How to take better pictures - no matter what sort of camera you have

This weekly blogger tip is complements of Shutterfly:   tips about how to take great photos, of various types, no matter what sort of camera you use.

Giving your Blog a Home Page

This article is about the options for setting the home page for blogs made with Google's Blogger.

AdSense, mobile templates and Analytics - and how they do (or don't) work together

If you

• use AdSense to make money on your blog, and

• have a mobile template enabled
  (which should, unless the blog is about something that makes no sense on a mobile device), 

then it's an extremely good idea to have at least one AdSense ad-unit that was made with Blogger's official AdSense widget rather than by getting the code from AdSense and installing it manually.

Non-US based Amazon Associates must "perform all services" outside the US

An interesting addition to Amazon's terms and conditions for their Associates (announced here):

“If you are a Non-US person participating in the Program, you agree that you will perform all services under the Operating Agreement outside the United States. If, for any reason, you cannot comply with this requirement, you must notify us using this link for an exception.”

My guess is that this is something to do with tax-regulations, and is worth a few moments thought (at least) for Bloggers who use Amazon Associates links to earn money from their blogs.    

But it also made me wonder about bloggers who travel a lot:   we possibly shouldn't be doing any work inside a country where we don't have a visa that allows us to work.   I wonder if that includes writing blog posts, or perhaps even drafting but not publishing them or taking pictures for them? 

Look at the receipients of the "registration will renew automatically in X days" email to work out your domain-administration login name

This article is about how you can work out what Google Account to use to check custom domain renewal details from the reminder emails that Google sends in the month before the domain registration expires.

Help visitors who arrive at your blog via a link to a deleted post

If you sometimes delete posts from your blog, then it's a good idea to provide some help to people who who arrive at your blog via links to those posts.

(Even if you don't have any links to those posts, it's likely that a search-engine somewhere will have some - and other people may have bookmarked or shared them, too.)

There are two options for doing this:

Adding an RSS feed icon to your blog, using Feedburner

Feedburner's chicklets are used to add the standard "orange radar" button to your blog.  This lets readers to subscribe the RSS feed of your choice.   The information is targeted to Blogger users, but most of it applies to anyone who uses Feedburner.

Keep a backup copy of complicated gadget settings

This article explains why it's a good idea to keep a backup copy of settings for your gadget, in particular for HTML/Javascript gadgets that have complicated, hard-to-regenerate, code.

Use diagrams to make pictures for your blog posts

This post from the Weekly Blogging Tips series is about a cost-effective way to make pictures for blog postings.

Make it easy for visitors to find other posts in your blog

Some visitors arrive at your blog from a search engine. Others will have subscribed to an RSS feed, or followed a link from some other blog or website. A few might even go directly to your home page because someone told them about it.

But no matter how they got there,

If you want people to read more than one post then you need to make it easy for them to find other posts. [tweet this quote]

How to change Labels on more than one post at a time

This article shows how to edit the name of an existing Label value in blogger, without editing each individual post that it's applied to.

Find an angle that lets you write some blog-posts quickly

This is a post from the Weekly Blogging Tips series.

Introducing Weekly Blogger Tips: A new type of post from Blogger-HAT

Blogger-hints-and-tips was originally where I kept my own notes about how my solutions to problems with Blogger

But then I found other people were visiting - because they were looking for solutions to the same problems!   And looking back, I was embarrassed about how low-quality the original posts  were.  So I made a commitment to only publish properly researched articles, and I started keeping a private blog with post-ideas that I haven't researched fully (which now has 200+ posts in it).

Then in Sept 2012, I started posting "Quick Tips" - very quick posts about changes in other products that are people tend to use with their blogs, which I didn't have the time or ability research fully, but which I really wanted to share with my readers quickly.

Recently, however, the number of  Quick-tips has decreased: as Blogger and the other tools have become more mature, there just haven't been the same number of changes.

And at the same time, other projects have been taking more time and I often don't have the capacity to do the in-depth research for the quality articles that I want to publish here.

But one thing I that noticed on another project is that I get a lot of satisfaction from publishing regularly:   in one niche, there's a type of post that I can write in about 20 minutes, and this is great for my motivation and satisfaction, as well as for the blog's traffic levels.

So, between now and December this year, I've set myself a target of publishing at least one short post here once a week.   This won't be a fully researched article.  Instead it will be a short hint about some aspect of either Blogger or blogging in general- in short a Weekly Blogging Tip.

To start with, I've made a list of potential topics, but I'd love hear your suggestions about aspects of blogging where a quick post would be helpful - you know where to find the comments box ....

How to use Picasa-web-albums with your Google+ Page's photos

This article shows how to manage your Google+ Page's photo collection using Picasa-web-albums.

How to give a Google+ page its own password and login-name

This article is about setting up a Google+ page so that it is a stand-alone thing, and can log in to Google services without needing your personal Google+ profile.

How to put put Posts into Pages in Blogger

This article shows how to set up your blog, using Blogger, so that it looks like your posts are on separate web-pages.

RSS feed reader options - the saga continues

When Google Reader was retired, I posted about my search for a replacement.

Eventually I settled on TheOldReader.   This had a few headaches - too many other people made the same choice, so they had performance problems.  Then they were going to shut down.   They they got help and weren't shutting any more.   Now they've siaid that only the first 100 subscriptions are free, and that people need to pay to have more than this.   The design still looks a bit clunky.

I may yet end up paying them $30/year - it's not unreasonable for the service.   But OTOH, I don't see paying a small amount for any service as a guarantee that it will actually survive.

But in the meantime, I'm hunting for options again.    Here's some info about what I've tried.

Setting up Google Analytics for a 2nd or later blog

This article is about how to set up Google Anaytics to work on subsequent Blogger sites, if you have already set it up for your first blog or website.

AdSense Direct: A new way to sell direct advertising on your blog

This article introduces AdSense Direct, a new way to use AdSense to manage advertising that you directly sell ads on your blog or website - and to fill those spaces with AdSense ads when there are no Direct ads running.

Putting a picture on your blog as a Gadget

You can put a picture anywhere in your Blogger blog that you can insert a gadget - and you can make it link to a post in your blog or to any other website.

Google use Google-Sites, so we should too!

This QuickTip explains why I now feel happier about using elements from Google Sites in my blogs.

Delete, change or re-format the "Showing posts with label" message.

This article explains options for deleting, or changing the content or formatting of Blogger's "Showing posts with  LABEL.  Show all posts" message and it's ugly grey box.

How to show AdSense ads that are non-standard sizes

This QuickTip is about AdSense's new custom-size-advertisement option, which lets you choose the height and width of each advertisement that you show on your site.

Finding the co-ordinates of a place in the new Google Maps

This article explains how to get the co-ordinates for a particular location in the new and old Google Maps interfaces.

Adding tooltips or hover text to Blogger posts and gadgets

This article is about putting a "tooltip" (text that is shown when you hover over) into something (eg text, a web-address or even a picture) in a Blogger post or gadget.

Stop Google from "fixing" pictures that are loaded through Blogger

This article is about how you can stop Google from automatically "enhancing" pictures that are loaded in Blogger - even if you do not have a Google+ account.

How to let another person load pictures to your Picasa-web-album

This article shows how to let another person (Google account) upload pictures to your Picasa-web-albums:   this is one possible way to work around the issues with Google's photo auto-enhance feature.

