Firefox and the New Blogger Interface

Blogger has a (relatively) new interface, to which I switched a while back. The one major annoyance I found was that clicking the "Preview" button while editing a post did not actually generate a preview. I got a notification (lower left) that the preview was being prepared, and then ... nothing. To get a preview, I had to save my work, exit the edit screen (going back to the Blogger control panel), and do the preview there.

It wasn't just me, either. Checking the Blogger help community, I found a ton of posts about this, on pretty much all operating systems and browsers, with some dated this month. A tip about fixing the problem on Safari worked for me. The key (somewhat obvious in hindsight) is that Blogger needs permission to open a pop-up. This was not entirely obvious to me, since I don't consider opening a tab the same as opening a pop-up, but so be it. In Firefox, with any Blogger screen displayed, click the padlock icon in the URL bar, and under "Permissions" allow the site to open pop-ups.

Other users said they had the same problem with Chrome, which is interesting in that preview works fine for me on Chrome, and I don't recall giving explicit permission there. At any rate, I seem to be back in business.

And yes, I previewed this entry before posting it.

Scalable Images in Blogger

Questions about a recent post containing a couple of flow charts made me regret the fact that Blogger does not support SVG graphics.  Although I made the charts using the excellent TiKZ LaTeX package (which produces vector output in the form of a PDF file), I had to convert the PDF output to PNG for Blogger, and the images are a tad fuzzy (and do not scale well when zoomed), which may have led to some confusion. So I was on a mission today to find a workaround.

The first thing I discovered that SVG is not nirvana.  I generated the images as separate PDF files from the TiKZ source.  (Hint to people doing this: use the LaTeX standalone document class and the output file will automatically be cropped to the smallest rectangle containing the image.)  I then used ImageMagick to convert the PDF files to SVG files ... which blew them up from around 54 KB to about 8+ MB. Each. Oops!  I tried a tool I found to convert the SVG files to "canvas" files, which got me another 5x or so increase in size.  So back to PDF files.  Blogger does not consider PDFs to be images, to the plan now is to use a PNG file as the image and link it to the corresponding PDF, allowing readers to click on the image and at least get a scalable version in a new window or tab.

Blogger does not allow you to upload arbitrary files, only images in formats it recognizes (which are actually stored in Picassa, another Google product/service). I thought about putting the PDFs on a personal server somewhere, but I worry about moving things (including them) to a new server at some future date and not remembering to update the links.  Enter Google Documents.  I just have to upload the PDFs to Google Docs, make them public, grab the URLs and set the links on the PNGs (which by default point to the PNG files in Picassa) to point to the PDFs in Google Docs instead.

I did this with the aforementioned post, and I think it's working. The one question mark for me is whether everyone can see them.  I can, but Google knows I'm the owner.  If either of my loyal readers runs into problems, or wants me to convert images from earlier posts, please drop a comment here.

Backing Up My Blog

I just spent an hour or so searching for options to print Blogger entries (printing just the blog entry itself, not all the widgets and other clutter) and/or back up the content.  Ideally, I'd hoped to add a "print this" widget, but apparently none exists, and the best solution I found (which involved adding custom code to the template) didn't work for me because I couldn't figure out the right IDs to use for the bits I wanted to make vanish.  There's still the browser print feature, but that gets you all sorts of things you probably don't want.

On the backup issue, I had better luck.  There are various options for (essentially) spidering the site and storing pages, including the ScrapBook extension for Firefox (which I already use for other purposes).  In my case, I found a simpler option.  The key is that I already have source documents for any images I use (because I have to create them myself).  For lengthier posts, particularly those with lots of math, I sometimes compose the post in LyX and transfer it to Blogger, which means the LyX document serves as a backup.  So my main need is to back up just the text itself (with or without all the extra clutter), primarily for the posts that I create directly in Blogger's editor (such as this one).

Enter the DownThemAll! extension for Firefox.  Once you've installed it, the process is pretty simple:

1. In the Blogger dashboard, select Posting > Edit Posts and list all your posts (or all your recent posts if you've backed up the older ones).  There's a limit of something like 300 posts on any one page, so if you're very prolific, you'll need to iterate a few times.  (Then again, if you're that prolific, you obviously have no shortage of idle time.)
2. While staring at the list of your posts (each post title being a link to view the corresponding entry), click Tools > DownThemAll! Tools > DownThemAll! in Firefox to open the a dialog in which you can select the files to download.  Highlight the ones that say "View" in the description field. A quick filter on "*.html" selects them all without (so far at least) grabbing anything else.
3. Select where to save them, futz with other settings if you wish, then click Start! and watch DownThemAll! suck down all your postings.

Need to back up images (or other media files) as well?  So far, the best way I've found is to open the actual blog post and download them (by right-clicking individual images or using DownThemAll! again).  Note that the links in your downloaded copies of the HTML file still point to the Blogger server, so you can open the downloaded copy to get to media files; you do not need to actually navigate to it on Blogger.

If there's a better way to do this (and particularly if there's a simply way to print just what's in the actual post), I'd love to hear it.