Turning the RSS feed off or on again

By default, public Blogger sites offer an RSS feed.  But there may be times when you need to turn it off, either for good or temporarily.

RSS and Blogger

Previously I've explained what RSS is and why it's important for bloggers.

But there may be times when you want to turn off your RSS feed, either because you don't want to offer one at all, or because you want to make some posts, or changes to existing posts that are not notified to  your RSS subscribers.

Or you may need to turn it back on again - for example, if you want to use a dynamic template, to offer a subscribe-by-email option, or to enable automatic posting to Google +.

How turn off a blog's RSS feed:

In post-Sept 2011 Blogger (aka the new interface):

• Go to the Settings > Other tab.

• Under "Site Feed", use the drop-down to change Allow Blog Feed to "None".  
  (This is the only option that totally turns your feed off:  the others, including Custom, leave some aspects of the feed on.)

In pre-Sept 2011 Blogger (aka the old interface):

• Go to the Settings > Site Feed tab.

• Beside Allow Blog Feeds, use the drop-down to change the value to "None". 
  (This is the only option that totally turns your feed off:  the others, including Custom, leave some aspects of the feed on.)

How turn on your RSS feed:

This is just the same as turning the feed off (see above), except that your need to choose one of these options instead:

• Full - the whole post is shown in your feed
• Until Jump Break  - only the part of the post before the jump break is sent to your feed
• Short - only the first 120 (ish) letters, or less if the jump break comes first, are sent to your feed.

Also, the new interface has a Custom option, and the old interface has an Advanced Mode.   If you use these , you can individually set the value for post feed, comments feed (all comments), and comments-feed-per-post.


Private blogs 
Blogs that are not public do not offer RSS feeds, because they cannot be secured.   So if your blog is private, then it does not matter what setting you choose, your blog will not offer an RSS feed.

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Related Articles:



Understanding RSS - why it's imporant for bloggers who want to grow an audience

What are dynamic templates

Linking your blog and the social networks

Follow-by-email gadget:  an easy way to offer email subscriptions

Private blogs aren't as secure as you might think

mail2Post: Using email to update your blog

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 > Mobile & Email tab if you are using an administrator account  
  (The tab is called Settings > Email & Mobile in the old Blogger interface.)

Beside Posting using email (or Email Posting Address in the old Blogger interface), there is a place where you can enter some "secretWords", to make up an email address that you can use to post to your blog.

Enter some suitable words:  make sure it's not too easy to guess (your surname would not be a good choice!), so that spammers cannot get into it:

Choose either to publish emailed updates as soon as they arrive, or to save email as drafts so that you,  or another administrator, can review them before posting.

Note down the full email address, ie   NAME.your-secret-words@blogger.com   (you will need this later - and unfortunately because of the way it's displayed, it is not easy to copy-and-paste the value).

Press Save (old interface) or Save Settings (new interface).


Using the mail2Post address:

Once mail2Post is set up, anyone who sends an email message to the email address you copied can post to your blog, with what ever restrictions you set.

You might put message on your blog saying

 "send contributions to YOURNAME.YOURSECRETWORDS@blogger.com"

But be aware that this could generate a lot of spam.   And in the worse case, the spam could get your blog deleted for breaking Blogger's terms and conditions.

Alternatively, you might just tell the address to selected people - or perhaps even just use it yourself.


How is a Post constructed from an email message:

When a message is sent to your mail2Post address:

• The subject-line of your email message becomes the Post-title
• The body of the email message becomes the body of the post
• I think:  If you automatically publish emailed posts, then the post date-and-time is the moment at which Blogger's servers received the incoming email message - expressed in Blogger's default time zone (PST OR PDT, I think).
• No labels are applied to the post
• The post-author is the profile name of the blog-author who set up the mail2Post address.

Pictures and Videos
People have reported various results when they include images and videos inside messages sent via mail2Post.   Personally, I have tested:

• An attached picture - posted ok, the image is show before all the text from the body of the email message
• An attached video file (4meg) - posted ok with the video appearing to be above the text from the email message
• An in-line photo - worked perfectly, the picture is placed in the post in the same position (relative to the text) that it was in the original email.

I suspect that the results  depend on they type of picture, the email client you are using, and the message format settings.   My testing was with Mozilla Thunderbird, which has a particular way of thinking about "attachments", slightly different from other email systems that I have used (eg Microsoft Outlook).

Probably the only way to discover how photos are handled when you use your email to send them is to set up a test-blog and experiment with different options.


What your readers see:

People who read your blog in a web-browser see mail2Post entries just like any other posts.   If your blog displays the poster's name, then mail2Post entries have the name of the blog-author who set up the mail2Post address.

As mentioned before, the positioning of pictures and videos may not always be as good:  attached pictures, in particular, may be shown as the very stop of the post.

