a webmaster you would like to reach as many readers as possible. But still if someone wants to use IE6 now, I am not going to take the responsibility to show a good webpage. IE6 really sucks!
I have seen many Wordpress blogs taking this approach. They use to close comments after 30 days or 2 months of writing the blog post. So if you have some current affairs blog or a blog that updates your on offers & price of products, you can think of trying it. But I am not a big supporter of this method. Even with those blogs you may want to comment something so that later users get the correct info for that time. Only solid reason that I find is for dofollow blogs. If you have a dofollow blog, other webmasters might try to take advantage & there is every possibility that they would make a meaningless comment on an old blog post that has nothing to do in current context.
So now I will just tell you how to do it because the choice is up to you
So to close comments on Wordpress blogs after some specific days just go to Settings> Discussion from your Wordpress dashboard. Search for the line “Automatically close comments on articles older than” & then you can find the option to specify the number of days after publishing the blog post. Don’t forget to check the checkbox & save it. You are done. Comment option for all of your Wordpress blog posts will now get closed after that specified days.
Have a look at this fun quiz from Google for webmasters. The questions are all objective multiple choices and are based on common queries in Google Webmaster Help Forum. I checked the questions & they have some pretty good questions about the problems that you face regularly as a webmaster like on multiple domains & ccTLDs, url changes or robots.txt etc. You can take the quiz till this January 27.
The answers are not available right away. Google will write a follow up blog post in their webmaster blog with the correct answers. Don’t forget to save your answers now before submitting. Then you can realize if you are making any common mistakes.
First thing first, this is only for Indian sites. Google India has opened a Health Clinic for your site. Actually in this service Google Search Quality team will review some handpicked sites. They will analyze & suggest you improvements so that you can find out what is going wrong & rectify accordingly to get better visibility in Google search results. You need to send your request for free site analysis through this form. The applications will be accepted till this 20th January. Remember you must have your site registered in Google Webmaster Tools & your site should meet Google webmaster guidelines. So hurry up & see whether you can get a free site check up from Google
Do you know Yahoo has a media player that can auto-detect & play all the mp3 links on your site without taking your visitors away from your own page? Yahoo Media Player is still in beta. But what attracts me most is its simplicity to use. From a webmaster perspective, all you need to do is to add a single line of HTML code in your script. And all the things are taken care of automatically. Now whenever you post a mp3 link in your site or in your blog post, Yahoo Media Player will detect it & add a play button just before it.
And when user clicks on that link a floating media player panel will open at the bottom of your page. It will play the next track automatically when the current one is finished & even has a button to play the next track if you don’t want to listen to the current track anymore. It’s like making your page an active audio playlist.
As, you can see, it is quite simple & soothing to the eye. And, yet it has all the basic functionalities. So if you post lots of mp3s in your blog & want users listen to them & stay at your page, it can be a handy tool. I tested it in a Wordpress blog. I just added the single line of HTML in a widget & it worked fine.
Recently I told you about Google url shortening service that you can use with FeedBurner feed to serve your blog updates automatically in Twitter. I told you that I was looking forward to use this fully Google operated service. But I couldn’t access my TwitterFeed account to remove my feed from there as Technorati OpenId is working no more. So I contacted TwitterFeed through Twitter few times & they transferred my feed to a new account that I created. They usually replied back within a day or two & I am quite satisfied with their sincere effort.
From then, I thought I can stick to them. Their service is pretty good after all. For serving blog updates in Twitter, Google has one more option of creating Hash Tags automatically from <category> element of your blog platform like “Labels” element in Blogger. Hash Tags help different Twitter clients to filter & group tweets depending on these tags. But TwitterFeed has one distinctive feature too. You can find the total number of clicks for each of your post that you served as blog update in Twitter. That is also a handy feature. So for now, I am with TwitterFeed
It’s first day of 2010 & I am starting it with a rough review! About a few weeks ago I wrote a post on CopyGator as a potential free Copyscape alternative. I was pretty impressed with their large database & the results that they showed for copied content when I searched for few blogs. But as I tried to submit my RSS feed there to keep track of copied content from my blog, it left me pretty disappointed. Though the page says that my RSS feed is in queue & I will get an overview page within 10-15 minutes, more than 15 days have passed & still no luck. It got stuck in the queue. I mailed their support several days ago, but they didn’t reply. Though it is a free service & I can’t ask much, I just wanted at least a bit better service from their part.
Just few days have passed & Wordpress developers have been forced to release a maintenance version for Wordpress 2.9. The main issue is that current Wordpress 2.9 is triggering a bug in certain versions of PHP’s curl extension & for that pingback & scheduled posts are not working properly in different hosting environment. Besides, they have fixed 14 tickets in this maintenance upgrade.
So, if you are having any problem after you have installed Wordpress 2.9, you can give it a try.
By the way, this blog is working perfectly after I upgraded to Wordpress 2.9 & I am quite happy with it
You can not only choose from predefined image set, but also you can upload your own customize image to set as Twitter background. This option has been there in Twitter for a long time. So actually if you are new to Twitter or looking to customize your Twitter account for branding, here is how you can do it.
From Twitter account click Settings tab. Then click Design button in the settings page.
The point is that you just don’t have to buy custom Twitter background. If you have a good designing sense, you can create an image with your own logo, information or picture. As you can see from the screenshot, you can even choose any custom color to give a different look to your Twitter background, sidebar, text or even links. You can always give it a try for fun or for creating your own brand.
Change Colour:
Change Background Image:
And for truly professional theme, you can always avail a service where you can order & buy customized Twitter theme specific to your requirements. But why not try to customize your Twitter account for free at first
