Showing image-only AdSense ads in your blog

This article is about how to show image-only AdSense ads in your blog.

Blogger and AdSense

It's easy to Set up AdSense on your Blog: Just go to Monetize > AdSense - and then follow the prompts to apply for an account.

Once you've been approved, it's easy to put AdSense ads into your blog:

• Design > Page Elements > Add a Gadget > Adsense - for ads in your sidebar, header, footer etc
• Design > Page Elements >  Blog Posts (edit) - for ads in between posts

But the advertisement format options that Blogger provides for are limited: you can only choose either text-only or image-and-text ads.  There is (currently) no option for image-only ads.

To guarantee that your blog displays image ads only, you need to get the ad-code from AdSense, and put it into an HTML-Javascript gadget or inside a Post (or Page)


How to display image only ads:

1  Log into AdSense with the Google-account that you use to manage your ads.   (There may be some cases where this is not the same Google account that you use to manage the blog where the ad is displayed)

2 Go into the AdSense Setup > Get Ads tab.

3  Choose AdSense for Content

4  Configure your ad:

Work through the items in the wizard to (I like to choose single-page, so everything is visible at once).   If you've chosen the Ad Unit radio button, then beside it there is a drop-down that lets you choose:

• Text-and-image, 
• Text-only, 
• Image-only.

5  At then end of the wizard, you are shown some HTML code.    Copy and paste that code.

6  Go to Blogger (with the account you use for the blog).

7  Place the ad:

• If it's going in a gadget, Choose Design > Page Layout > Add a Gadget > HTML-Javascript     and paste the copied code into the Contents field.   Save the new gadget, and drag-and-drop it to wherever you want  

• If it's going in a post, see putting AdSense ads inside Blogger posts

To request image-only for the ads that are shown at the bottom of individual posts (via Design > Page Layout > Blog Posts/edit), you would need to edit the design-template.  Instructions for this will vary depending on what template you have, and are beyond the scope of this article.   But you can put a gadget at the bottom of all the blog-posts that are shown on a screen - just make the gadget the usual way, and drag it to underneath the Blog Posts gadget

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Putting AdSense ads inside Blogger posts

Blocking categories of AdSense ads from your Blog

Stop malicious use of your AdSense account ID

Setting up AdSense on your Blog

Changing the case of your Label values

This article is about how to change the case of the Labels in your blog.  For example, from lower to initial case ("cats" to "Cats") or even all capital-letters ("CATS").

Why change case?

When some people start using Blogger, they apply labels to posts without much thought:  they just type "cats" into the label field, and don't consider how it will look later on.   Even worse, they type in "Dogs" for the next post and "FROGS" later on.

This gives an untidy, unprofessional-looking labels gadget.

And it's a bit hard to fix:  you can change the labels on individual posts, but if even one other post has "cats" as a label, it doesn't matter how many times you add "Cats" to new posts the label will always be recorded as "cats".

The only approach I've found is to apply a unique temporary label to all posts with the value you want to change, then to delete the initial label and use the temporary label to select the posts to apply the correctly-formatted value to.


How to change the case of existing Labels

Log in to Blogger, and go to the Posting > Edit Posts tab.

Select all the posts with the label you want to change (eg "fred"), by clicking on this Label in the left-hand panel, and then clicking Select All.

Use the Label Action... drop-down menu (just above the list of posts) to:

• Give them a new temporary label that's not already in use (eg "xxx-temp") - when you have done this, they will all have at least two labels.

• Remove the label that you want to change

• Select all the posts with the temporary label

• Give them the label that you want to change to (eg "Fred")

• Remove the temporary label that you added in the 2nd step.

Warning:

Blogger blogs have a maximum of 5000 labels.   Some problems that have been raised in the Blogger-Help-Forum make me think that this is a life-time limit, and that a label is still included even if no current posts have it, though I haven't tested this personally.  I suspect that applying the procedure above will use up to three labels:  the original, the temporary one and the new one.   You may not want to use it if you think that your blog might ever reach the limit.

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Using Labels to Categorise your Blogger Posts

Posts, Pages and Navigation.

Understanding the email address that is shown in your blog

This article is about when, and what, email addresses are displayed in your blog.

Overview:

Many people who are new to Blogger get upset because when they look at their blog, they see their email address near the top right hand corner.  Reasonably enough, they assume that is they can see it, so can other people.   And so they start looking for instructions about how to remove the email address from their blog.   Or they notice that some other blogs don't have email addresses showing, and start looking for ways to make their blog the same, sometimes with far-reaching consequences.

However there's one important piece of information that they've missed:

The email address that may be shown near the top right hand corner of a blog belongs to the person who is reading the blog, not the person who wrote it.

This means that it's simple to remove the email address from the top of your blog:  just click the Sign-out link.


