Setting up a new Administrator for your blog

This article shows you how to set up someone else (ie another Google account) as an administrator for your blog.

How long does it take your average blog-page to load?

If you use Google Analytics on your blog, then you can get data about how fast your pages(*) load. This is seen in the the Site Speed report which was turned on for all users in mid November

Analytics have now published more information about what it contains, too.

Blogger users can't control some of the items that are shown (redirection time, domain lookup time, server connection time, server response time) - although you may like to keep an eye on them if you are concerned about whether the Blogger platform is suitable your blog/website.

But we do have a lot of control over page(*) download time. This is impacted by the size of our posts (especially the picutres and videos), and by the widgets that we use.

How much difference  page-load speed makes to you and your visitors (how many pages they view, and how likely they are to come back) depends on your niche and how impatient they are.

As with lots of web-statistics, there are no hard-and-fast rules. I recommend keeping an eye out for change.

• For example, if adding a widget adds one second to your average load time, but there is no change to visitor numbers or pages per visit, you probably don't have an issue.
• But if it adds 0.5 seconds and pages/visitor decreases by 50%, you might need to think about whether the widget is worth it, or whether you need to do something like only display it on the home page.

(*) These "pages" are not the same as so-called "pages" in Blogger: read more about the difference. LINK

More categories to ban from your AdSense ads

AdSense has added 88 new categories to the list of advertisement-topics that can be blocked from your sites, including apparel, business, family and sports. The may make it easier to keep ads for competitors off
your blog.

You can block a maximum of 50 categories - and there is still no way to block categories by site.

Ref: How to block competitors ads from your site.

Backing up picture files from Picasa-web-albums

Google Takeout (called Takeaway in some places) lets you backup your Picasa-web-albums, Gmail contacts, Circles, +1s and lots of other things, into one single zip file, which you can then store in a safe, off-line place.

It might be a way to move the photos in your blog to someone else if you're transferring owership of a blog.

1. back them up
2. extract them
3. sent the pictures to the other person
4. they upload them, and re-establish the links from the blog to the new location.

Still dreadfully tedious, but better than nothing.

API for Google Affiliate Network

Google Affiliate Network have introduced an API.    Not sure if this will be much use

Picasa 3.9, unlimited web-size photo uploads for Google+ users

Custom Search can include images in results

Custom Search has a new option to have search results that are images.  

If you have existing Google custom search engines on your blog and want have the image search feature, you need to edit each CSE and

• turn the image-search-option on 
• generate the code
• re-install it into your blog.

I probably won't bother, as my blogs aren't image-intensive.   But I can see that this will be a big thing for some people.