important tips

This article shows how to change the accounts presented in an AddThis Follow gadget which has already been set up on a Wordpress-based website . (Note:   this is only relevant for Wordpress.org users.   Wordpress.com users do not have the same freedom to add or configure plug-ins.) The AddThis plug-ins for Wordpress provide several functions.  One is a Follow gadget, which lets you offer links to your account on other platforms (eg on Twitter, Facebook and Instragram), so that people who are interested can subscribe to you there, and get updates from you even if they don't visit your blog or website regularly).  When you install and activate this plugin, there is a screen where you can choose which other platforms to show, and say what your address on those platforms is.    After you have set up the plug-in, then you an add the AddThis Follow widget to your site,   This gadget displays an icon for each tool which you selected, and each...

This article shows how to set up your blog made with Wordpress so that that (it looks like) your posts are on separate web-pages, without needing to install any plugin. (For this task, the answers for Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com are so very similar that they have been combined into the one article.) Wordpress, like most blogging platforms, is basically made up of Posts, Pages and Widgets (aka gadgets). People who are building blogs often want to "put posts into pages" ie to have a page which shows a subset of their posts, based on the category.   The standard, but unsatisfactory, answer is " Sorry, that's not how Wordpress works.   Static pages are used for reference information that doesn't change often, which you don't want to be part of your regular post-feed, but which you do want users to have easy access to. " Luckily it's easy to set up your blog so that it looks like your posts are on different pages  by following three simple steps.   T...

The Follow-by-email gadget uses Feedburner's email-subscription service.   It's very easy to add to your blog, but there are some things that you need to think about if you are using it to deliver blog-posts to your followers by email. The Follow-by-Email gadget is a very simple way to give your readers access to blog-updates by email: it delivers a message in their inbox every day that you post. But to decide if it's a good thing to use, to get good value from it, and to troubleshoot any problems, you need to understand a little more about how it works. And, since it uses Feedburner, this means understanding how Feedburner works, too. What is Feedburner The Follow by Email gadget uses a product called Feedburner to manage the list of people who have followed, ie subscribed to your blog.  Feedburner was originally a tool to enhance the RSS subscriptions that website-owners delivered - see Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog   for info about RSS...

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog. If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory .   They may even tell you to use an FTP  tool to do this. Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog  , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger. Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking you to change the website code itself. How to add a file to your blog's root directory The short answer for Blogger users is "sorry, you cannot do this" . The l...

This article explains the difference between themes and templates in Blogger, Google's blogging tool. What is (was) a Blogger template How a blog that is made with Blogger is shown to a visitor is controlled by four sets of information: The posts which the blogger writes (ie the content) A user-editable "configuration file" which records the overall formatting options which the file designer and then the blogger have chosen Another configuration file, called the post-template , which records choices that the blogger has made under Layout > Blog posts (edit), but cannot be edited elsewhere.    Blogger's own software, which puts the other things together with some internal rules to make "web pages".   Bloggers cannot control the rules in this at all. Originally, the first "configuration file" was called a template .   In fact, officially it was called a design-template , to distinguish it from the post-template.   However because most peopl...

This article is about how to edit your theme in Blogger. It supports many other articles on this site, which suggest specific theme changes needed to solve particular problems.    Note that until early 2017, themes were called templates.   In practise, "edit your template" and "edit your theme" mean the same thing. In Blogger, a theme is a file which controls how your blog are displayed on the screen when someone reads it using a browser or a mobile device.   Themes used to be called templates, but were renamed "themes" in early 2017. Previously, I've looked at whether it's a good idea to edit your Blogger theme / template or not.   Because themes are the same thing as templates, the same principles apply to editing your theme. For many people, editing the theme is simply something which they need to do, because it's the only way to do what they want ( remove the attribution , show a gadget on the homeppage only , add a Facebook like button t...

This article explains how to find things (gadgets or text) in the Theme editor in Blogger. Very often when you are editing your Theme in Blogger, you need to find particular text. For example, you might need to find all places where  "</head" appears, so you can add something to the very next line.   Or you might want to find the code for a particular gadget (aka widget), so that you can put a conditional-formatting statement around it. There are now two tools you can use to find items in the Theme editor: The Jump to Widget tool if you are looking for a Widget The Find bar if you are looking for a text string. More information about using each of these is given below. How to use the Jump to Widget tool First, you need to find out the exact name for the widget / gadget that you need to find the code for.    (See Finding a gadget's name for a tip on how to do this). Then, inside the Theme editor (see Editing your Blogger Theme for how to get there), just choo...