Details:

Some blogs never show any email addresses, because they have hidden the navBar.   This is either deliberate, or because the are using 3rd party templates that simply don't include it.

But when YOU are viewing a blog (yours or someone else's) that is showing a navbar, AND  you are logged into a Google account, then YOUR email address is shown near the top right hand corner of the screen.

In this example, I'm viewing someone else's blog, and my email address is shown (even thought it's quite hard to see because the background picture is noisy and the navBar has been set to be transparent).

In the same way, if one of your readers is looking at your blog, and they are logged in to a Google account, then their own address shows near the top right hand side of the screen.


My email address?

There is one small point that I've glossed over here.

When an "email address" is shown in the navBar, it's actually the name of the Google account that is currently signed in.  For many people, this is the same as their own email address, but some people have different email addresses.   And some now sign-in to Google with old "addresses" that have long-since stopped working for email:  this is fine provided they remember their password, and have updated the primary address that is updated with their account so that Google know where to find them.

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Finding the address for any blog's RSS feed

This article is about how to find the subscription-address for any blog's RSS feed, whether or not the blogger has provided a subscribe button.
 

Blogger blogs and RSS feeds:

Every blog created in Blogger is originally set up to produce an RSS feed.

Some blogs don't actually produce a feed any longer:

• Bloggers can choose to turn their feed off (Settings > Site Feeds > Allow Blog Feeds = None), 
• Blogs that are changed to not public have their feed automagically turned off, because it's not possible to apply Blogger's security rules to control access to a feed.

But provided the blog is still producing an RSS feed, it is still possible to find the feed address even if the blogger has not provided an icon for it on his/her site.


Finding the RSS-feed address for a Blog

Option 1:  Use the Subscribe to Posts (atom) link

Every Blogger template produced by Google (or at least every one that I've seen) has a Subscribe to Posts (Atom) link at the bottom of the screen.

The easiest way to get the blog's (atom) RSS feed address is to right-click on this link and copy the link-location.

But some blog-authors have removed the Subscribe to Post link

• accidentally, or 
• because they're in the process of replacing it with a "proper" chicklet
• because they don't want people to read their feed - possibly because they've realised that for each Post, the feed contains the first version of it that they publish, not any updates that they've made since - and don't know about the proper option to disable it.

and in these cases you need to use another option.


Option 2:  Use the RSS icon or feedcounter icon that the blogger has provided

If the blogger has added either an RSS icon, or Feedburner's feedcount gadget, then you can right-click on them and copy the link-location.   Or just click on them, and most probably the feed will be opened in your favourite feed-reader software.


Option 3:  Work it out from the blog's source-code

Even if the blog-owner hasn't given you any way to subscribe to their feed, you can still work out the feed-address by looking at the instructions that are used to show the blog in your web-browser:

1  View the blog in your browser.

2  Choose to view the page-source.   The command to do this is different in each browser:  in Firefox it's  View > Page Source.

This opens a text-file which shows the code that was used to draw the web-page you were looking at.

3  Search for "RSS" in the text file.  
Hint:  use the browser's seach command (Edit > Find in Firefox).

4  Examine the code:  If there is a feed coming form the blog, you will see the URL's of the feed in atom and RSS format, like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml"
        title="Blogger-Hints-and-Tips - Atom" 
          href="http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" 
        title="Blogger-Hints-and-Tips - RSS" 
          href="http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" 
        title="Blogger-Hints-and-Tips - Atom" 
          href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/5681944372768269659/posts/default" />

The URLs are the text inside the quote-marks after each of the "href=" statements - shown in the example as links.

Note:  I've put in line-breaks so you can read this code, but in the source file there will only be three - long - lines used.

5  Choose which one you want to use.    (Atom or RSS - I think RSS is more universally accepted, but Atom will be fine for any Google situations.)

You can copy-and-paste one of these, and use it to subscribe to the blog.   Which one to use, and how/where to use it depends on where you want to put the subscription.

For example, I've just done this to subscribe to a blog in Google reader:

• I chose the URL which is equivalent to the one that's highlighted in the example above
• In Google-Reader, I choose Add a subscription, and pasted in the URL

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Removing the Subscribe to Post (Atom) link.

Putting an RSS feed icon (chicklet) onto your blog

Adding Feedburner's count gadget to your site

Why RSS is important for your blog

Restricting your blog's readership isn't as secure as you thought

Feedburner and the follow-by-email gadget

Zemanta and your Blog: how to add and remove it

This article is about Zemanta and your blog:  what it is, how to add it, and how to delete it.

Overview

In June 2009, Google announced Zemanta - a tool for "blogging smarter", which had to be downloaded and installed into your browser.   More recently, they announced a closer integration between Google and Zemanata:  there is now a Google-hosted page where you you can choose to install Zemanta with pretty much a single click.

