Mentioning Someone From Google+ Mobile

+Mention-ing someone in a Google+ post or comment is a neat way of grabbing someone's attention; whether to ask them a question, to give them credit or just simply to thank them. When we +Mention someone, a link will be created between our post or comment and the person mentioned. A notification will also be sent to the person mentioned.

Call me weird but I have always liked accessing Google+ (Facebook too in fact) via its mobile site on my Windows desktop PC. Google+ pages on the mobile site just loads faster compared to its desktop version because of its minimal bandwidth requirement. But there was one problem - I had never found a way to +Mention someone from Google+ Mobile. This has subsequently led me to wrongly assume that it was not possible to +Mention someone from Google+ Mobile. But after something like 2 years, I have finally found a way. I accidentally stumbled upon this workaround about a week ago when I clicked on the About page of MacroAddict on Google+.

I have tested it out by Google+ mentioning myself in a test post and found that it actually works. I have tested it on Google+ Mobile running under both Opera desktop (just remember to use the URL for Google+ Mobile: https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream) and Opera Mini. I guess I must have not looked hard enough previously.

The Steps To +Mention Someone

To Google+ mention someone in a post or comment, just type '+' followed by the person's Google+ numeric ID (A Google+ profile custom URL will not work; it must be a Google+ numeric ID).

Disabling Google+ Comments On Blogger

I should have given it more thought before enabling Google+ comments on my blog. The problem with this feature is that once enabled, a Google+ profile or page is required before any comments can be made on my blog. Anonymous and non-Google+ user comments are disallowed. With Google+ Comments enabled, I would expect some future comments to be loss as I actually have a few Anonymous user comments on my blog itself. This is definitely something that I do not want.

I spent something like 2 hours looking for a way to disable Google+ Comments on my blog. The answer is actually there at Google+ Comments FAQs but unfortunately it is not that obvious to me. A separate heading on "How to remove Google+ Comments on Blogger" in the FAQs would have been a much better idea.

Faster Page Loading With Google+ Mobile On The Desktop

Mobile sites are websites that are designed to be viewed from a mobile device, like on a mobile phone for example. They are simpler in design and more focused. I love using mobile sites, quite simply because I can get faster page loading time on a desktop browser even though I am still using a slow 50kbps dial-up line. I am not really into those dynamic and interactive web pages. So the absence of such feature on mobiles sites is not a problem for me.

Google+ On Opera Mini

I am now accessing Google+ on Opera Mini via the URL http://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream. This is the only URL that I know of that will give me a decent looking Google+ Stream on Opera Mini. I have tested it on a mobile phone and also on a J2ME (Java Micro Edition) emulator running under Windows XP (I am using MicroEmulator). They display perfectly, much to my satisfaction.

When accessing Google+ via the "Speed Dial" that came pre-configured with Opera Mini Version 5 and 7, most of the Google+ options will go missing. They were there previously but for some reason they have gradually disappeared over the last couple of weeks, making the Google+ page looking rather plain and uninteresting. I wonder what happened?

Accessing Facebook Via Facebook Mobile Site From My PC

With a dial-up line and a 14 year old Windows 98 PC, accessing Facebook via the URL http://www.facebook.com/ is a pain for me. Compared with Firefox version 3.6.8, the Opera web browser provided some improvement in terms of speed in rendering the Facebook pages. But on the whole, things are still crawling. Disabling the loading of graphic images does not help much. It has more to do with the heavy usage of Javascripts, I believe.

It is a welcome relief when I started accessing Facebook via the Facebook Mobile Site http://m.facebook.com/ on my desktop PC. My experience on Facebook has certainly improved. I have been using this URL instead of http://www.facebook.com for about a week now. With less graphics and Javascripts, the responsiveness of Opera is certainly much better, even when I have 3 other tabs opened simultaneously in Opera - and this is on a Windows 98 PC with 128 MB RAM and AMD 333MHz processor. Also, I do noticed that hard disk activity is significantly less compared to previously.

The user interface design of the Facebook Mobile Site is definitely plain, with not much bells and whistles. But I believe all the functions on Facebook that one normallly use are still there. I think I will be adding more Facebook Pages to my news feeds in the days to come. I could not do much previously as Opera was crawling all the time when loading Facebook.

Posting Churp Churp Campaigns To Facebook

My first Churp Churp campaign posting to Facebook was a disaster. I have assumed that I could easily do the posting with just a single click of the mouse on the "Like" button (see picture below) but ended up sharing the advertisers site instead - with no URL to my unique campaign link in the posting. Good for the advertiser but not good for me as I will not be paid for the mouse clicks generated from this advertisement.

"Invalid Title Value" when creating a new blog

Update 25th April 2014

I think I need to create an update to this blog post. The older blog entry (I must admit, is confusing) is at the end, to anybody who is interested.

To work around this problem, try upgrading your desktop web browser to the latest version of, preferably Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. If you are getting this error message on a mobile device, do try using a desktop web browser first.

I believe this problem has something to do with newer Javascripts tags being used on the page for creating a blog at blogger.com, that is not recognized in older web browsers. I have had pages in blogger.com that were working properly at one time, but started popping up warning messages months later. The only reason that I could think of is that the code and scripts for that page have changed.