Apart from that, there is nothing to show visitors that the post was created using email - in either the post or in the blog's RSS feed.

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Related Articles:



Giving someone write access (ie author permissions) to your blog

Setting up a blog administrator

Understanding Google accounts

Setting up a test-blog to try things out in private

RSS, and why it matters for your blog

Setting up a new Administrator for your blog

This article shows you how to set up someone else (ie another Google account) as an administrator for your blog.

What is a blog administrator 

An administrator is a Google account (controlled by a person!) that has full rights over your blog: they can do anything that you can do, including write posts, edit anyone else's posts, change the template, add gadgets and formatting rules.   Also they can grant and remove author and administrator rights.

This last point is very important: if you add someone as an administrator, then they immediately have the power to remove you as an administrator. This means that you need to be very careful who you give these rights to.

How to give someone administrator rights

Firstly, give them author rights.
To do this, you may need to log in as the other person, or to wait for them to accept the invitation themselves. If you log in as them, then make sure that you either:

• Use two computers,
• Use separate browsers on the same computer (eg Firefox and Chrome, or Internet Explorer and Safari), OR
• At least clear your cache and restart your browser between each login.

Then upgrade them by logging in to Blogger as yourself (ie with an account that has administrator rights already).

Pre-Sept-2011-Blogger (ie the old interface):

• Go to the dashboard, Settings > Permissions tab.
• Every account that has accepted an invitation to be an author will be listed. Choose the one want to make into an administrator, and click the Grant admin privliges link  to the right of their email address.  
• Click Grant admin privileges button on the confirmation screen

Post-Sept-2011-Blogger (ie the new interface):

• Go to the dashboard ("home" button), Settings > Basic tab.
• Scroll down to the Permissions area. 
• Every account that has accepted an invitation to be an author will be listed. Choose the one want to make into an administrator, and choose Admin using the drop-down arrow to the right of their email address.   (Note:  this is an immediate change, you do not have to click Save.)

Note that there are also options here for removing administrator rights, and removing author rights too.


Very important:
 If you are doing this before removing your own administrator rights, eg as part of transferring a blog from one account to another, then it is very important make sure that the transfer has been successful before removing yourself: you do not want to be in a situation where your own account is no longer an administrator, but you don't have access to the actual administrator account.

As before, ways of doing this include

• Using two different computers,
• Use separate browsers on the same computer (eg Firefox and Chrome, or Internet Explorer and Safari), OR
• At least clear your cache and restart your browser between each login.

Other things to consider

Comment moderation:
Only blog-administrators can moderate comments, so you may need to:

• Set up comment notification so that the new administrator is emailed when a comment is left
• Make sure that they know the policies that are applied to comments
• Agree who is responsible for moderation at what times

Custom domain administration:
If you have a custom domain, and the new administrator may need to be involved with this, then you need to tell them about the domain-administrator account that you set up after purchasing the domain.

Or if you are using a domain from an external domain registration company, they may need some other information about how to manage the domain.


Other blog settings:
Because an administrator has full control over the blog, they can do a number of things including:

• Editing posts made by other authors
• Change the template, layout or gadgets
• Edit any of the blog's Pages
• Granting and revoking other people's permissions
• Change the default language and date/time settings 
• Changing the RSS feed settings in any way
• Edit the Adult-content warning setting, or the blog's Open-ID URL.

You may need to agree how changes like this are to be done on your blog - including ensuring that backups are stored safely.

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Related Articles:



Making an author for your blog.

Transferring blog ownership

Setting up a custom-domain administrator account

Using a custom domain from an alternative registrar 

How long does it take your average blog-page to load?

If you use Google Analytics on your blog, then you can get data about how fast your pages(*) load. This is seen in the the Site Speed report which was turned on for all users in mid November

Analytics have now published more information about what it contains, too.

Blogger users can't control some of the items that are shown (redirection time, domain lookup time, server connection time, server response time) - although you may like to keep an eye on them if you are concerned about whether the Blogger platform is suitable your blog/website.

But we do have a lot of control over page(*) download time. This is impacted by the size of our posts (especially the picutres and videos), and by the widgets that we use.

How much difference  page-load speed makes to you and your visitors (how many pages they view, and how likely they are to come back) depends on your niche and how impatient they are.

As with lots of web-statistics, there are no hard-and-fast rules. I recommend keeping an eye out for change.

• For example, if adding a widget adds one second to your average load time, but there is no change to visitor numbers or pages per visit, you probably don't have an issue.
• But if it adds 0.5 seconds and pages/visitor decreases by 50%, you might need to think about whether the widget is worth it, or whether you need to do something like only display it on the home page.