How to set up a Google+ profile for an existing Blogger account

This article is about how to set up a Google Plus profile for a Blogger account which already exists.  It looks at the history of Blogger and Google accounts, how to make a Google+ profile for a Blogger account, and what the consequences of this might be.

The "follow by email" gadget: an easy way to add an email subscription to your blog

Blogger have made it very simple to offer an email-subscription to your blog, with the "Follow by Email" gadget.  This article describes adding it to your blog, and how it works for your readers.

Dealing with the "Keyword not provided" problem in your statistics

This article explains why the proportion of "keyword not provided" visits to most websites is increasing, and gives you options for finding out what keywords people are searching for when they reach your blog.

How to edit a picture in Picasa Web Albums or Google+ Photos

This article is about how to edit pictures in Picasa web albums, and how to use Picasa-destop to edit pictures in your Google+ Photos.

What is Creative-Kit, and how to use it

This article describes Creative Kit, which was a photo-editing tool for enhancing pictures in your Picasa-web and Google+ albums.

How to set up Twitter's "view summary" cards to work with Blogger posts

This article shows how to install Twitter Cards into Blogger - and explains why you might do this if Twitter could be an important source of visitors for your blog.

How to automatically share every Blogger post you publish on your Google+ page or profile

This quick-tip is about Google's new feature for automagically sharing every Blogger post to Google+

How to embed a Google+ post into your blog post or website - and what happens when you do

This article explains how you can put a Google+ post (your own or someone else's) into your blog or website, provide the post was shared publicly on Google+.

Put a survey questionnaire in your blog, using Google Drive's forms tool

This article shows how to use a Google Drive form to put a survey questionnaire into your blog or website.

How to show pictures from Google Plus in any website

This article shows how you can make a slideshow of all the photos from an album in your own Google Plus Photo collection, which can be shown on a website or blog.

Get your blog-posts into Google's in-depth search results

This QuickTip is about the new in-depth search results feature that Google has recently introduced, and how you set up your blog-posts so they have a chance of being considered as in-depth.

Removing the label values from the blog-post header or footer

This article explains how to stop label values from showing in the header or footer lines for each post in a blog that is made with Google's Blogger.

Webmaster tools Structured Data Testing Tool - helping bloggers who care about SEO

This quick-tip introduces the Google Webmaster Tools structured data testing tool, which gives you a view of how your site looks to the search-engines.

How to replace a file in Google Drive with a new version

This article is about how to update a file that you have loaded to Google drive. It only applies to files that have not been converted to Google Docs format - for example, PDF, Word, Excel etc files.

How to use Picasa-web-albums, without being re-directed to Google+ Photos

This article is about how to you can start Picasa-web-albums in way that stops you being immediately re-directed to Google+ Photos.

Where is the Blogger help forum now?

This quick-tip is about how to find the current version of Blogger's support forum.

How to make AdSense ads in your site load faster

This article is about a new, faster, type of AdSense code which is available, and how you can add it to your blog.

What is / was Google Friend Connect

This article describes Google Friend Connect, and how it can be used at the moment.

AdWords external keywords research tool is going to be retired

This quick article shares an observation about the likelihood that Google's free Keywords Research Tool is being turned off.

New Google+ badges and follow buttons can be used in Blogger

This Quick-tip introduces the new Google+ plugins that Google released in late June 2013

How to make a new category / folder in your The Old Reader subscriptions list

This article explains how to make new categories for listing and organizing feeds in The Old Reader.

Why enabling a mobile template just became more important to some bloggers

This QuickTip explains some recent announcements from Google  about SEO and mobile devices, and what they mean for Blogger users.

How to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into Blogger

This article shows how to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into Blogger

Choosing a replacement for Google Reader

This post tells the story of my choosing a replacement for Google reader.

Tell Google more about the posts in your blog with Webmaster Central's Data Highlighter - now supporting more data types

This QuickTip is about the new types of "things" which the Data Highlighter tool knows about.

How to access your Google Custom Maps after migrating to the new Google Maps

This QuickTip is about how to access your existing Google Custom Maps, once you have started using the new Google Maps interface being introduced in mid 2013.

How to keep your Blogger password safe

This QuickTip introduces a useful post about password management from Google.

Google Buzz's last-gasp addition to your Google Drive

This QuickTip is about a file that Google Buzz is going to put into your Google Drive, as part of it's final turn-off routine, for all Buzz accounts that haven't yet been deleted.

AdSense now allow changes to their advertisement code

This QuickTip is about a change to AdSense's policies about modifying their ad code: in short, you are now allowed to change the code in certain way, to achieve certain things.

Setting up Google Analytics so it gets AdSense data from more than one blog or website

This article is about setting up Google Analytics on your blog in a way that includes data for AdSense clicks and behaviour.

How to re-direct an old custom domain - and all its posts - to a new one

This article describes options for making link to a blog's old URL automatically point to the blog's new URL after a custom domain change.

Introducing Maps Engine Lite - a better tool for customizing maps

This article is an introduction to Google's Maps Engine Lite, which is a tool for creating custom maps.

Newer AdSense ad-unit sizes are now available inside Blogger

This QuickTip shares a feature that I just noticed inside Blogger's Add-a-gadget > Adsense option.

What happens to your blog if your Google account becomes inactive?

This article describes Google's Inactive Account Manager, a new tool that gives you control over what happens to your Google account if you don't log on to it for a period of time.

How to tick the "expand widgets" checkbox in Blogger's new template editor

This QuickTip is about finding the "expand widgets" option in Blogger's template editor.

Introducing Google's tools for measuring how fast your blog loads

This quick-tip describes some tools that I've recently discovered that measure page-load speed and make suggestions about how to improve it.

Stop Twitter's "follow-me" spam in its tracks

This article is about how to stop the annoying email messages that Twitter sends when an acquaintance joins Twitter and decides that they think you should follow them there too.

Comments I'm never going to publish

The "best" of the comments I'm never going to publish.

Accessing Pinterest Analytics, and verifying your website with Pinterest

This Quick-tip is about how you can verify the website (or blog) associated with your Pinterest account - and solving a small problem with the meta-tag that Pinterest give you.

Getting started with SEO, for Bloggers

This article introduces Google Webmaster central's first-steps-SEO cheatsheat, and explains how the points in it apply to Blogger.

RIP, Google Reader. Google's March 2013 product cancellation summary.

This QuickTip is about Google's March 2013 (spring for them) product retirements, and how they affect Blogger users.

New resources and help-options for Google AdSense publishers

This Quick-tip is about some new help resources and options that Google has recently introduced for AdSense publishers - including ones who use AdSense through Blogger.

Easy professional translations for YouTube video captioning

This quick-tip is about an extension to YouTube's captioning service. It's relevant to bloggers who focus strongly on videos as a complement to their blog content.

A simple time-management tool for bloggers

This QuickTip shares a template that I used to help me be productive when I was working as a free-lance blogger (and a other things besides).

What "Another blog or Google Site is already using this address" really means

This article explains what "Another blog or Google Site is already using this address" means when you see it while setting up a custom domain for your blog - and what you can do to fix it.

The "Single-Slash Double-Dot" rule for identifying spam links in phishing emails

This article is about email phishing, and spam-links in emails: how you can recognize them and what to do about them.

Custom-search-engine adds an "overlay" results layout

This quick-tip is about a new overlay results format which Google Custom Search Engines have just introduced - and which looks like it will be their new standard. 

