important tips

This article describes making a Facebook badge to promote your page, and putting it onto your blog. What is a Facebook page This article is about how to make a badge to promote a Facebook  Page . This is an example of the "follow me" approach to linking your blog and the social networks , although for Facebook pages your reader becomes a Fan rather than a Friend. Many people are confused about when they should use each of the types of "thing" in Facebook, ie Profiles - accounts for flesh-and-blood, living, breathing, individual people Pages - for websites, brands, and organisations that don't want to approve all their Facebook members Groups -  for organisations that want to approve individual members who join (and in return, group-owners can send private messages to individual members. The most common "thing" for blogs to have is a Page - and a Badge is the tool which Facebook provides to help you to promote a Page on your blog or other website. Ho...

Blogger's mail2Post tool lets authors make blog-posts, without using the Blogger software.   All you need to do is set it up, and write posts using your regular email tools. Mail2Post and Blogger The mail2Post feature, sometimes known as Post-to-profile, is a way of putting content on your blog without using the full Blogger software for writing the post. It's not quite as good as using Blogger itself - there are a few features missing - but it is good enough in many situations. How to set up mail2Post Log in to Blogger with the Google account that you want to have mail2Post rights to your blog:  this account needs to already be set up as an author for the the blog. Go to The Settings tab - if you are logged on with an author account, or The  Settings > Email  tab if you are using an administrator account   Beside  Posting using email , there is a place where you can enter some "secretWords", to make up an email address that you can use to post to your...

This article is about the steps you can take when someone has made an unauthorized copy of something that is published on your blog. Finding out that your blog has been copied Previously, I've described how copyright applies to blogs in very general terms, and the steps you can take to apply copyright protection to your blog . Even if you follow these these steps, if you put material onto the internet it is quite likely that someone will copy it. This maybe done out of naivety, or as a deliberate attempt to rip you off, or as part of an organised spam-blogging ("splogging") operation. There are several way you might find out that someone has copied your work: You, or your friends, notice it Maybe you or one of you readers searched for a certain phrase and you found your content elsewhere.  Or maybe you found a link to an identical post on a help-forum or discussion board.  If you use a lot of in-post linking (ie you link to another article in your content), and notice ...

This article is about how to set up a gadget / widget in Blogger so that it is only visible on the first place that a reader sees when they visit your blog (often called the "home page").   It is one of a series of articles about controlling what goes on the homepage of your blogspot blog. Front Page Bob By Paginator (Own work)  [ CC-BY-3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons There are a number of reasons why you might want to put a gadget only the screen that shows when a visitor first navigates to your blog's home page. You may want to show a welcome message, or a topic-index page, or to give a view of your recent tweets or some other RSS feed.     No matter what the reason, the process is very similar: How to make a gadget only appear on the first page Note:  in Blogger, the words "gadget", "widget", and even "page-element" all mean the same thing.  I generally use "gadget", because the Page Elements tab currently says "Add a Gadget...

This article describes how to get the URL or internet address of a picture in Google Photos, and the difference between Google's shareable links and URLs. Google Photos is a tool that help bloggers (and everyone else) to manage their picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here . In Google Photos, there are two different types of web-address for a photo. One is the URL , and this can be used to refer to pictures from Blogger, or from other tools that want a link that just shows the photo, eg Twitter, Google Maps.  This is the traditional style of internet-address for a photo. The other is the shareable link.   This is what Google Photos provides from the Share function.   Shareable links can be used in Facebook, and other places where the photo that is being shared is displayed within a web-display, rather than just as a picture.   (Ref:   How to make and manage shareab...

This article is about how you can use a custom domain that was purchased through Google / Blogger for something other than a Blogger blog. Blogger makes it very easy for you to buy a "custom" domain name (ie URL) for your blog.   Instead of being www.fred-fish.blogspot.com, you can easily be www.fred-fish.com - which is more appealing for all sorts of reasons. Blogger tells you which domain registrar they're going to use and lets you change to the other one if you want to.  Apart from this, Google hides most of the "technical" domain registration details from you:  you are invited to set up a domain administrator account (in Google Apps) , but even this is optional.   But there may come a time when you want to use your domain for more than just a blog:  eg, Fred may want to use www.fred-fish.com to sell fishing trips or as the public gateway to a massive database of fishing achievements, neither of which are functions that Blogger (easily) provides. To use...

This article gives a brief introduction to Google Photos, and how it relates to both Blogger and Google+ Photos. Google's recent announcement  of Google Photos opens the door for Blogger to make some improvements to how it works with pictures. Why? Well Google+Photos simply wasn't a way forward.   Too many Blogger users chose not to "upgrade" their Google accounts to Google+ accounts, so it wasn't possible for Blogger to force Google+ features on everyone. And that was even after they removed the rule about one G+ account per person, and allowed Google+ Pages to be turned into stand alone accounts with their own passwords. However Google Photos is basically Google+ Photos, without the need to have a "plus" account, and with some other nice features, like Free picture and video storage (any number of pictures, provided they aren't "too big"),  Image recognition and search Sorting pictures by date, but giving options for you to grou...

This article shows how to use Google's Takeout service to make a copy of the contents of all your blogs at the same time. A backup is a copy that you can use to restore from if something goes wrong.  For your personal compter, you may have a backup copy of the files on your hard-drive, so that if you lose the machine, you can get the files back, usually with a little work. In blogging terms, a backup of your blog is a copy that you can use if you accidentally delete a post, or lose control of your blog, or perhaps even a copy of a blog that you have deleted but still want some last-chance access to. Unfortunately Blogger does not offer a complete solution for backing up our blogs .    Instead, we need to take separate actions to back up our gadget settings , our template when it is being edited , and our post-contents. You can back up the posts from one content from the Settings > Other > Blog Tools  tab.  If you choose the Export Blog link, Blogger ...

This article explains how to change the author of a post that has already been published in Blogger. Blogger posts and changing post-authors When you Publish a post in Blogger, a number of features are set up for the post, as well as the contents.  These include: The URL / web-addresss where the post can be found The post date/time when it was published The post-author (which is now set the first time that the post is Saved , ie even before it is published.) The labels that apply to it. Some of these can be changed by editing the published post . But there are some features that cannot be altered after they are set. In particular, Author is not changed even if a different Google account  is used to edit the post - or if the original author has their permission to write to the blog  removed. This can lead to interesting situations on multi-author blogs, especially when one writer leaves the team and perhaps even deletes their Google account.   Because of th...

This article discusses some things to keep in mind when you are putting advertising on your blog. If you are considering putting advertising onto your blog, there are some basic things that you need to think about.  These include broader philosophical questions, right down to nuts-and-bolts technical concerns. This article is not a definitive guide - see somewhere like ProBlogger for that.   Rather it's a collections of thoughts about the issues specifically related to Google's Blogger and its relationship with advertisers.   And it may include some thoughts about philosophical and policy issues, if I do any deep research or thinkng about these in the future. Terms and Conditions There are lots and lots of possible advertising and affiliate marketing programmes . Staying within the programme of terms and conditions (often called T&C's) for every programme that you participate in is important.   Every advertising programme has terms and conditions.   You ne...