(*) These "pages" are not the same as so-called "pages" in Blogger: read more about the difference. LINK

More categories to ban from your AdSense ads

AdSense has added 88 new categories to the list of advertisement-topics that can be blocked from your sites, including apparel, business, family and sports. The may make it easier to keep ads for competitors off
your blog.

You can block a maximum of 50 categories - and there is still no way to block categories by site.

Ref: How to block competitors ads from your site.

Backing up picture files from Picasa-web-albums

Google Takeout (called Takeaway in some places) lets you backup your Picasa-web-albums, Gmail contacts, Circles, +1s and lots of other things, into one single zip file, which you can then store in a safe, off-line place.

It might be a way to move the photos in your blog to someone else if you're transferring owership of a blog.

1. back them up
2. extract them
3. sent the pictures to the other person
4. they upload them, and re-establish the links from the blog to the new location.

Still dreadfully tedious, but better than nothing.

API for Google Affiliate Network

Google Affiliate Network have introduced an API.    Not sure if this will be much use

Picasa 3.9, unlimited web-size photo uploads for Google+ users

Picasa have announced that version 3.9 of the Picasa client (ie for your PC), is now available. Features include:

Sharing with Google+ circles

tagging from your Google + circles and gmail contacts

More photo editing effects

Side by side photo comparison

“Best for web sharing” uploads: Google+ users can upload pictures for free if they use this option.

Making someone an author on your blog

This article shows you how to set up another person (ie another Google account) as an author for your blog.

Google, Blog-Authors and Blogger

Setting someone up as an "author" in Blogger is one way that you can let other people post to your blog.

It's easy to do: you tell blogger to create an invitation, which sends the person an email saying you would like to be an author, they click a link in the email and then sign in with a Google account to accept the invitation. And once it is done, the person can write and edit their own posts.

All you need to know is the person's email address: it doesn't matter if it's a gmail address or not.  You can send invitations to people with hotmail, yahoo, and indeed any email address where your invitee can read their email.

 However the other person will need to use a Google account (which doesn't necessarily include Gmail) to accept the invitation: don't waste time inviting people who are allergic to Google and not willing to sign up for an account.


How to make someone a blog author

Send them an invitaton:

Pre-Sept-2011-Blogger (the old interface):

• Go to Settings > Permissions > Add Authors

• Enter the email address of the person you want to invite

• Click Invite

Post-Sept-2011-Blogger (new interface):

• Go to Settings > Basic > Permissions

• Beside Blog Authors, click + Add Authors

• Enter the email address of the person you want to invite

• Click Ok

A few minutes later, the email address that you sent to receives an email invitation, like this, from no-reply@google.com:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: You have been invited to contribute to AnotherTestBlog
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:47:45 +0000
From:   THE NAME OF FROM YOUR BLOGGER PROFILE 
To: maryc@act.nz

The Blogger user Mary has invited you to contribute to the blog: AnotherTestBlog.

To contribute to this blog, visit:
http://www.blogger.com/i.g?inviteID=468-GEEKY-LOOKING-CODE-973&blogID=31-GEEKY-LOOKING-CODE-83

You'll need to sign in with a Google Account to confirm the invitation and start posting to this blog. If you don't have a Google Account yet, we'll show you how to get one in minutes.

To learn more about Blogger and starting your own free blog visit http://www.blogger.com.

When the person who gets the email clicks on the link, they are taken to Blogger, and asked to sign in

Once they have clicked the link and sign in, the Google account that they log in with has "author rights" to your blog (just the one you invited them to, not any others you've made).

The person does not need to have a gmail or Google account for you to invite them to be an author - but they will need to sign in using a Google account (new or existing) to accept the invitation.


What you will see:

Once the person has accepted the invitation, the Google account name (which looks like an email address) that they use to accept it is shown as an author on the permissions tab (the one that you went to to invite them to be an author):

If they accept the invitation by signing to Google in with a differnt email address than the one you invited, you will get a message telling you about this. It says

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Your invitation was accepted using a different email address
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:51:33 +0000
From: Blogger
To: YOUR-EMAIL-ADDRESS

Your invitation for THE-EMAIL-ADDRESS-YOU-INVITED for your private blog "AnotherTestBlog" has been accepted, but using a different email address. It has been accepted by THE-ACCEPTING-EMAIL ADDRESS.

If your invitation has been accepted by someone you do not know or did not intend to invite, please visit the Permissions tab of your blog where you can choose to revoke access.