Zemanata is basically an assistant that sits inside Blogger while you're writing, and makes suggestions about related things (pictures, articles etc) that you might like to link to. It's fine in theory (although I'd prefer to control my own research process, and take responsibility myself for meeting copyright conditions), however I found real performance issues when I tried to use it - which is why I went looking for the removal instructions! Some people at Blogger clearly like it though, so it must have some advantages.

It's possible that there will be some more Zemanta integration coming:  eg options inside Blogger for enabling  and disabling it and setting the user-options/preferences.   But in the meantime the basic information about adding it to a blog, and removing it too, is presented here.


How to add Zemanta to your Blog

To turn Zemanta on for your blog:

• Log into Blogger with a Google account that has admin-rights on the blog which you want to use Zemanta with
  
  
• Click here to add the Zemanta gadget

• In the window that opens, choose the Blog from the drop-down list

• Click the orange "Add Zemanta" arrow.

Immediately after clicking the arrow, you are taken to the Post Editor with a new post for the blog that you selected.   There is an extra gadget showing on the right hand side of the editing window.  This gadget will be on the screen every time that you edit a post.

It's not currently available in the Page editor - but if you really want to use it while writing a Page, then just write the contents in a Post, save it as draft (ie don't publish), and use the HTML copy/paste approach described in Moving a Post from one Blog to Another.


How to remove Zemanta from your Blog

• Log into Blogger with a Google account that has admin-rights on the blog which you want to remove Zemanta from
• Open the Post Editor (eg by clicking New Post).

• In the top row of the Zemanta gadget, at the right hand side, there's a small down arrow.  Click the arrow and choose "Remove this gadget".

•  Click Ok.

Some people reported that removing it from Chrome was different:  they said that there you would not see the small drop-down arrow, but instead need to look in the browser's address bar and use the  Zemanta icon on the right hand side, which has an option to isable Zemanta for blogs.   However this clearly isn't the case now, because I just removed it from Chrome to make the pictures above.   It may be that these instructions apply if you have used some other method to install a toolbar:  in this case, you may need to go into the Control Panel and use Add/Remove Programs to remove it.

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Moving a Post from one Blog to Another

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Zemanta - a tool for "blogging smarter" .

Seven simple steps to a snazzy new-look blog: preparing to change template in Blogger

This article is about making a plan to change your Blogger template if your existing blog-template has been customised:  it covers how to make a list of the changes that have been made to your template, and using this as the basis of a list of changes to re-apply when you change templates.

Overview:

Changing your template in Blogger is easy: you just choose another template, press save or Apply to Blog (in the Template Designer), and the changes are applied. 

But if you have ever customised your template using the Edit HTML feature, then ALL the customisations are lost when you change templates.  This is fine for some changes (eg hiding things you didn't like in a particular template), but it means you lose changes that you may want to keep, eg a favicon, meta-tags, Google Analytics or Webmaster verification, Amazon Product Preview, etc - in short anything that you want to keep, no matter how your template looks.
 
If you're worried about the consequences of changing templates, you have a basic choice to make:

1  Remember what you did:
Try to remember what you've set up on your blog, and think about which of these things you want to apply in your blog-with-a-new-template.

2  Code comparison:
Compare the layout-template code for your blog with the same code from another blog that has the same template and widgets as your blog, but not the HTML customisations.  From this comparison, make a list of what customisations you need to re-apply after you change templates.

The first option is quicker and a lot easier - but you might miss something important.  Personally it's not an option I'd like to use for any blog that has "weight".

Unfortunately the second option doesn't give a 100% correct list of customisations, unless you kept a copy of your current template at it was at the time when you first applied it to your blog.   This is because Google may have upgraded their copy of the standard version of your template, but not been able to upgrade your customised version.  (See Advantages and Disadvantages of Editing Your Blogger Template for more about this).   However the list that you can make may be close enough - and I used it myself to make sure I didn't miss any details in migrating the blog you are reading now.

This article is about the second option, and how to use the results of the comparison to make a detailed plan for moving your blog from one template to another.


Applying Option 2:

Follow these steps to compare the template from your blog with another un-customised version of the template:

1  Make a test-blog which is like your Real-blog, except it doesn't have the layout-template customisations.   See Making a test-blog for more details about this: it's NOT as simple as just copying the template over.  
IMPORTANT:  If you do have a backup copy of your template from immediately after you last applied a new template to, then apply it to your test blog before giving it any widgets.  (Doing this will give you the chance of making a 100% correct list.)

2  Line-by-line, compare the template code in your test and main blogs.  For each difference, work out whether it's due to a customisation that you want to keep when you "migrate" your main blog to a new template, or something that you can leave behind.