A quick way to keep an eye on what is posted to interesting YouTube channels

This quick-tip is about subscribing to a YouTube channel using an RSS feed-reader, like Google Reader

Stop Blogger offering to share your posts to Google+

This article describes Blogger's share-to-Google+ feature, and shows how to stop Blogger offering to share to your Google + circles every time you publish a new post, and what you cannot (yet) do with the feature.

Remove sidebar background in the Travel template

This quick-tip is about removing the coloured section that is in the background in Blogger's Travel template.

Teach Google-search about your blog with the Data Validator

This quick-tip is about the Webmaster Tools Tool Data Validator tool - which is an easier way to "teach" Google about the way things are described on your blog or website.

How to find free pictures for your blog, using Creative-Commons search

This article describes the Creative Commons search tool, which you can use to look for pictures, videos, music etc that are available for other people to use under a Creative Commons license.

Google product cancellations for December 2012

This quick-tip is about Google's winter 2012 product cancellations, which
appear to have less impact on most Blogger users than their recent seasonal purges.

New rule for how many AdSense ads per page - from Jan-2013

This Quick Tip describes a new rule that AdSense is introducing to their terms and conditions, about how often the new 300x600 ad unit can be used on a single page.

Google+ communities - another way to grow your blog's influence

This Quick Tip is about Google+ Communities, and the ways you could use them to promote  your blog.

Limiting AdSense ad types for individual websites is now available

This quick tip is about a new feature that AdSense have just announced, which lets you control the types of ads that are banned - by website, instead of just for your entire AdSense account.

Blog home-pages and mobile-templates: Do they work together?

This article discusses the issues of giving your blog a home page, and how this works for people using mobile devices.

How to make a blog into a real website

This article explains how you can use Blogger to make a site that looks just like any other website and why you might, sometimes, want to do this.

Using an URL from domainDiscount24 for a blog

This article shows Blogger users, who have purchased a domain through Google Apps using domainDiscount24 (dd24.com), how to set up the 2nd CNAME statement that is needed by  Blogger's custom-domain verification step. 

Most of the information also applies to any who purchased a domain from Key Systems / DomainDiscount24 / dd24 and wants to use it for a Blogger blog.

Simpler - but more limited - AdSense sign-up for Blogger users

This quick tip describes an announcement from Google about an upcoming simplified process for applying to use AdSense on Blogger or Hubpages.

Add Google Drive's one-click-new icons to your blog or website

This Quick-Tip is about Google Docs / Drive's new short-cut buttons for making a new document, spreadsheet or presentation - and how you can install them into your blog.

Stop spammy links from hurting your blog

This article describes the Disavow tool, which you can use to ask Google to stop taking notice of links to your website that you consider to be bad.

Creative Kit photo editor works in Google+, if not in Picasa

This Quick-Tip is about using the Creative Kit, which has been giving me grief recently when I tried to use it from Picasa-web-albums.

Making custom domains work without the www at the start

This Quick-Tip is about an issue that some people have had with their "naked" custom domain not re-directing to the www-at-the-start version, and how to fix it using a feature in your Google Apps account.

Google product cancellations for October 2012

This Quick-Tip is about the products that Google is dropping, or making changes to, from October 2012.

Google Groups now has a "My Discussions" view

This Quick-Tip is about how to see the posts you made in Google Groups - in particular in the Blogger Product Forum.

Takeout now lets you download your own YouTube videos

This Quick-Tip is about accessing your own YouTube videos, using Google's Takeout / Data-liberation service.

Get notified about changes in popularity of pages on your blog/site.

This Quick-Tip describes the alerts that Webmaster Tools are now offering for changes in search popularity of particular pages.

Using a domain purchased from another domain registrar or blogging-platform for your Blogger blog

This article is about how to use a domain (URL) that was purchased outside of Blogger / Google as the custom-domain for your blog.
 

Desktop search turns a downward corner?

This Quick-Tip shares an interesting observation about the trends in search-volumes - and is a reminder to think about what your blog is like for readers who use mobile devices.

Google Affiliate Network has a widget for UK Bloggers

This Quick-Tip is about the Google Advertiser Network widget becoming available for Blogger users based in the UK.

How to link posts together in Blogger

This article shows how to link from a new blog post to one that you have already written. It is part of the Blogger-Basics series.

Verifying blogs and their Google+ pages

This quick-tip describes verifying Google+ pages, based on a recent post in the Inside AdSense blog.

Introducing Quick-Tips: notes about interesting changes in other blogging tools

This quick-tip introduces "quick tips", a new type of post in Blogger-Hints-and-Tips.

Post author is now the first person to save a post, not the first to publish it

This Quick-Tip (more about them soon), is about a change that I noticed in Blogger's Post-editor a week or so ago - and I've just confirmed again that it's still happening now.

In short, the post-author is set to the first Google-account that saves a post - not the first one that Publishes it.

Verify your Google + page to get more exposure in search results

I spotted an interesting post in the AdSense blog just now.

It's actually been deleted from the blog (probably because it was supposed to be posted on the Google+ blog, not the AdSense one), but the original feed content is still available, for now, at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tuAm/~3/30qIWIcbTMk/social-fridays-gain-visibility-by.html

According to the feed, it's all about verifying Google + pages, ie making an official link between a page and a website.   They say

Verifying your +page confirms that the +page actually belongs to you. Once your +page is verified, it’ll appear with a checkmark designed to help our users find what they’re looking for.
and

Verified +pages that are popular and engaging may appear on the right side of relevant Google.com search results, for users who are logged in. .... Please keep in mind that to be eligible, the +page also needs to be active with regularly-updated content

To verify your page, you need to

1. Link your +page to your website: Fill out the ‘About’ section of your Google+ page, being sure to enter your site’s top-level URL.
2. Link your website to your +page: Add a Google+ badge or code snippet to your site, ...
3. Complete ... [the]  verification request form.
4. ... continue posting regularly to your +page ....

The verification form, at http://support.google.com/plus/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=page_verification&rd=1 states the conditions a little differently (boldness mine);

• Your Google+ page must be authorized by your commercial entity, organization, brand, or product.
• Your Google+ page’s profile must contain a link to your organization’s website.
• Your organization’s website must connect to your Google+ page, by adding the Google+ badge or by adding a snippet of code.
• A meaningful number of people must have added your Google+ page to their circles.

This will be simple enough for most of my sites - I own the website and the G+ page.   Though it should be a little more challenging for one or two community groups that I do things for, where the ownership is a little ore "vague".

My only decision is whether to start the verification process now, or to wait for this to be announced on the right blog!

What bloggers need to know about Responsive Web Design

This article is about responsive web design, and what it means for Blogger users.

Some of the information is relevant for people who use other platforms (especially Wordpress) but much isn't, because Blogger does so much of this for us.

Pinterest Twitter friend notification email messages

Mousetrap or gourmet cheeseboard - how are you treating your readers?

This article is pure self-indulgence and doesn't tell you how to do anything in Blogger or any other tool.

But maybe it's a good day to ask whether your blog is a murderous mouse-trap, a grotty greasy-spoon, or a luscious gourmet cheeseboard.

Google Blogger / Apps access to country-specific domains

Today, Google Apps announced that we can now purchase a wider range of global and country-specific domains through them - previously they only offered a more limited set of the global domains. And now they're cheaper, too: domains registration is $8/year instead if $10.

