important tips

You can set your blog up so that no posts are shown on the main screen - provided you have used some of the other "home page" approaches to give readers other ways of getting to your content. Previously I've explained how to only show one post on the main page of your blog . But some people who want to give their blog a home page  go further than that, and don't show any posts on the main screen at all.   (Remember, the main screen is where people who navigate to your blog, rather than to posts within it, go.) This sounds like a strange thing to do - after all, blogs are about posts. But actually it's fine, provided you use some other tools to let readers move around the blog .  I've made a 150+ page blog this way, and it works very nicely because I have organised the information and used some index-pages (containing lists of bus-routes, suburbs, maps etc) with tables  that link to many other posts. How to show no (ie zero, 0) posts on the main screen Some pe...

This article explains the problems with getting valid, SEO-friendly links to images that are in Google Photos - and shows a way of doing this using Google products.   Previously I've explained how to get a URL for a picture stored in Google Photos - and the difference between Photo's "shareable links" and real photo URLs. The sort of link you get with this procedure looks like this: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMQIpC7kv_ZDGV9qWEF2O11u8oOoU5rkSdlFq9LVfcUzWBhSLGltPnUQOJRHNYX-ol3kArsRifqEq8bbQfe36vi1RFkIn2-uSJhRMvgh8RJ24jVExmC4wnk9sF7ivn7LLt8v9PgoMvhRkj/w1006-h566-no/ There are some issues with using URLs (aka web-addresses) obtained like this: They aren't recognised as valid image file links by many online tools which ask for the URL for an image (eg phpBB, Blogger - and many others) Sometimes they stop working (I've not been able to track down exactly when, but there are reports around the internet from people who say that links ...

This article is about how you can save a  post even if Blogger's Publish button won't let you save your work. Imagine you've been working on a Blogger post for several hours.    It's finally ready: you've got the wording exactly right, everything is formatted with bold, italics and bullet-points, your pictures and links are all correct, etc.    But then your internet connection stops working.   Or you click the Publish button - and get a message like  "Post cannot be saved due to HTML errors".   You can't work out how fix the problem, and you need to stop working on it now ! This may seem like a disaster - hours of work wasted. But luckily there's a very easy way to save your work, and tools to help you diagnose problems. Saving your work and recovering it later How to save the post that you have written Switch to HTML mode (this is a tab at the top left corner of the editing window.  Select all the text in the...

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...

This article is about re-naming files from within Picasa-desktop, to provide SEO benefits for your blog. Picasa's desktop software is a good tool for organizing and editing photos on your local computer.   And it is still available for you to use on your computer, even though Picasa-web-albums has been replaced by Google Albums + Google Album Archive. For pictures that are important in your blog, I still recommend preparing them in a tool like Picasa-desktop and then uploading the finished versions to Google Photos before putting them into a post, because: The desktop tool has better editing tools (cropping, zooming, auto adjustment, adding watermarks) and Picasa-web-albums does. It lets you control the size of the uploaded file It's easier to ensure sure that you still have full-size files on my local machine for printing etc, as well as smaller, more optimized, copies to use on web-pages. Picasa-desktop folders have a very nice relationship with files and directories with t...

This article is about centering gadgets from 3rd parties that you install onto your blog. Previously, I've described how to put HTML code from a 3rd party into your blog . When code like this is put into a gadget , one common question is "how do I center it?" There are (at least) three options for doing this, ie for putting a gadget into the middle (horizontally) of the area it is located in.   These are described below. Option 1: Centre all the gadgets in your blog To center-align every single gadget in your blog, just, add a CSS rule to your blog .  The rule to add is: .widget {   text-align: center; }  This will centre the contents and title of every gadget on your blog. Option 2: Only center-align the specific gadget To only centre-align one gadget, which is made from HTML/Javascript code, you can just put the gadget-code from the 3rd party (eg PayPal, Amazon, etc) inside a centering statement, like this: <div style="text-align: center;"> PUT THE...

In some Blogger themes, there is a big gap between the bottom of the header and the start of the first post, which means that the posts and the sidebar are not aligned.  This article explains how to adjust the gap, and so remove the problem . In the themes that Blogger provides , as well as all third-party themes, the amount of space between elements on the screen is not accidental:   designers put a lot of effort into working out what spacing will look good, and then finding ways to put CSS code into the template so that the spacing they want is shown in any browser software that Blogger supports. But there are times when you may want to change this spacing, and this is easy to do, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your theme , and if  you can work out exactly which part of the template code to change. The pre-Header gap A pet-hate of mine is the blank space above the first post in many Designer themes, which looks strange unless you put...