To do the comparison:

• Get the template code for your test-blog by choosing Design > Edit HTML for it, and clicking on Download Full Template.   Save the downloaded file somewhere with a name like testBlog-Template.xml
  

• Get the template code for your main blog the same way   Save the downloaded file with a name like realBlog-Template.xml
  

• Use a text-file comparison tool to find the differences between the two files.
  Comparing two text files using Excel discusses this in more detail, and links to a tool that makes this process (a little) easier.
  
  Note that there may be some differences which aren't explained by modifications that you made to the template:  these will be due to improvements that Google have made to the template file.   You need to decide how much time to spend investigating each difference, based on how likely it is that you made it.

3  From the list of differences, write a plan of the existing customisations you want to apply to your new template, and also of any new changes that you want to make at the same time.  Put it in order of most-to-least important  (eg I usually put "load Google Analytics code" just after "apply template, because the statistics are very important to me).

3.5 (optional) Decide which new template to use, and practise the upgrade:
Use the test-version of your existing blog (the one you made in step 1), and give it the new template.  Apply the extra customisations from your list.  Possibly even copy in some posts from your main blog into it.  Test how well it works, and tweak your list of the changes that need to be made when you migrate your real blog.

4  Back up the current template of your blog.

5  Apply the new template you've selected to your blog.

5.5  (Optional)  make another back-up of your template - before you re-apply any of the customisations.    This will be the basic version that you compare against if you ever need to do this exercise again, so save it somewhere safe.  

6  Make the other changes from your plan.

7  Test your blog to see that all is well.


That sounds easy enough.   Seven simple steps to a snazzy new-look blog.   Let me know how you get on.

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Related Articles: 



Comparing two text files using Excel

Making a test-blog

Advantages and Disadvantages of Editing Your Blogger Template
 
Adding a footer section to your Layout Template blog
 
Making a shadow-blog  for testing with

Copying all your existing posts into a new blog

Copying some posts between blogs.

Comparing Two Text Files - using Excel

This article is about comparing two text files, making a list of the differences between them and categorising each difference according to whether you care about it or not.   An Excel file tool (available for download) is used, because this helps with making the final list.

The tool was made to support comparing two Blogger templates,as part of Seven Simple Steps to a Snazzy New-look Blog.  But it can be used for many different types of file-comparisons where you need to think about the between the files, keep track of individual differences, and plan actions based on them.

Overview

In theory, you can compare two text-files line by line manually. But in practice, especially when the files are made from code like HTML and not English-language sentences, this is very hard to do:  even a one-character difference may be significant, but hard to see.

There are many existing tools that will compare two files.   But a spreadsheet works just as well - and it has other features that can be used to help with making a plans based on the differences found, and tracking progress with fixing them.

I've put some notes about where to put the comparison text files, and how to use the formulas into the spreadsheet, and some detailed pictures below.  But the main point is that when you find a difference you need to:

• Work out where the difference ends, 
• Insert some blank cells in the other column so that the code lines up again,
• Re-copy the comparison formulas into column F (because the insert will have mis-aligned the existing ones),
• Make notes about differences as they are found - this list is important for deciding what to do next.

Preparing to compare text files

Get the two template files that you want to compare, and open them with a text editor (eg Notepad).

They will look ugly and hard to work this - this is ok, the next step puts them in a better format.

Download the Excel tool for comparing text-files.

Paste the contents of the template file from your real blog in the left-hand column. 

Paste the contents of the template from your test-blog in the middle column.

Paste the contents of the comparison formula cell (ie the red-shaded one) into every row where there are contents from either of source files.

NB  the comparison forumla is    =IF(D8=A8, "", "Not the same")
In the spreadsheet the cell is shaded red, and you cannot see it unless you look in the formula bar  (this makes the pictures easier to read). 

Doing the Comparison

In Column F, look for the first row when "Not the same" is displayed.

Look at the code for that line, and work out what caused the difference, and whether it's is due to a customisation that you made and want to keep, or someone that you don't want to keep, or something else that Google have done in the meantime.

If the difference is due to a customisation that you want to keep, then make notes about this into the Comments and ToDo columns.

In the example shown, the first difference line is a meta-tag, which I do want to keep, but the second is just the tag-close command:  I don't need to put it separately into my plan, so it's marked "no".

Re-match the lines of code: 
If the difference was due to extra code, then

• insert some extra rows in the other column so that the matching code lines up again, AND
• re-copy the comparison forumula into the rows from there down.

Repeat these steps until all the differences are understood.

At the end, copy the comments and notes columns into another worksheet, and use Excel's sort functions to extract a list of the differences that you need to deal with.

(I like to use Excel to keep lists of planned changes too - but that's a whole different topic.)

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Making a test-blog for testing template changes

Seven simple steps to a snazzy new-look blog.

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Planning changes to your blog - in private