To do this, they've partnered with a new-to-them domain registrar http://www.domaindiscount24.com - instead of eNom and GoDaddy, who they used before

If you buy a domain via Google Apps, and DomainDiscount24.com is the registrar, then

• It comes pre-set up to work with Google's tools (mail, apps, sites, etc)
• You need to use DomainDiscount24.com's administration tools if you want to make any changes to the domain set-up
• You continue to use Google Apps domain management tools to manage the Google Services that are available to users in the domain (eg enabling/disabling Blogger)

Can we use one of these domains for Blogger?

I'd guess so: I'm pretty sure that Sites, like Blogger, requires that the domain-registrar provide DNS-hosting and the ability to edit CNAME and ANAME records.  You simply have to go through the same process that you need to use if you purchase a domain directly from any registrar.

(I'm going to test this very soon, there's a .co.nz domain that I've been thinking about for a while>

Will they work automatically with Blogger?

Not always: domain setup is a complex thing, and it's hard to predict if you will get the dreaded "Another blog is already hosted as this address" message:  I've purchased a domain via Google Apps before and and it work perfectly with Blogger - and I've had just the opposite experience, too.

If you get stuck, try either

• Use the information in this recent article from Chuck at Nitecruzr (he's one of the best for resolving custom domain issues)
• Going to the Blogger Product Forum: explain your problem and URL and ask the experts there to take a look.

Can we use this new registrar to buy country-specific domains inside Blogger?

Not at the moment, and - there's been no announcement from Blogger about it.

(Sideline:   I just tested it, and found that eNom is no longer offered as an option for domain-purchase under Blogger's switch-to-custom-domain track.   This means that GoDaddy, who not have a tool to make custom domain purchases easier, are now the only option inside Blogger - so I can see why Google might be looking to bring another registrar-partner on board.)

What domains are now available to purchase via Google Apps:

Global
.com    .info   .org    .net     .mobi     .biz     .name     .cc    .tv


Asia-Pacific
India: .in .co.in .org.in .net.in
New Zealand: .co.nz
Taiwan: .com.tw
Japan: .jp

Latin America
Colombia .co .com.co
Mexico:   .com.mx .mx

Europe
Belgium: .be
Switzerland: .ch
Czech Republic: .cz
Germany / Deutchland .de
Spain / Espana .es and .com.es
Republic of Montenegro: .me (though it has obvious wider appeal to English speakers!)
The Netherlands .nl
Poland .pl

Are domains for all countries available - why not?

There are still far more countries not on the list than on it.

I'm not surprised that there is no sign of Ireland (.ie) on the list -  these domains are hard to get.  I do manage one .ie site with Blogger:  the domain was obtained for a community group that doesn't have a company registration number, but which does have letterhead, a constitution and a well-connected chairman.   For it, I've found that LetsHost.ie provides the necessary domain management tools and their support people were helpful and didn't turn up their noses when I told them I was using it for a Blogger site.

Disappointing ommissions: Australia (.com.au) and England/Britain (.co.uk) - I'm not sure what the story is with these, or which registrars provide the tools needed to let you use a domain purchased from them with blogger.

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

This article is about the steps you can take to apply copyright protection to your blog.

Blogger and valid HTML code

This article explains the issues faced by Blogger users who try to see if the HTML in their blog is valid - and why this doesn't matter in most cases.

Get ideas for your social media policy by reading other people's

Recently I posted a template for helping to work out and document how you use your blog vs Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.

This is mainly for bloggers who look after blogs-sites for companies, community groups, etc - basically any organisation.  It came about because I started using Blogger to do the website for a choir that I sing in, and I needed to think about all the issues shown.

If you are having difficulty figuring out how you should use these tools together in your own setting, it might be heplful to look at some of the example social media policies listed on the Social Media Governance website.   Some of these are from big companies and non-profits, but some are from far small outfits which might be like yours.

Remember, sometimes it doesn't matter what rules you follow - so long as everyone understands who does what, and acts consistently.   Most problems happen when people have different expectations about who should do what, when and how.

Chitika now supporting all countries

Chitika is one of the advertising programmes that is an alternative to Google AdSense.

Initially, their ads were only shown to website-visitors who were in the USA and Canada.   That list extended a while ago.   Now they say that they're available in all countries.

Actually, their post makes it sound like you can sign-up as a publisher no matter what country you are in.  But I was signed up while they were still limited to showing ads to USA/Canada visitors, despite not being in those countries.   So I'm pretty sure that they mean their ads will be shown in all countries.

Custom Search Engine improvements

Google have announced version 2 of the "custom search element" - this is the "thing" that lets you put a custom-search tool in your blog (and any other website).

Important features are:

• Search UI is rendered based on the settings stored on the Google CSE servers ... any configuration changes you make in the CSE control panel ...[are shown]  on your web pages the next time they reload. ...

• All element code is loaded asynchronously for reduced page load times.

• Client-side customization allows you to overwrite global CSE settings on a per-page basis ...

Faster load time is very welcome - I've been noticing that custom search gadgets take a long time to load, relative to other things on my blogs.

And the first feature seems very handy - it means not having to copy-and-paste new CSE code whenever you change a CSE using the control panel. But this has a price: the existing code (in the best option for Bloggers) had two parts - one for where the seach box goes, and one for where the search results go. In the new code, there are still these two parts, but each one has two sections: one section that needs to be added to the header and one to the place (usually a widget for Bloggers). That means:

• Four separate pieces of code to install
• Installing means editing the template as well as adding a gadget
• If you change your template, you need to remember to re-install the CSE code too. 

That said, I'm not sure if the first code sections need to go into the header, or whether they could beside the other parts, perhaps with a loss of speed - any advice is welcome.

Lastly, Google says that the existing CSE code will continue to be supported for now (although there's no way to get it from them any more, they are now only supplying the updated code) - but that this won't last forever.   So sooner or later, you will need to update any custom-search(es) on your blog.

Six Reasons why SEO is irrelevant for your blog

This article explains what search engine optimization (SEO)) is and why it is sometimes not relevant for  bloggers, ie why many of us should ignore all the "essentials SEO for your blog" advice and focus on writing good-quality original posts.


It also has a simple guideline for deciding if a particular piece of SEO-advice is relevant for your blog.

Hiding the space where the navBar used to be

This article shows how to remove the space that is left when Blogger's top-of-screen navigation bar display is turned off.

Blogger and Analytics adjusted-bounce-rate

I've had interesting discussions with people about whether the bounce-rate in Google Analytics is worthwhile: one of my sites has information about local bus routes and neighbourhoods, and many visitors only need to look at one page (the one suggested by Google search) to get the information they need.  I've long believed that these people counted as a "bounce" (ie look at a page and leave), while friends assured me that Google is smarter than that and wouldn't count visits that last for a certain length of time as bounces.

I've just discovered that I was right after all: by default, Analytics counts all one-page-only visitors as bounces.

Google have now told us how to change this, and not count visitors as bounces if they stay on the site for a certain length of time (we can choose how long)

Unfortunately this option isn't fully available to Blogger users at the moment. We can either


1)  Install Analytics in a way that it works properly with dynamic and mobile templates,

Thsi approach will most likely be supported if Blogger invent any other types of templates in the future, so is what I recommend now.  GreenLava explains how to do this here. 


OR


2) Install the Analytics code in the same way it gets put into other websites.

This won't count visitors who view the blog using a dynamic template (either because you choose one or because they added a command to your URL in order to see your blog that way).
And if you have enabled a mobile template, it will only count visitors using mobile devices if you have:

• Installed the Analytics code using an HTML/Javascript gadget (I've explaiend how to do this here)
• Edited your template so that gadget is "shown" on mobile templates (by default, HTML/Javascript gadgets aren't - I've explained how to change this near the end of this article)

So at the moment, our options for Blogger are to either count visitors properly and not see the adjusted bounce-rate, or undercount the visitors but get the custom-adjusted bounce rate.

