important tips

This article explains some of the issues with restricting readership of your blogspot blog to just people who you choose, and why you can appear to have unexpected readers. When you first set up a blog in Blogger, anyone in the world can read it (if they can find it - how to get them to there is a different story!). But some people want to keep their blog private, just for them and their friends (or teachers, students, other parent, classmates, etc).   This is fine, provided they don't mind that only up to 100 people - ever- can be invited to read the blog, and that it doesn't have an RSS feed so cannot offer email subscriptions . How to stop everyone from reading your blog In the Settings > Basic:  Permissions tab , there is an area where Blogger lets you restrict the readers of your blog to anyone, selected people, or authors only. If you click the Edit link in this section, you can choose one of:  Private - Only blog authors Private - Only these readers If you c...

This article explains how you can control who can send mail on your behalf if you have a gmail account, why you might want to do that, and how to stop people from sending email messages on your behalf. If you have given other people rights to publish to your blog  , then you may also want to let them send emails on your blog's behalf - particularly if you are using an "organisational" email account.   I do this for several blogs - eg the one for the choir that I'm currently doing public relations for. This is a way to let the the other people use their current email client, ie what looks to them like their "normal email", but still to send official-looking messages from your organisation or blog. Note that this is not the same as spoofing , which is a way that people with malicious intentions create email messages which appear to come from your account, even though you didn't send them and did give anyone else permission to send them. Spoofing, ie sendin...

This article explains the relationship between your blog and "the cloud", and other ways that you might be using the cloud without even realising it. A few days ago, I received an email from Sam who works for "SingleHop, a company that specializes in cloud computing." He explained that "Due to recent events like Heartbleed, the Target breach and the leaking of celebrity photos to the public, the world is abuzz about "the cloud." However, you may be wondering what exactly it is and what it does. We are hoping you would be interested in sharing a post with your readers about cloud computing in everyday life. In a nutshell, the cloud is a way to store data remotely, rather than on your home computer. This gives you easy access to your photos, documents, and other files from anywhere at any time. We are hoping that by spreading awareness about how the cloud works, we can help others make smarter decisions about what they post/share online. We have put t...

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. Picasa-web-albums and your Google account Previously I've described Picasa desktop vs Picasa-web-albums , and noted that you can upload pictures to your PWA folders using either of the two pieces of software. Each album and folder in Picasa-web-albums belongs to one Google account (which may or may not have an associated Google+ account ). Google now provide a tool to transfer Picasa-web albums from one account to another - but only once ever in the life-time of the album.   You cannot transfer ownership to one person now, and to another person in  a year's time (which is quite different to the way you can easily transfer other aspects of your blog to a new owners ). And Google also provide a way for an account owner to let another Google account add photos to the owners ...

This QuickTip introduces a useful post about password management from Google. Giving computer or password-management advice to people who don't have lot of experience with IT has always been challenging: there is a lot of background information that you need to know before it all starts to make sense. And eaching colleagues to use a mouse back in the 1990s was a lot easier than explaining on-line services and security is in the twenty-teens!  I know that I'm not the only person who struggled to explain the difference between email and gmail to someone who just didn't understand " gmail is one type of software for doing emails " - he just kept asking "so what does fmail do?" To help with this challenge, Google have released a very carefully written article with advice about managing passwords. My guess is that lots of research went into working out exactly how much someone who uses a few on-line services needs to know, and how to explain it simply. Th...

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. Ages ago, I read a thought-provoking article on ProBlogger about making a "blogging will" . His main aim was to ensure that his family could access his business assets (ie his blogs etc) if something untoward happened to him. Now, Google's Data Liberation Front have annnounced a new tool called the Inactive Account Manager , which lets Google account owners say what should happen if they ever stop using their account. This tool lets you decide If and when your account should be treated as inactive What happens with your data if it becomes inactive, and Who else is notified, and what is said to them. At the moment, it covers these Google tools - which are attached to your Google account : +1s Blogger Contacts and Circles Drive (which I guess means Docs too) Gmail Google+ Profiles, Pages ...

This article is about email phishing, and spam-links in emails: how you can recognize them and what to do about them. Understanding Spam vs Phishing Most people know what regular spam is. Phishing is a more sophisticated type of spam, which combines information that the spammer knows (or guesses) with conventional spam techniques. Often phishing emails are addressed directly to you, and offer a "product" or "service" that you might realistically want. For example, they may offer to fix a security problem with your on-line banking (just as soon as you have gone to their website and given them your real on-line banking details). Bloggers are particularly susceptible to phishing emails, because we write websites where we share information about ourselves. For example, anyone who reads Blogger-hints-and-tips should have no trouble guessing that I use both Amazon Associates and Chitika , and that I have a domain hosted with DomainDiscount24 .  It's not...