Thanks,
 The Blogger Team

What your new author will see:

When your new author logs in to Blogger.com - using the Google account they accepted your invitation with - they see a regular Blogger dashboard, except that they only have access to a limited range of functions:

An author can:

• Create a post,
• Edit the date for posts they have made
• Turn comments of for posts they can edit (provided the default setting is On)
• Edit a post that they made
• Add a mobile device so they can post using SMS/MMS - (this may only work in certain countries)
• Set themselves up to post using email (the mail2Post feature) - note that their "secret words" address is different to yours - and that an author could use this feature to let anyone else post from their account.
• Remove themselves as an author

An author cannot:

• Edit posts made by other authors or administrators
• Change the template, layout or gadgets
• Change the blog's URL, title or description
• Set up for any email address to receive comment-moderation alert messages
• Moderate comments (even about their own posts), or change the global comments settings
• Edit any of the blog's Pages
• See the blog's statistics
• Install AdSense into the blog (although they can put ad-units of their own inside their own posts)
• Give other people permission to write on the blog - except by sharing their own mail2Post "secret words" address.
• Change the default language and date/time settings for the blog
• Alter the RSS feed settings in any way
• Set up Google Analytics for the blog
• Edit the Adult-content warning setting, or the blog's Open-ID URL.

Troubleshooting

Be sure your transfer works:
If you are accepting the invitation yourself (eg you are transferring the blog to another Google account that you control), then make sure that you either

• [Recommended]: use a different browser for each Google account, or
• Each time you need to change Google accounts, log out of the present account, clear your cache and re-start your browser.

Make sure the emails arrive:

We sometimes see questions in Blogger Help Forum from people who say that they sent invitations, but the email message was never received.

The most common solution is that the author-to-be needs to check their spam folder - very often that's where the messages have gone.  If that doesn't work:

• Try sending the person an email address from your regular email account - so you know if there's a  problem with their email.
• Cancel the invitation (there's a link in the Invitation screen), wait a few minutes and try again.
• Try sending an invitation to a different email address that you control, and forwarding that message (without clicking the accept link) to the person.yourself.

If none of this helps, post a question in Blogger Help Forum: tell us your blog's URL, and exactly what options you have tried.


More things to think about:

As well as giving the person rights, you may also need to work with them to make sure they understand how you use certain features in Blogger:

• What's your editing and quality-assurance approach - how you do make sure you've got posts right before you publish them?  Do you allow adult content?   What about content that might not suit advertising that your blog is showing.

• Do you use labels?  How do you decide what labels to apply? This is especially important if you put your posts into pages. 

• What time of day do you post (to get maximum benefit from your RSS non-email subscribers)

• How are posts promoted on social media - do they need access to your blog's Twitter account or Facebook page too?

• What policies do you have for responding to comments - Who is notified about comments left about their posts?  What guidelines are followed about complaints?  How do you deal with spam and abuse - and what do you regard as abuse?

• How do you organise pictures, and other external files that your blog uses?
  I always upload pictures to Picasa-web-albums outside of Blogger, LINK so I can control the picture size/resolution. If you do this, you need to make sure that your new author knows where to file their pictures.

• Have you got a place where you keep policies, documetation, ideas for new posts, etc (eg I use a separate documentation blog for this) - does your new author need access to this?

Next:

Giving someone administrator access to your blog.

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Related Articles:



Understanding Google accounts

Putting AdSense ads into your posts

How to put posts into your blog's pages

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts matters for your blog

Your blog and the so-called-social networks:  Facebook, Twitter, eg al

Putting pictures onto your blog

Advertising and your blog, some things to consider

Custom Search can include images in results

Custom Search has a new option to have search results that are images.  

If you have existing Google custom search engines on your blog and want have the image search feature, you need to edit each CSE and

• turn the image-search-option on 
• generate the code
• re-install it into your blog.

I probably won't bother, as my blogs aren't image-intensive.   But I can see that this will be a big thing for some people.

Linking a picture in your post to a website

This article shows how to change a picture in your blog, so that when it is clicked, it opens another blog post, or even a totally different website.

Clicking pictures in your posts 

Previously I've described how to put a picture into a blog post.

By default, when a picture in your post is clicked, the file that is used to load the picture is opened, in a new window and at its original size.   This can encourage readers to steal photos that don't belong to them, so I've also described how to stop pictures in your blog from being "clickable".

But sometimes you may want to set a picture up so that clicking it opens up a different post, or even a whole different website.

How to change where a picture is linked to:

Add the picture into your post in the usual way.

Note where in the post your picture is - you may want to put some temporary marker-text (text that doesn't appear anywhere else, eg ZZZ) just before or after it, so make it easier to find.

