ScribeFire, Blogger Custom Domain And The Image Not Appearing Issue

Have you tried the ScribeFire blog editor? ScribeFire is a Firefox extension, that enables you to edit and post to all types of blogging platform – Google Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal and many more.

Within a short span of time, ScribeFire had made such a large number fans that ScribeFire had to name its testimonial page as the World’s largest testimonial page. Yes, ScribeFire team, we buy that.

However, if you are a blogspot blogger having a custom URL, like www.name.com instead of http://name.blogspot.com, then chances are that you may have been bitten by a ScribeFire bug. Images that you upload using Google API mysteriously vanishes. You have double checked the html source of the post and ensured that the <img> tag is pointing towards the image. Still, when you load the blog in a browser, the images are missing.

The Problem

When you upload an image using Google API, you get a link like: http://xyz.ggpht.com/<username>/AB_CDEF123/AAAAAAAAAmk/RANDOM-Letters/s1600-h/image-name.jpg. The problem is that, this is a link to the full size image and Google prevents hot-linking to this image from any domain other than *.blogspot.com. So if you are hosting your blog in a custom domain, the images fail to appear.

In this point of view, this is less of a ScribeFire bug and more of a Blogger bug. The Google image servers ought to know that a blog is hosted under a custom domain name and that domain name should be given full respect, as of the name.blogspot.com address.

Solution:

Go to the html mode in ScribeFire and go to the image code. It should look like:

<img src="http://xyz.ggpht.com/<username>/AB_CDEF123/AAAAAAAAAmk/RANDOM-Letters/s1600-h/image-name.jpg">

Append the string "?imgmax=800" to the end of the image URL. So, your final html shoudl look like:

<img src="http://xyz.ggpht.com/<username>/AB_CDEF123/AAAAAAAAAmk/RANDOM-Letters/s1600-h/image-name.jpg?imgmax=800">

Now your images will begin to appear normally. Know a better way? Who do you think should fix this bug? Post in the comments.

Happy Blogging.