Thankfully, I seem to keep running into problems as I try to get this blog off the ground, and streamline my workflow. I say thankfully, because it makes for good blog material.
1. Google Reader
I’ve written a couple of posts here and here about collecting and processing your favourite links and articles.
I’ve run into a frustrating snag when it comes to Google Reader. As I mentioned before, one of the steps in my process involves emailing important articles from Google Reader to GMail. Usually, when every couple of emails, it brings up a Captcha to prove that I’m not spamming myself. Usually, I was doing these in small batches, so no big deal. Since then, I’ve been trying to catch up on my work, so I’ve been emailing quite a few articles at a time. Both times Google has temporarily locked me out of my Reader account. It seems they think I’m some bot trying to spam the world with Reader articles. With all of their algorithmic power, you would think they’d notice that it’s me emailing my own GMail account from the same IP address. Unfortunately, not the case.
So, what the heck do I do about this? For a blog of this stature (I get double-digit reads some weeks!!), you would think that Google would do all that it could to appease me. Just in general, there aren’t enough good ways to get content into Google Docs. I really like the service, although it’s still not powerful enough to ditch Office completely. I can’t even get the Chrome extension “Send to Google Docs” to work properly.
2. Twitterfeed
I wanted a quick and easy way to send out a tweet every time I posted something on my blog. Sure, I can just as easily do this myself with a quick message and a bit.ly link. The problem is, I’m trying to write more posts in advance, and schedule them in the future. I’m certain that with my bad memory I’ll forget, so it’s just easier to have a service that does this for me.
Twitterfeed was the first result back from a Google search, and seemed to be exactly what I needed. At the time when I signed up, I was still using a .blogspot domain for the blog. It was only a few days later that I switched everything over to my own domain. When I signed up for Twitterfeed, I used my OpenID from Blogger to sign in. When I switched over to the new domain, Twitterfeed kept working fine, so I assumed everything transferred over properly.
I’m having a weird problem. I wanted to change the settings on how it tweeted. It was including a quick snippet from the first line of my post. I wanted to change it to just say “New Blog Post: Post Title bit.ly link”. When I went to sign in, it wasn’t showing my blog, just a form to enter a new blog for the service. I signed in with both OpenID’s, and still nothing, but it was still tweeting after every blog post. I tried entering my blog again, in hopes that this would override any previous settings. Nope. Now it was tweeting twice. I went back into the Blogger dashboard, and revoked any permissions that Twitterfeed had to my account. When I opened up Twitter this morning, it had still tweeted my new post.
It’s not the end of the world. If I hadn’t wanted to tweak the output of the tweet, I wouldn’t have been bothered. Have any of you had this problem before? Any suggestions?
update: I checked this morning, and Twitterfeed managed to post 2 tweets; one with just the title, and another the old way. It looks like I’m going to have to email them and get this fixed.