Look at the HTML behind your post

• Pre-Sept-2011-Blogger:  Click Edit HTML in the top-right of the editor window 
• Post-Sept-2011-Blogger:  Click HTML in the top-left of the editor window

Find the code for your picture   (Hint - use the find-feature in your browser, eg Ctrl/f in Chrome to look for the marker-text if you used some).   It will look something like this:

<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/tkoGx2454hA/s1600-h/Inserting+a+picture.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguqd0ORSzsFLw269yIgNpniq9iCBgvm2Ag7tyItpuOTgVK8cMmwxa2myEKw6dB6gM3kHYQCiSwvB90OWCymZeQemXmdi3TlCRduwo2I6kAH29AkkM7Q3YQ3qTkvlCj1quoeI4Z_qB_BeYm/s400/Your-picture-file-name.gif" />&nbsp;</a>

Notice the part in bold, ie the href="CONTENTS"

Replace this with the URL that you would like your readers to go to when they click on the picture.
For example, if you want them to be taken to Google to do a search, the code would look like:

<a href="www.google.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguqd0ORSzsFLw269yIgNpniq9iCBgvm2Ag7tyItpuOTgVK8cMmwxa2myEKw6dB6gM3kHYQCiSwvB90OWCymZeQemXmdi3TlCRduwo2I6kAH29AkkM7Q3YQ3qTkvlCj1quoeI4Z_qB_BeYm/s400/Your-picture-file-name.gif" />&nbsp;</a>

By default, clicking the picture will take your visitor to the link you give in the same window.   But if you would like it to open in a new window, add target="_blank" to the code too, like this:

<a href="THE URL TO GO TO" target="_blank" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguqd0ORSzsFLw269yIgNpniq9iCBgvm2Ag7tyItpuOTgVK8cMmwxa2myEKw6dB6gM3kHYQCiSwvB90OWCymZeQemXmdi3TlCRduwo2I6kAH29AkkM7Q3YQ3qTkvlCj1quoeI4Z_qB_BeYm/s400/Your-picture-file-name.gif" />&nbsp;</a>

Go back to Compose mode (so you don't get confused next time you edit a post)

Remove the marker text, if you used any.


Some more things to think about:  

Will your readers realise that they should click the picture?   Unless it says "click me", some of them won't - and if they're used to Blogger, they may just expect to see a larger version of your photo.   So it might be a good idea to add a caption, or even some instructions in your blog to tell them to click the picture.

Also while you're editing the code, you might also like to add some alt-text to your picture link too, to make your blog more friendly for readers who use screen-reading tools, and for search engines / SEO.


What you will see:

At some times in the past, when you added a link a picture and then hovered over the picture in the post editor, your would see a double-row of in-post editing options:

• one row had the usual options for editing pictures (which lets you set the picture size, alignment and caption)
• one row had the usual options for editing links (with options to go-to, change and remove the link.

Today, as I'm writing this post using the new-interface editor, I can only see one row of options in hyperlinked pictures - so I need to edit the HTML again if I want to change or remove the link.

But it's quite possible that this is a mistake and that you can see the two rows of options in the old-interface editor, and that it will be added back to the new one too.    Fingers crossed.


What your readers will see:

When you readers look at a picture that you have linked to somewhere, it will seem just the same as any other picture.

For example, the picture to the right of this paragraph looks just like the one one at the top of the article.  But when someone clicks on it ...

Go on, click this one yourself, to see what happens!


(Acknowledgement: public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

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Related Articles:



Adding a picture to your blog

Making your blog friendly for search engines and screen-reader software

Stopping pictures from being able to be clicked

Aligning text and pictures in blog-posts

Integrating Picasa and Blogger

Changing the tracking ID for an Amazon Associates widget

You can change the tracking ID for an Amazon associates widget, even after the widget is created and in use on your site.

Tracking Amazon widget performance

Widgets (aka gadgets) from Amazon Associates can be used to display certain content from Amazon on your blog / website.   Some of them are fixed format, while others (eg the MP3 widget) let you select a range of items from Amazon's stock to display.

In two of my blogsites, I use Amazon MP3 widgets to include snippets of songs that my readers might be interested in, without breaking any copyright laws.

If Amazon sells more than one version of a song, then I put in quite a bit of time choosing which specific version to include, so that a variety of styles are shown - this makes it more likely that my readers will see something that they like.

Because there are two sites, I set up two tracking-ids within my Amazon Associates account, one for each site, and use these to know how many of my Amazon visitors have come from each site.  This will let me analyse the performance of each site as they grow.

Problem:  assigning the tracking ID

When you create a new widget on Amazon, the tracking ID that is assigned to the widget is the one that is selected when you start the widget-creation process. There is no way to change the tracking ID part way through the process.

Changing it on the left sidebar resets the widget-creation process back to the beginning, so you have to start again.  This isn't much of a problem if you're just getting the Amazon code for a simple gadget with no selection or maybe a context sensitive one.  But it's extremely frustrating if you've spent 15 mintues carefully choosing exactly which versions to a song to include.


Editing the tracking ID after the widget is created:

Recently I discovered that it is possible to change the tracking-id, and other features too, after the widget has been created.   To do this:

1  Log in to Amazon  (either .com, or whichever one you are working with) and go into the Associates section

2  Choose Widgets from the top menu.  This changes the contents of the left-sidebar to show items relating to widgets.

3  Choose My Widgets.  This opens a screen where you can change of the details of the widget, including the name and the tracking ID - and has a button that you can use to Edit the widget contents, and one where you can get the the code for the widget.

