Long time no see...

It's been quite a while (over a year, to be pre­cise) since I've last posted to the blog. I took hia­tus from writ­ing mainly be­cause of great changes in my life: change of em­ployer, fol­lowed by change of mar­tial sta­tus, job po­si­tion and mas­ter's the­sis sub­ject. So you can imag­ine that all the adap­ta­tion kept me pretty busy :D.

I've also man­aged to pass two cer­ti­fi­ca­tions in the mean­time:

• Er­lang Foun­da­tion Cer­tifi­cate (great fun! I hope to write about this more)
• Or­a­cle Cer­ti­fied Pro­fes­sional, Java EE 5 Web Com­po­nent De­vel­oper (scored 95%)

So, to re­flect all these changes, I've de­cided to move my blog to a cus­tom do­main, and switch blog­ging plat­form to Blog­ger. I was quite sat­is­fied with Wordpress.​com, but I needed more free­dom with edit­ing CSS (12$ 'up­grade' for small cor­rec­tions is too much I think) and using cus­tom Javascript. I had some ex­pe­ri­ence with cus­tomiz­ing Word­press blogs, so host­ing one on my own would look like a log­i­cal choice, but I've opted for Blog­ger mainly be­cause it's quite flex­i­ble and of course much eas­ier to set up and main­tain.

I think that great im­prove­ments will come to Blog­ger, as it has a huge user base and is an in­valu­able source of con­tent for Google – so im­por­tant in times when so much user-gen­er­ated con­tent is buried in un­crawlable so­cial sites like Face­book. So I wasn't very sur­prised to see Google an­nounce­ment on new fea­tures that will come to the plat­form this year. They look re­ally promis­ing – I like es­pe­cially the user ex­pe­ri­ence de­sign bor­rowed from Google Docs – the more doc­u­ment-ori­ented in­ter­face seems cleaner, ex­pos­ing the posts as the most im­por­tant el­e­ment and I think that's the way to go. Also, the func­tion­al­ity of blog ex­plo­ration based on topic clus­ter­ing looks pretty cool (al­though every­thing de­pends on ex­e­cu­tion, so we need to wait to see it in ac­tion).

Tran­si­tion to Blog­ger went pretty smooth, thanks to this con­ver­sion util­ity. I sim­ply needed to ex­port my blog from Word­press, up­load the XML file to the men­tioned tool and then I've got an­other XML to im­port into Blog­ger. There is a very nice Google ef­fort on mak­ing it easy to trans­fer your data in and out their prod­ucts: The Data Lib­er­a­tion Front. There are how­ever few things that aren't so smooth:

• Blog­ger has re­ally awk­ward han­dling of para­graphs: it en­closes them in div, in­sert­ing br el­e­ments on every hard break. There is an op­tion to turn off the later func­tion­al­ity, but it doesn't get you plain old <p>s any­ways; it's pretty an­noy­ing, be­cause it caused extra empty lines after my each para­graph and makes the markup very non-se­man­tic. I'm writ­ing the posts in HTML then to have con­trol over it, but the ed­i­tor is also pretty strange, be­cause it seems to in­ter­pret white­space – I hope that it will be fixed soon.
• The plat­form doesn't let you de­fine your own 404 pages. It's maybe not a big deal on its own, but be­cause I've set a 302 redi­rect from my old blog here and URL pat­terns dif­fer be­tween Blog­ger and Word­press, it causes all redi­rects from the old blog to land on the stan­dard 404 page, so vis­i­tor feels a bit lost.
• Great thing about Blog­ger is that you can host sta­tic re­sources like CSS or Javascript files on Google Sites. The catch here is that Google Sites block the traf­fic if the orig­i­nal re­quest was per­formed out­side of Google do­mains (which in­clude blogger.com). So it's easy to host JS files if your blog is in blogger.com name­space, but if you choose to use a cus­tom do­main, you need to host the files else­where. I don't re­ally think that this re­stric­tion will be lifted, be­cause other checks for re­quest com­ing from ac­tual Blog­ger blog could be coun­ter­feited; luck­ily, there are lot of CDNs (I'm using the one from Google) that host the most pop­u­lar Javascript frame­works and toolk­its and for sim­ple scripts and CSS, you are free to mod­ify the head el­e­ment of the page.