Technoreply » Blogging

Haloscan will be obsolete as from February 19 2010

Morinn — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:32:53 +0000

JS-Kit’s Haloscan is being shut down on the 19th of February, this year. This is what the team from Haloscan announced today in a mail to registered members:

The Haloscan hardware and software is physically failing and we have no choice but to discontinue the service.

Haloscan users now have the choice to either switch to Echo, another JS-Kit project or export their comments freely from Haloscan to their original blog host’s commenting system.

For several years Haloscan has been a good alternative to bloggers (especially those using Google’s Blogger) looking for a better and more rapid solution to their blog’s original commenting system. Now that Blogger has implemented some changes to its commenting system and that JS-Kit has developed Echo, a better performing system, that amongst others, integrates with Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo accounts, Haloscan has become quite obsolete.

Fix “Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact administrator by other way.”

Jevin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 05:44:37 +0000

A few days ago I received a mail from a reader, notifying me that my contact form was not working. I use Contact Form 7 on my blog and I was very surprised by the fact that it was not working. It usually is just plug and play.

The error message I was getting was “Failed to send your message. Please try later or contact administrator by other way.”. A quick Googling and I came upon this post by Mario Vargas. I then realized that the error I was getting was because my mail settings were messed up. You can find my mail settings on the screenshot below:

Wrong config for Contact Form 7. Click on picture to enlarge.

As you can see, I was using the reader’s email address to send me emails. This was the wrong thing to do. Even if the mail would be sent, it would be flagged as spam. As a general rule, you should only send emails belonging to your domain from your domain. (send only @technoreply.com mails from www.technoreply.com).

So, I applied this formula. I changed the senders email to one that belongs to me. The screenshot below speaks for itself:

Good config for Contact Form 7. Click on picture to enlarge.

This simple little trick worked for me. It saved me a lot of time since I did not have to tweak my server.

Verifying Technorati Claim Token

Jevin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:17:55 +0000

Verifying your Technorati claim token is very easy. Here are the steps:

#1 Make a new post
#2 Paste your claim token on the post content
#3 Publish post
#4 Go to your Technorati account and click on “Check Claim”

As a proof, this post was the post I made to verify my blog on Technorati.
My Technorati Claim Token : YAPSSJEUEBZG

New features on Blogger – August 2009

Morinn — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:14:35 +0000

Blogger users, especially those who had voted on Google’s product ideas page are perhaps a little bit disappointed. The reason for this: the proposed feature gaining the most suffrage from Blogger users, an improved commenting system which allows threading and supports Gravatar icons, has not yet been included by the Blogger team as at the last blogger upgrade in August.

However, on it’s 10th birthday celebration post, the Blogger team promised that the next several weeks will be a lot of fun! So we might be in for some surprises on the part of Blogger.

Moreover, Blogger has sure been implementing some added features on a drip basis in the past days. For instance on the 28th of August it has included the “Share” button on its Navbar.

Readers can now easily share blog posts by Email, on Google Reader or on Twitter and Facebook.

Blogger has furthermore previously introduced a label cloud widget which allows users to choose which labels are going to be displayed on their blog.

Blogger has also updated its text editor. You can enable the new one by going from Dashboard – Settings – Basic.

All these new features sure promise other great stuff coming up. Perhaps the improved commenting system could come as the cherry on the cake later on.