4  Choose the item(s) that you want to update, change them

5  Save the change.

There is no need to change the code that is on your blog or website:  the tracking ID, name, etc are stored in Amazon, not in the code.

What you and your readers see:

The tracking ID has no effect of what your reader see - unless they're beign particularly eagle-eyed when they look at the URL that is generated when they click on the widget.

But it means that when someone visits Amazon, as a result of clicking on the play or buy buttons, the visit and the credit for any qualifiying purchased that they make are given to you using the tracking-ID that you chose.

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Related Articles:




Getting product and widget link code from Amazon

Amazon Associates and blogger - an overview

Copyright, blogs and bloggers

Amazon integration is with Amazon.com only

Stop malicious use of your Google AdSense id

Google+ now has Pages, letting us set up and link with things that aren't brands

Google+ have launched Pages - so far looking pretty similar to Facebook pages with circles attached.  Potentially a way to link your business, sports club or hobby blog to this social network, without totally entwining the blog into your own life.

"Old" Analytics interface will end in January 2012.

The "old" Google Analytics interface is going to be "sunset" in January 2012. fyi, "sunset" usually means "turned off".

(These days, I use a netbook quite often, so I really hope they have the problems with small screen sizes not displaying properly sorted out by then.)

Finding the Web Property ID & tracking code for an existing Google Analytics profile

This article shows how to find the Google Analytics Web Property ID for a website that you have previously set up in Analytics.

Google Analytics and websites

Previously, I've explained how to set up Google Analytics for blogs made in Blogger, and shortly I'll be releasing another article about how Analytics is affected by the recently introduced dynamic templates and mobile blogger templates.

But if you have already set up Analytics on for your site, then you may need to find your Analytics Web-property-ID and/or tracking code..

Analytics:  New vs old interfaces.
Like Blogger, Analytics has a new interface coming.  You get to their with the "new version" link, in more-or-less the same place as Blogger's "switch to new interface" link.   However the new-look Analytics still has the word Beta (meaning "still being tested" in its logo), so for now these instructions apply to "old Analytics". I'll update them when the time seems right.


How to find your Web Property ID

1    Log in to Analytics, using the Google account that owns the Analytics profile that you want to get the ID for.

2    Choose the Analytics Settings tab
Currently the link for this is in the orange stripe at the top left, just under the Analytics logo.

3   Find the entry in the list for the Analytics profile that you need the profile for:

Each profile has two rows:  the top one lists the URL of the site and profile ID, while the 2nd one has the name you have given the profile, view report-link, some statistics, and links to edit or delete the profile.

Only 10 profiles are listed on the screen, so if you have set up more profiles than that, you may need to use the "next page" links at the bottom right of the screen.if you have set up Analytics for a few different sites, you may need to

The web-property-id is shown beside URL address of the website that the profile is for, like this:

How to get your Analytics tracking code 

Follow the steps above for finding your web profile ID.

Click the Edit link in the row for the profile you are interested in.

This takes you to the Profile Status screen.

Click the Check Status link near the top-right side of the profile display.

This opens the Profile Settings screen, which you can copy and paste your code from.

(This screen also has an Advanced tab, which covers options that are not relevant to the vast majority of Blogger users, so will not be covered here.)



If you use AdSense as well:

If you use Analytics to track your AdSense performance as well, then you may also need to get the code to enable to this.    To find this code

• Go back to the Profile Status screen (listed above)

• Click the Edit link (in the grey bar, just underneath the Status link)

This opens the Edit Profile Information screen, where you can edit various characterisitcs.  Your AdSense code, which should be put just before or after the other Analytics code, is shown at the bottom of the screen.


Next:
If you haven't used Analytics on your blog previously, see setting up Google Analytics for your blog for advice about where to put your code in Blogger.

If your blog is made in Wordpress, then I understand that you cannot install the HTML directly, you will need to locate a suitable 3rd party plugin that you can add your code and or web-property to.

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Related Articles: 




Understanding Google accounts

How the data in Blogger is organised

AdSense and AdWords - understanding the difference

Installing 3rd-party HTML into your blog

Setting up Google Analytics for your Blog

Not showing any posts on your blog's home page

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" aproaches to give readers other ways of getting to your content.

A blog with no posts is like a pub with no beer?

Previously I've explained how to only show one post on the main page - and this explanation looked at the types of screen that your non-dynamic-template blog can have (main, label, archive, post, and page).

But some people who want to give their blog a home page want to go further than that, and not 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 of "key" pages (lists of bus-routes, suburbs, shopping centres, etc) with tables that link to many other posts.