Have all your posts been added to Google search results yet?

How can you tell if Google has indexed your blog - or if it's indexed all your posts.

The quick way is to search for site:YOUR-BLOG-NAME and see how many results are returned.   If it's roughly the same as your number of published posts, then you're about right.   But what if it's not?

For example, if I google

site:blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com

I get

About 385 results (0.26 seconds)

However I've only 226 published posts in blogger-hints-and-tips.   That tells me there's a problem with content being indexed more than once.   Looking at the results, I can see the problem immediately:  my dynamic-views have been indexed (goodness only knows why) - but also, my archive pages appear to have been indexed.  

For a more in-depth analysis, though, Webmaster Tools now has an Index Status feature, which is particularly useful if there are less pages indexed than published posts, because it shows you if it's always been like that, or if there has been a change at some time which led to a lot of your posts being removed from Google's index.

To use it:

• Log in to Webmaster tools with the Google account that has administrator rights to the blog. 

• If you haven't verified the account before, you may need to do this.
  (Google have said before that blog-owners are automatically verified, but I've found a few times that this hasn't quite worked - I've had to manually verify by installing a meta-tag that they provide)

• Look under the Health tab for Index Status. It shows a graph of the number of pages indexed vs date for (up to) the last year.

Looking at the graph, if:

• the line is flat and you havn't made posts at that time, or
• you have been posting and the line is going upwards,

then it probably means that all your posts are being crawled and indexed (and so can be found in google searches).  

But if there's a different pattern, the advanced tab might be helpful.   It shows:

• the number of pages indexed
• the cumulative number of pages crawled,
• the number of pages that Google knows that it couldn't look at because they are blocked by robots.txt, and
• the number of pages that were not selected for inclusion in search results.

These numbers are point-in-time totals, not numbers of additions.

Note the important difference: the first graph shows pages indexed (ie added to Google). The advanced one shows pages crawled. If Google crawls a page and finds it hasn't changed since last time they looked at it, then they don't bother indexing it again.

If some of your posts aren't in Google anymore, and the graph of pages indexed has a sudden drop, then most likely a change that you made at that time has caused a problem with indexing or includign your results.

Of course just knowing when things happened doesn't tell you why they happened.  In my case, I remember adding the Archive gadget into Blogger-HAT's layout.   Obviously I didn't stop the pages from getting indexed (though it does make me bitter and twisted that Google doesn't just handle this for us!)

What this does point out, though, is that if you're serious about managing your site for maximum searchability (SEO-friendliness), you should keep a note of the date and time of any structural changes you make, so that you can compare this with diagnostic tools and see if there's a link between the changes and changes in your visits, indexing etc.

Stop AdSense showing you the ads you hate the most

A year ago, I planned a trip to New Zealand. I Googled "NZ camper vans" and similar things a few times, found a company and had a great trip (thanks, Jucy Vans)

For about three months after I got back, Google remembered that I'd looked for this and kept showing me ads from other van-hire companies. Not only were they irrelevant (since I wasn't looking for a hire-van anymore), they really reminded me that I in the office on the other side of the world in wintertime, instead of on the beach in the sun at home. This didn't exactly generate warm-fuzzy feelings towards the advertiser (NZ Van Hire, I hate you with a passion .. and you didn't even do anything!)

This was a lose-lose-lose-lost situation:

• The advertiser was wasting ad-impressions showing me ads even though I was no longer in the market to hire a camper-van. And they really annoyed me to the extent that they're unlikly to get my business next time I go home, because I've linked their brand to negaive feelings.
• The publisher - was wasting valuable screen-space showing me ads that there was no chance I would click - so they lost potential income.
• Google: there was no chance that I'd click those ads for something I didn't want any more, so they didn't get a cut of the revenue either.

To help address this, Google are introducing a “mute this ad” icon on AdSense ads. This will let us tell Google which ads we don't want to see.

How will it work:

• A small [x] will be put in the corner of some display ads on the Google Display Network.
• When a website-visitor clicks the [x], sees confirmation page shows, explaining that the advertisement has been "muted", and linking to the Ad Preferences Manager. And after that, ads from that campaign aren't shown to that person in future.

This is being rolled-out over the next few weeks, and won't be applied to all ads to start with. (And I'm describing it based on Google's description - haven't actually seen it myself yet.)

It's not a guarantee you won’t see that ad again -- the ad could be shown by a different company or in a separate campaign. But it's a start.

Google Video being retired - impact for Blogger?

Where to get the HTML code for popular gadgets in Blogger

This article explains where to find alternative code for many of the gadgets provided by Blogger - and why you might want to do this, and how to back up your HTML gadgets.

Custom Search Engine ad block background color changes

Google's Custom Search Engine styles have been changed so the ad-blocks at the top/right of the search results have a different background colour. Ref:  http://googlecustomsearch.blogspot.ie/2012/06/ads-background-colors-in-custom-search.html

It looks like we cannot control this colour - it's been chosen to "contrast in a visually appealing way with the default [or user-selected] background color".

In at least one of my blogs, though, the contrast between the ad-background colour and the outer background color selected in blogger isn't quite so "appealing".   :-(

I'm still considering whether to change my outer background, or to experiment with different CSE custom styles to see if one is a better fit. Luckily most of my in-post features have been set up with CSS rules, so I can change them easily by adding a new CSS rule to my template.

Google Advertisers Network - now has UK advertisers

Google Affiliate Network (one of the alternatives to AdSense LINK, which lets you deal with specific, relevant, advertisers) has signed up 30+ UK based advertisers.  Ref:   http://googleaffiliatenetwork-blog.blogspot.ie/2012/06/announcing-new-uk-advertisers.html

(When you're looking for them, don't forget to set Relationship status to "available", instead of the default  "approved".)

Fingers crossed some of these will also be suitable for my Ireland-focussed blog!

Knowing about better pictures Google Maps & Earth

If you blog about geographic locations, or add Google custom maps to your blog, then it can be very helpful to know when the satellite photos for a certain area are updated. Among other things, this is a reminder to check your map for any details that have changed.

Google's new Follow Your World service tells you just that.

In short, you sign up with your google account, and register to get email alerts when new images for a specific point are availabe in Google Maps or Earth.

Unfortunately you need to select on specific point, not an area, so there's a risk that you might miss updated if you're just a few metres out. But it's beta at the moment, so this may change in future

I haven't seen an official announcement, but it's mentioned in this post on the latLong blog

More info in Google Trends Hot Searches lists

Bloggers who want to write about what's ultra-current in the USA might like the changes to Hot Searches list in Google Trends:

• The list of searches is more visual,
• Related rising search terms are grouped
• You can see more information about those searches

Even if you don't want to blog about these topics, you might like to check them before you post, in case you can associate your somewhat-related post to something that lots of people are looking for right now (which is what Google means by "hot"). Search traffic gained this way may or may not be useful for building long term readership, but can be a nice short-term boost.

How to put a working Twitter message into your blog

This article shows how you can embed a fully-featured message from Twitter, right inside your blog, which lets visitors re-tweet, favour it - and follow you in Twitter.

Wordle tag clouds - a logo maker for hard-to-illustrate blogs?

