important tips

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. In Septemeber 2012 , YouTube introduced a feature that let you or your friend translate the captions of videos (that you own) into additional languages. Now  they've partnered with some professional translation firms so you can get a quote, order, receive and pay for professional translation - all within YouTube / Google.    So you don't have to worry about whether your friend's high-school Spanish is really good enough for your international audience! The first step to doing this is uploading a transcript file for your video. Something to bear in mind if you do this:   If SEO matters for your blog , then you probably don't want to put the transcript into both YouTube and the blog, because that would create duplicate content.

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). Blogging can seem overwhelming: there just is so much to learn, to do, to read And if you don't have a boss, official work-hours or school-pickup-times to structure the day, it can be easy to get to the end of the week and discover that you've done lots of research, but nothing has actually been finished and published.. I had a few months between jobs, and found that it really helped to plan my week, by: setting very small, achievable goals for each of my blogs,  allocating my time in two hour blocks. writing this all down on old-fashioned pen-and-paper on a one-page-at-a-glance sheet that I could hang on the wall, tick of my achievements and keep track of the progress. A week-planner template Here's the template that I used to do my planning every Sunday night.    It's licensed under Creative Commons, so you are free to copy, ad...

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. What is a custom domain A custom domain is a "real" website address, instead of the free one that you get when you first set up a blog using Blogger.   It's one of he essential steps if you want to use Blogger to make a "real" website .   For example: You initially set up    www.yourBusiness.blogspot.com Then you hear that people will treat you with more respect if you have www.yourBusiness.com  or www.yourBusiness.co.uk.  In this case, www.yourBusiness.com  and   www.yourBusiness.co.uk   are both "custom domains", ie web-addressed without "blogspot.com" or "wordpress.com" at the end of the address. To use www.yourBusiness.com, you need to either use Blogger's custom domain wizard - available under Settings > Basic > Publsh...

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...

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.  Custom Search Engines have announced a new layout - which appears to have become their new standard option. Search-engine creation is much the same as it was, but at the end you only get one piece of code to install, and it can just go in the place where you want it (no more messing with editing the <header> in your template). The search results page is shown as an overlay on top of your regular page.  As always with custom-search-engines, there are ads-by-Google at the top of the page, and if you have already become an AdSense publisher you can use your custom-search-engine to share the revenue . The big question is - will this new layout approach work in Blogger?    If I was writing an article, I'd test it out somewhere else first, and have some advice about the options, likely problems etc. ...

This quick-tip is about subscribing to a YouTube channel using an RSS feed-reader, like Google Reader Most bloggers  know about other blogs and websites in their niche that they want to keep an eye on, to either know what's going on, or as inspiration for their own posts. Previously I've explained that RSS was invented to make this simpler : you can get a summary of changes on all interesting websites in the one place (called a feed-reader), rather than having to regularly visit each site individually. Video is increasingly popular: many bloggers are putting videos in their posts or their posts into videos, and some have even abandoned their blogs and are only publishing new content to a YouTube channel. I've just found that it's very easy to subscribe to a YouTube user or channel in RSS / Google reader, meaning you can see a list of new videos from you reader, without having to go to the channel in YouTube. Follow these steps: Find the channel or person you want t...

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. Automatically updating Google + from your blog If you have linked your blogger-account to your Google+ profile, then by default you are shown a pre-filled Google+ share box with details of your post in it, every time that you publish a post, including times when you edit a post that has already been published . The share box has a snippet and thumbnail picture  based on your post, and section where you can add a comment, remove the description, choose the circle(s) to share it with, and say to also email people who are not in your circles. You can change the picture associated with the shared post using the arrows (hover over the top left of the suggested picture - the arrows circle through the other available pictures. Or you can remove it using the cross button (h...