How to show no (ie zero, 0) posts on the main screen?

Some people want to do this, as part of the process of giving their blog a home page.  Again, it's not possible (at the moment, anyway) using Dynamic templates, but can be done with others:

In Blogger-2011:

• Choose the Options drop down from the main menu, 
• Choose the Settings > Posts and Comments panel from the left sidebar.  
• Enter zero (0) into the Show at most field
• Click Save Settings in the top right hand corner of the screen.

In the pre Sept-2011 Blogger:
In this interface, you can change posts-per-page on the Settings > Formatting screen to 0, and it works  nicely.

Unfortunately the Design > Page Elements > edit Blog Posts screen doesn't accept 0 as a valid value, so if you later need to change something on it, you need to:

• Change it to 1 on the edit Blog Posts  screen
• Make the other changes you need to make on that screen
• Save the changes
• Use Settings > Formatting to change posts-per-screen back to 0, 
• Save again.

Doing this means that there is a slight period (maybe a minute or two, depending on how fast you are) when your blog will show a post on the main screen.   But this is a problem that most people can live with.

What your readers see: 
Unless you take steps to avoid it, your readers will see a grey box saying "0 Posts" when they look at your blog's main URL.   Some of the things you can do to avoid this include hiding the "showing posts with label XXX" message, and creating a gadget that only shows on the "home" page.

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Related Articles:



Limiting your blog to only have one post on the main page

Giving your blog a home page

What are dynamic view templates?

Blogger template types
.
Using tables in your blog

Displaying a gadget only on the home page

Making every post appear on a separate page

You can set your blog up so that only one post is shown at a time - provided you don't use a Dynamic template, and you don't use Label or Archive pages.

One Post per Page?

One options that confuses some people is how to set up their blog up so that only one post shows up on each "page" or screen of their blog, and there is a complete break between the posts.

This is fairly easy to set up, you just need to understand a little about the types of screens that Blogger uses to display your posts, and how they can be manipulated and used - or importantly not used.

Most people refer to the screens that their blog as "pages".   However I try not to use that word, because the Pages feature in Blogger is quite different.  See "The Difference between pages and posts" for more about this.


The types of screen in your blog:

If your blog has a Designer or Layout template (ref  What templates does my blog have) then Blogger offers these major "views" of it:

• The main screen
• The posts-by-label screen, which shows all the posts (or the most recent however-many posts) that have a label that you or the visitor selects
• The posts-by-archive screen, which shows all the posts (or the most recent however-many posts) made in a time-period that your visitor selects
• The pages screen, which shows only one page at a time
• The post screen, which shows only one selected post at a time.

Visitors see the post  screen when they navigate to the URL of an individual post.   In Blogger-HAT, for example, most visitors are from a search engine or a referral from the  Help Forum.   These people always follow a link to a specific post, so they see the post-screen showing only that post.

You cannot control how many posts are shown on the label or archive view - that is simply not how these screens work.

Similarly, you don't have full control how many posts are shown on the main screen:   you can make a suggestion (up to 500), but Blogger's auto-pagination rules decide how many post are actually shown, and how many are behind the "older posts"link.

But, you can set your blog up so that only a single post is ever shown on the main screen.  And if you do that, you may want to

• not use the Labels gadget (which shows the posts-by-label screen) 
• not use the archive gadget (which shows the posts-by-archive screen)

because these screens always show more than one post-per-screen.


How to show one post at a time on the main screen:

In Blogger-2011:

• Choose the Options drop down from the main menu, 
• Choose the Settings > Posts and Comments panel from the left sidebar.  
• Enter one (1) into the Show at most field
• Click Save Settings in the top right hand corner of the screen.

In pre-2011 Blogger:

• Either  Go to Settings > Formatting, and set Show at most X posts on the main page  to 1
  OR
  Go to Design > Page Elements > edit Blog Posts,  and set Maximum posts per page to 1

• Click Save Settings in the bottom left corner of the screen.

(Yes, these commands both talk about "page", but they mean "the main screen".)

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Related Articles:



Blogger template types
.
The difference between pages and posts

Removing dynamic templates from your blog

Adding a separator line between posts

How to cut, copy and paste if you don't have an Edit menu

Putting Posts into your Pages in Blogger

Using Excel to make the HTML for the "body" of a table

This article is about how Excel's text functions can be used to make the HTML statements to put inside the body section of a table.   It's written with Blogger users in mind, but applies to anyone who needs to create a large HTML table.   Two Excel example files are provided, one using CSS and one not, which have some formatting included.

HTML table code

Previously I've described tables in your blog:  why you might want to use them, and some options for making a table,

These include using a HTML-code-generator to get the "skeleton" of the table.   With this approach, the hardest part is putting the table content (ie the words, numbers and pictures) into the correct place in the HTML, so that it appears in right cell in the table.

