Google's Blogger Down For Over 24 Hours!

Blogger Logo - Image Credit: Blogger.com

Google's Blogger Down For Over 24 Hours!

Blogger ... Google's web log hosting portal, has been down for a full 24 hours at the time of this posting.

This seems like a modern era record for this usually very reliable communications service and personal publishing arm of the giant search powerhouse, Google.

With all of the push Google has been putting in on Chrome, one has to ask - Is Blogger now becoming just an ugly stepchild to the array of focused services that Google has to offer? What - isn't Blogger sexy enough for Google to keep outages down to a minimum?

If this is the case, Google's shine is losing its luster.

This excerpted from Blogger's Status Link:

Push-Button Publishing

Blogger Status

Friday, May 13, 2011

We’ve started restoring the posts that were temporarily removed and expect Blogger to be back to normal soon.

Posted by at 06:07 PDT

To get Blogger back to normal, all posts since 7:37am PDT on Weds, 5/11 have been temporarily removed. We expect everything to be back to normal soon. Sorry for the delay.

Posted by at 04:25 PDT

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UPDATE May 13, 2011 - 9:50am PT:

Blogger back online after nearly 30 hours of non-service.

Thanks, Google ... but we will be keeping an eye on you.

Stick-Pin Travel Via Google Maps

Example: Results of Jobe Media's method to create a stick-pin locator map for associated photo galleries of related travels to the longitude and latitude marker (not simple to the layperson, but effective). Image Credit: Google via Jobe Media

Stick-Pin Travel Via Google Maps

Here is a tip for those people who are (or would like to be) organized and need a way to communicate and organize photo galleries.

I suppose it can be used for anything, however, that involves travel to a specific destination and needs to be marked with a locator or virtual "stick-pin"!

Excerpts from Jobe Media –

Jobe’s Gallery - MAP Edition - Instructions
Scott Carmichael jobe-omg-slashdot-effect@jobe.ca http://jobe.ca/

OK, so under much pressure from my friends, I decided to write a little document on this neat map-based gallery addition I made to my site last week.

You can see it live in action here. Or you can look at this picture of it [above]:

Essentially, it's a map of all the albums I've got pictures for, mapped out all over the world, with little links at the top to zoom into specific areas where there's some detail to be seen. :)

It uses Google Maps API for the map drawing, and otherwise is a pretty simple little site that links into my simple (yet elegant?) photo gallery I made a few weeks before I added the maps.
I had to get the lat/long for all the places I've taken pictures by using http://maps.google.com/. If you double click a spot on Google Maps, it'll zoom and center on that spot. Then by copying and pasting the "Link to this page" link, you can see the lat/long of where you double clicked... for some random double click in Montana gives me:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&z=5&ll=47.040182,-109.599609&spn=20.043173,40.78125&om=1

There's your latitude and longitude. There'd be many ways to tag my albums with these, but for speed (and potential digg effect), I just chose a flat file, written out like this:

2003_08_11_europe/01_amsterdam 52.372874 4.894753
2003_08_11_europe/02_paris 48.857261 2.344551
2003_08_11_europe/03_toulouse 43.603267 1.442986
2003_08_11_europe/04_carcassonne 43.211682 2.355537
2003_08_11_europe/05_sete 43.40405 3.69175
2003_08_11_europe/06_agde 43.309191 3.473053
.. etc
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Basically what's happen here, is that it's reading all the albums in with the lat and long, then the second foreach loop is checking for multiple albums having the same location, and then writing out a little for the tool tip for when you click on the marker, which has a pre-generated thumbnail and the album title for all albums at that pin. Neat, eh?

This method and site and photo album look best using Firefox!
Reference Here>>

So, each album has a latitude and longitude so it shows up as a stick-pin on a map of the world. When you click a pin, up pops the highlight photo for the albums at that location. Clicking the pin again brings up that album. Makes a great front page to a gallery.

It's a pretty cool technique to place marks here on the Oblate Spheroid.
(ht: SlashDot)