One of my blogs is about some very abstract concepts, which are ever-so-slight difficult to illustrate in a way that's meaningful to the very wide range of readers.

Today I discovered Wordle - a tool that creates free-to-use graphic arrangements from lists of words - for example the words used in a website.   http://www.wordle.net/create

Here's one for Blogger-HAT, to give you an idea - but there are lots of options and customizations, so lots of looks that can be achieved.

After you've made a wordle, the easiest way (IMHO) to get it into your blog is to do a screenshot, then use Paintbrush (or some other very simple picture-editor) to save it as a PNG file).   The it can be loaded to your blog like any other picture.

How to put a gadget into a post in Blogger

This article describes how to put a gadget into a blog post / page - or at least how to make it look like you have done so.

Content Experiements in Analytics

Content Experiments is a new feature in Google Analytics.

It claims to

helps you optimize for goals you have already defined in your Google Analytics account, and can help you decide which page designs, layouts and content are most effective.

I'm not sure how possible it will be for Blogger users to use it - suspect that it may need some serious template editing at lease.

Translations - and better translations

The translations widget now offers you - and your readers - a way to make better translations.    More details here.   Key thing to remember:  if your readers offer suggestions, you have to approve them.    So if you're the sort of blog who encourages this, make sure you keep on top of the approvals.

I've also found that by getting the gadget code from Translate, I'm offered the chance to track translations using Analytics.   I'm not sure if this is an improvement over the standard widget or not, ie whether it perhaps picks up my code itself.  Suspect not though, 'cos part of installing the gadget-code from Google involved adding their meta-tag to my template.

Planning how to use your blog VS your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, G+, etc: what is each one for?

This article describes working out how your blog relates to the other communication tools that you use (sometimes called your "social media strategy"), and how members of a community-group can work together to so that their blog, Facebook page are used well. 


It includes a template that you can use to record your own group's decisions about how to use these tools, and a worked-example.

Docs research panel beats Zemanta gadget

Google Docs now has a research pane available while you're writing.   Basically this is a quick way to access google-search results.

To use it:

• Select a word
• Right-click the word
• Choose Research from the tools menu.

Or just select the word and hit the key-combo ( Ctrl+Alt+R on Windows or Cmd+Alt+R on Mac) if you think mice are evil time-wasters.

This is a far better than the Zemanta gadget that was offered to Blogger users back in 2010; research is done only on the words you want researched, not everything that you're writing. My experience was that the latter approach  slowed my machine down horribly, and mostly added no value because it just distracted me from what I wanted to write. Other people seemed to feel the same way, and for a while How to disable Zemanata in blogger was popular reading.

Personally, I'm not sure research-pane will be enough to convince me to write my posts in Docs and load them to Blogger from there: a lot of my research is about "how does Blogger handle this", which I can only find out my testing it.  But it will be a very handy tool for bloggers in some niches.

A couple of things to be aware of:  the pane  offers you imagees that you can "drag into your document", and it add footnotes saying where the image has come from. But the last time I loooked, documents loaded from Docs to Blogger didn't maintain footnotes. And even so, if the image is copyright, you can't get permission to use it in your blog just by linking to the source.

Six simple subscription buttons for Blogger

This article shows how to make a very simple row of subscription buttons for your blog or website, using image files that you host yourself.

Spam links can be invisibly embedded in comments

The pseudonymous John of Gordon's Tech reports that spammers have found a way to put links into comments so that they don't look like links when we're doing moderation.

Now he mentions it, I've been seeing a lot of comments lately that are something like  

"Nice info, thanks for sharing.   Facebook developers" 

all in plain text.  And the "signature" has often been something that's even less relevant than this.

I had been thinking that they were naive, and didn't know how to put links into comments, so was deleting them rather than marking as spam.   Time to change the comments moderation policy, I think, down the spam-shute they go.

Result-sorting and better filter queries in Google Custom Search Engines

Google's have added result-sorting and compact queries for filtering-by-attribute options to their Custom Search Engines (ref: Adding a custom search engine to your blog).

These are most relevant for people who use a CSE over their own blog/site, rather than over other sites which they don't control the markup.

Sorting:

If you have specificd PageMaps, rich-snippets or meta-tags for your posts, you can add them as an option that is available to people who use your custom-search-engine. Do this in CSE by

• Enable sorting (www.google.com/cse > Control Panel > Basics)
• Adding the key.

Compact-queries:

The language that is used to state a qeury against defined attributes now supports "and"-ing values together in a more compact way.

Putting scripts behind Google Docs

I'd never really thought about whether there was a scripting language with Google Docs spreadsheets (the same way that there's VB scripting with Excel).   But really it makes sense for there to be Javascript there.  (I have no idea if it's a new-ish feature, or has been there all along.)

This article from Blogger Xpertise not only got me thinking about the possibilities, but also has a useful script for making embeddable custom forms created in Docs a good deal more useful

Google's guide to HTML and CSS styles

Google have released their own style guide for HTML and CSS code.

It will be interesting to see how much of it they apply in future changes to Blogger templates

But for Bloggers who do a lot of modifications to their own template, there might be some useful tips. I especially like the one about putting CSS rules into alphabetical order for maintainability.

Doing this would mean adding CSS rules manually rather than than through Design > Customize > Advanced > Add CSS

And it will be harder to do a code-compare to see the difference between our customized template and the current standard-issue ones.  But storing like-named rules together appeals to me more than just tagging new ones on the end.

Use Image Search to research picture ownership

If someone shared a cool photo with you on Facebook or Pinterst, you might want to write a blog post about it.

The post will be a lot more interesting if you can actually include the image. But you're not allowed to put copyright material onto your blog without permission - and how do you know if the picture that was shared with your is copyright or not, and who owns it.

Google Image Search may be part of the answer. Find out about it.

It won't tell you if a picture is definitely avaiable or not - but it gives you information from you can make some judgements based on when it first appeared, and what sort of web-sites it has appeared on..

Remember - although you're not allowed to publish copyright material, you will only get "caught" if a copyright owner spots something on your blog and takes action by filing a DMCA report. There are a great many items which are fine to share, even though they're not technically in the public domain, because no one is actively claiming ownership - and image search gives a way of validating ownership claims made by chancers.

Crop and re-size photos stored in PIcasa, without HTML

Some very interesting info from David of Blogger Xpertise about controlling the display of photos from Picasa by manipulating the URL.   What he's found is nothing that we couldn't do with HTML, but I have a feeling that it might point to some other possibilities using Picasa's URLs.   Ref:   http://blogxpertise.blogspot.com/2012/05/tip-automatically-cropping-square-and.html

Becoming a Google Trusted Photographer

Previously I described Google's Trusted Photographer's programme, which could be a nice business opportunity for serious photo-bloggers.

At that time, Google were selling business-owners the idea of using a TP to take photos of your business and upload them to Places/Maps. But they were pretty vague about how to become a TP.

Today, they've given links to far more info about how it works and how to to sign up as a Google trusted photographer.

Designing blogs for mobile devices - liquid design and image-width-maximisation

Today I read a very interesting article from the Webmaster Central blog about the challenges of designing websites for mobile devices, and a concept called liquid design.

For bloggers who have enabled a mobile template for their blog, the overall site design is handled by Blogger: you can add gadgets to your mobile template easily enough, and if they're in the sidebard then Blogger decides where to show them instead.

But the design inside posts is our own responsibility. I've been pondering this for one of my blogs that definitiely needs a mobile-template view, but which has a number of side-by-side images.

I'm not certain yet, sure, but the article's suggestion to add this CSS rule to my template

img {
max-width: 100%;
}

might just be a very good one for me to apply.

Adding gadgets to your mobile-template makes your blog better for smartphone visitors

This article shows how to add gadgets to the mobile version of your blogger template.

Google Drive will eventually replace Docs - but not yet for most of us.

If you use Google Docs as a file-hosting option, then the recent announcement of Google Drive probably has you wondering how Docs will be affected: there's a marketing announcement on the Docs Blog, but it has a distinct lack of detail on how it will work.

But this announcement on the to Google Apps blog has more info.  Key points:

• Initial access is "on an opt-in basis via invite at drive.google.com/start"
• It's being released to Google Apps users first: It will be made available to all domains over the next 4-8 weeks.
• But [eventually] Google Drive will become the default andwill replace the documents list as the way to access files and documents.

It is introducing many changes and new features to Google Docs, including:

1. A Google Drive desktop application, available from the Chrome Web Store
2. A mobile application for your iPhone or iPad
3. Sync files between all of your devices with Google Drive for your Mac/PC
4. A different kind of search tool across your own files
5. In Google document, spreadsheet, or presentation editors, you can add a file to a folder by clicking the folder icon
6. Collections are called folders
7. More options on the Settings menu
8. More views on the left navigation: "My Drive", "Shared with me", "Activity"
9. My Drive (instead of home) to organize all of your files, folders and Google Docs.

Note that you will not see any of these changes until Drive is available to you.   In the meantime, Docs continues to work as it has been working.

If you are a domain administrator, notice that Google Docs has been renamed to "Drive and Docs" in the Google Apps control panel, and that there are new settings in this service.

Finding the gadget ID for a widget in your blog

This article shows you how to find the "identifier" for a gadget in your blog.  This isn't useful in itself, but is a set in various other template customizations, including putting a gadget on a single page only.

Removing the attribution gadget from mobile template blogs

This article is about removing the "Powered by Blogger" statement from the bottom of blogs that have a mobile template.

A new advertising option for Blogger: Google Affiliate Network

If you are already an AdSense publisher, then today's announcment about Google Affiliate Network: Introducing Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger may be of interest.

Google Affiliate Network (GAN) is a different type of advertising programme:  instead of getting paid per click, you get paid per purchase (or whatever other key action the advertiser decides).

So far, it's limited to Blogger users who are based in the USA - presumably because this is where most advertisers are.   It's also limited to "select bloggers" - this seems to mean ones whose blog is a good fit with the available advertisers, and the criteria for "a good fit" is as decided by Google.  This is unlike regular use of the Google Advertisers network, where you apply to a particular advertiser based on your own assessment of the fit.

After you have signed up for AdSense (and, I guess been approved!):

IF GAN options are available to you
THEN they will be shown when you are editing a post, in a gadget that appears in the right-hand Post Settings area.   

This means they will only available from the "new", ie post-Sept-2011 blogger interface.

I guess you will be allowed to copy the HTML code for the GAN advertisement from the post editor, and put it into a regular gadget - since you can put regular GAN adverts into your blog in this way.  But this is a detail that should be checked against their terms and conditions:   as with AdSense, the additional requirements for GAN are glossed over when you are accessing it via Blogger, but I expect that they will still apply.

Test HTML rich-text post snippets before publishing them

Adding meta-tags to your blog or to a blog-post

This article describes meta-tags: why and how to add them to your blog.  


It applies to any type of meta-tag except the description-tag:  Blogger introduced special editing tools for them in late March 2012, so they are covered separately.

Comment management policy and moderation principles

This article explains the policies that Blogger-HAT applies in accepting, moderating and responding to comments.

Blogger developer documentation has moved

Blogger have announced that the documentation for people who write tools using the Blogger APIs has moved to https://developers.google.com/blogger/

This iinformation is what you need to know to create and share you own gadgets. It is also very useful for blogger-helpers who want to understand the data / schemas that Blogger uses, in order to work out hacks for the rest of us to use to control the look and feel of our blogs.

The blogger developer forum is another very handy place too.

Styles on Blogger's post-editor menu bar

This article shows how the styles that can be applied in Blogger's style-bar look.

Removing the navBar from your blog

This article explains what Blogger's navBar is, what features it offers, and how to turn it off if your blog-site doesn't benefit from these features

Stop Pinterest from sharing your pictures or blog-posts

This article shows you how to stop people from "Pinning" your blog-contents on their own Pinterest accounts.

Putting a Tweet-this-quote link in blog posts

This article shows you how to apply a "tweet this" label to a specific quote in a blog-post, and how this works for your readers.

AdSense for Domains is discontinued

AdSense have decided to stop offering AdSense for Domains - a product that let domain owners show AdSense ads when someone tried to visit a URL that's not currently pointing to any website. (Because, of
course, they cannot use regular AdSense for Content ads on URL like this because the Terms and Conditions say it can only be shown on websites that actually have "real" content.)

There hasn't beean a public announcement (that I've seen), but AdSense publishers who are currently using AdSense for Domains have been getting individual emails about the change, which has these timeframes:

• March 21: Cannot put AdSense on any new Hosted domains
• April 18: Existing hosted domains will become inactive and AdSense advertising won't be displayed when someone looks at them.
• June 27: Hosted domains will no longer be available in AdSense accounts (Meaning we need to have downloaded any necessary information about them before then).

They also say that: "going forward, undeveloped domains will only be served through our existing AdSense for Domains distribution network" - but I haven't yet been able to work out exactly what this means.

To continue monetizing existing undeveloped domains, we need to migrate them to a new domain parking provider - so I'm looking for recommendations for these at present.

There is a Migration Guide: to help people move existing Domains monetized through AdSense to other places here:  http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/5pn7W99IR8ElM3.

For more information see the Help Center: http://www.google.com/appserve/mkt/DhXnVfFp9Ihuw4.

Sharing Google Analytics reports with other people

Google Analytics has added a Share button to

• Custom Reports: (Actions menu on the table that lists your reports)
• The dashboard: (top-left corner)
• Advanced Segments: (Admin tab > Advanced Segments)

This a way to let you share reports etc that you've designed:  it works by giving you an  URL that you can email or publish in a blog-post.

When someone clicks on this URL, they go into Analytics, and a custom report - which is just like yours at the time you clicked Share and created the URL - is added to their own dashboard.

Effectively, what the other person sees is:

• your report structure
• showing their data

Analytics is hugely powerful, with far more features than your average blogger needs. Some blogger-helpers don't recommend it, just because it's so large (a bit like using Microsoft Word to edit a text file).

But it has a number of advantages over Blogger's built in Stats (including counts not being reset to zero every time that you edit and publish a post with an updated date/time - which is the way I give one of my blogs a home page).

It seems to me that this share-your-analytics-design feature opens up a large opportunity for people who really understand how Analytics works to help the rest of us find actionable information about what's happening on our blogs.   Do you know any Analytics gurus worth following?

Blogger Help Forum (English) is moving

The English-language Blogger Help Forum (BHF) is moving to a new Google Product Forum, based Google Groups, from 9 March 2012 (that's this Friday).



There's nothing about the change in Blogger Buzz, but they've posted a long announcement in the current BHF, and linked to a Getting Started Guide which shows the base features of Google Product Forums, and an example working GPF-based forum (the one for Google Plus).

Key facts about the change:

• Posts from the current forum will not be moved into to the new forum (since most of them refer to the old Blogger interface). 
• You will need to join Google Groups to use it.
• All user levels will reset to Level 1 (presuming not TCs though) - but if they look to make more TCs, your post-history in the old BHF will be checked.
• The only way to get a picture with your profile in the new forum is to have it linked to your Google + account.   (I tested with an account that's not +'d, these do  basic Google profiles that don't include pictures).
• The existing BHF will be archived, so the current content can still be found.
  (Not sure what "archived" means - probably that write-access to it will be turned off, but read-only access will be continued).
• All help-links inside Blogger will go to the new forum, once it's live. 
• The new forum will be at:   https://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!forum/blogger

One fantastic feature of the new forum is the keyboard shortcuts, eg "space" to move down a page.    (Bringing back fond memories of the first use-net reader I ever met, back in the days of Vax VMS  :-)

Adding a gadget to your blog, using Blogger's WYSIWYG interface

This article shows how to use Blogger's add-a-gadget tool.  

It also looks at how you can move a gadget around in your blog, and describes what you can do with some of Blogger's most-popular gadgets.

How to add a gadget to a blog with a dynamic-view template

This article is about how to add widgets (also known as gadgets) to blogs that have dynamic templates.

Options for adding gadgets to your blog

There are (at least) three different ways of adding a gadget to your blog.  This article explains what a gadget / widget is, and looks at the advantages and disadvantages of each method.

Changing the Date for a Post

This article is about how to change the date of a post in Blogger.  It looks at where the date value is found, and what format is used to display and edit it.

Getting blog videos indexed, with schema.org

You can put videos into blog post using an icon on the post-editor toolbar - they are one type of file that you don't need to host elsewhere.

If you do this, Google will (eventually) index the contents of your blog post, based on the text in the post, and the file-names of the file(s)you've used.

But the spiders behind search haven't quite got the hang of speech and image recognition yet: as with images, you need to explicity tell them about your content.

Webmaster Central have announced a new way of doing this called schema-markup.org.  This asks people who provide videos to show them in their websites using code like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject">  <h2>Video: <span itemprop="name">Title</span></h2>  <meta itemprop="duration" content="T1M33S" />  <meta itemprop="thumbnailURL" content="thumbnail.jpg" />  <meta itemprop="embedURL"    content="http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123" />  <object ...>    <embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" ...>  </object>  <span itemprop="description">Video description</span></div>

Sidebar
The code originally given in Google's post was missing the / at the start of the closing </div> statement. I suspect they'll fix it soon - but it's why you may get a message like


"your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not closed: DIV"

Fix it by simply changing the second <div> to </div>. 

Unfortunately the suggested won't work for Blogger users, because the Post-editor doesn't let us use meta-tags.    You can put the code into your post if you want, but they will be stripped out when the post is published or viewed in Compose mode.

But there are some options you can use to tell search engines about your video conent:

1) Edit your template, add a conditional statement that is only applied to the post that contains the video, and put the schema.org code (without the H2 and Object statement, of course) into the <head> section.   Something like this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl == "http://url of your post"'>
PUT THE SCHEMA.ORG META-TAG STATEMENTS IN HERE
</b:if>

Disclaimer: I haven't tried ths myself. But it strikes me that it should work, give the way we deal with other meta-tags when necessary. However "should" is an "interesting" word.   Maybe it won't work, if the tags are not in the same <div> as the video.


2) Put the description of the video into the blog-post - just work it into the text naturally.

3) Use a title statement to give the video some hover text LINK (I guess this works for videos - haven't tried it) or alt-text.

For both of the last two, remember that indexing of text on your blog will link to your blog-post, not to the video, so it may not get the "videos are cool" factor that seems to influence search results.   But they are both easy things to do.

4) Load your video to Youtube (or Vimeo or wherever), and put the content description into the fields there, along with links to your blog, of course.

This will have the vids-are-cool effect, but the search traffic will go to the host site, and may not ever get to your blog -  to get any search-traffic benefit, you need to to have good links to your blog in their the video-site information, or good promotion of it in the video itself.


5) Or maybe the Video Sitemaps or mRSS feeds approach that Google's article LINK also mentioned work well-enough for Blogger-users.    (Sorry, I have no time to investigate either of these - am keen to get comments from anyone knows more about them though.)

AdSense has a new ad-size

AdSense has introduced some new ad-unit sizes.

The mobile banner is 320px wide by 50px high, and designed for mobile applications.    However if you get your ad-code from AdSense (rather than using Blogger's AdSense gadget), it's available to put onto any type of site.  I've put an example of it, and a regular 468x60 banner to show the comparison, at the bottom of the page on this site.

There are also some new widths for link-units:  these are available from Blogger's add-a-gadget wizard too - but as always, if you use this you have only limited formatting control, ie cannot use AdSense color palates and cannot centre the text.

I think that Google are doing some experiments with mobile-ad units (ones with big buttons, and a slightly different look) at the moment:  I saw some when I used a smartphone to look at a non-mobile-enabled site the other day.   Since then, I've enabled the site for mobile access ('cos I discovered that a quarter of the visitors were using mobile devices) - but now when I look at it, the ads inside posts are not mobile, and there are none at the top of bottom (where they were before).    So - no conclusions about what we should be doing at the moment, but I suspect that the best-practise here might be changing.  

Google Knoweledge Graph will change how Google searches for our blogs

You may have seen references to Google Knoweledge Graph, and how it has the potential to revolutionize search.

The first few posts I saw were big on hype, but with very little substance. However this article from Mashable explains things a lot more.

Of course we don't know what the effect of this change in Google's approach will have on Bloggers - especially those who rely on search results to get people to visit their blogs. But here are a couple of predictions:

1) SEO, as we know it, will be less and less important. 

Writing for human (ish!) beings will be ever-more important.

No prizes for this one: SEO's changing all the time. But I think that the change will be dramatic. Once Google's algorithms know that a blog is a type of website, and that it's something that ordinary people want to put gadgets onto, and that gadgets are just small bits of code that do something useful, then searches like "how do I to put a list of favourtie posts into my blog" are more likely to return posts that tell you how to use the link-list gadget.

2) Good grammar will matter more

The beauty of keyword searches is that they just spot relevant words, or clusters of words.

Today,it doesn't matter if you say

" This few wrong SEO tricks will down the visibility of your blog in search engine result page."  

(thanks for the phrase, Tips and Tricks for Bloggers)

Because, all other things being equal, that sentence will be found by someone who who searches for the keywords that are used.


But with a semantic-network in the picture, the way that the sentences in our blogs are put together is likely to matter.  Searching, for example, for

"what eats, roots and leaves" vs
"what eats roots and leaves" 

is likely to return a vastly different set of results. (Or it would if that wasn't such a hackneyed example that probably half of the English grammar websites in the world use it already.)

Blogger is a long way behind in providing tools to help us write better English (or French or Dutch or Portugese or Spanish or Greek or whatever) - they've only given us a spell-checker in the last year or two, whereas even Microsoft Word has offered basic grammar checking, in English at least, for ages.   Perhaps converting from MS word to Blogger via Word will become more important than before.



Why this post:
Normally, I only post about changes that have already happened, which I think may affect Blogger-users right now.  This is an exception, because I believe we need to be thinking about how the knowledge in our blogs is structured and presented to that it makes semantic sense.  And we need to do this thinking now, not sometime down the track when Google is presenting semantic search results.   (And besides, I really liked the Mashable post).