This is easy enough for a small table.   But if you want to make a table with  more data (eg I recently posted a book-index with 100 rows by 5 columns), it can be a little tedious.    Even if you prepare your posts in private (which lets you save frequently without worrying about auto-save), it can still be very hard to make sure that you put the right contents in the right cell.   And because Blogger's post editor doesn't handle tables well, it can sometimes do unexpected things to them,.

But there are some alternatives.

Tools for creating the "body" section of HTML table statements

I'm sure that lots of people have written custom applications that take a text file and turn it into HTML.   (Though when i googled, the first SERPs included a program for Win 3.1 / 95, which most people gave up on a long time ago!).

Many programs like Excel, Word, etc now have an option to save as HTML - so you could just use look at the file they make with a text editior (eg Notepad), and take the relevant bits.   That said, they usually include a lot of extra code, eg for fonts, layouts etc, so you may get more than you bargain for.

Commercial web development packages, eg Dreamweaver, may have table editing tools - however  many people cannot justify the cost of buying and learning them for smaller jobs.

Another option is to use Excel to manage your table of data, and use it's text-string manipulation functions to turn it into valid HTML code.   This isn't as hard as it sounds, especially if someone else does the initial formulas for you.

Excel Templates for making HTML

First version -  cell level formatting - no CSS

Second version  with CSS styles

The first template was made before I understood CSS:  it uses text-functions to put formatting code into every single table cell - though you can just leave things blank if you don't want them formatted.  It may be best to use if you don't understand CSS.

The second template uses CSS styles to format the table.   This means you can change the formatting of all the tables in your website just by changing the CSS rules, ie you don't have to edit each individual table.   The Excel file lists the  CSS styles you need to define, and the names (eg keyTableOdd for odd numbered rows) show what each style is used for.

Version 2:  the formula area is green,
the input area is yellow, and the output area is orange

To use these templates:

1  Download the template


2  Check the formatting settings in the template.  Set up CSS styles in your website if you are using the 2nd version.


3  Create table header and footer statements yourself, or by using an HTML table generator.


4  Adjust the Excel template, so that

• the number of rows and columns in the data area is what you need,
• the formulas in the output area are right for your chosen rows and columns
  
  The section below explains the types of formulas used:  you can model new forumlas (for new columns) on the current ones, and new rows can be made by copying the formulas from an existing row.

5  Put the data for your table into the data area in the spreadsheet


6  Copy the text from the output area, paste it into a text editior (eg Notepad)


7  Use the text editor's Find/Replace function to change all cases of three apostrophes in a row (ie ''') into double quotes.


8  Copy the changed text from your text editor into the "body" section of your table statement.


This sounds like a lot of work but I've found that even if a table is only 10 rows long, using a HTML-generators-spreadsheet is a lot more efficient than trying to type the values into it row-by-row.

Understanding the Excel templates

I'm assuming that you understand a little about how Excel stores data in cells, and refers to those cells by their Row/Column combination, eg "E5" - if not, check out an Excel tutorial before reading on

Also, you need to understand the ideas of copying formulas between rows, and the use of relative co-ordinates in them to make sure that each new row or column picks up the right values. Again, an Excel tutorial would be a good idea if you're not familiar with copying formulas.

As well as these general ideas, there are here are two Excel concepts that are the basis of these templates:

1   Text concatenation functions

Excel has a wide range of functions that are used to glue strings together, or to pull them apart.   Important ones used in these templates are:

= "whatever"   puts a text-string with the characters whatever into the cell
= a1 & b1   combines the text strings in cells a1 and b1   (b1 goes immediately after a1)
= "This is A1: " & a1 & ".   This is B1: " & B1 &"."

The third function combined the two first ones.   It makes a text string like     "This is A1: AahOne.   This is B1: BeeOne."

Notice that it is a bit fiddly:   there are spaces inside the text-strings, and a full-stop at the end, so that the output looks sensible.   To make it easier to read, I've put the conent that's inside double quotes (ie "  ") on a pink background.

Once you understand this type of formula, though, it's not a big jump to formulas like these which combine HTML commands and values from the cells in the spreadsheet.

="<tr class='''"&A21&"'''>"
=" <td class='''keytableID'''>"&B21&"</td>"
=" <td> " & C21 & "</td> "
=" </tr>"
=E21&F21&G21&H21

This uses a step-by-step formula creation, which makes the parts of the final statement, then glues them all together in the last formula..

2   Putting an Excel special character in the output:

HTML needs to have double-quote characters around things that should be shown as text - for example

<a href="A-FILE-URL">Anchor-text</a>

However in Excel, the double-quote is used to show the beginning and end of text strings.

At first , this may put people off using Excel,   But there is a very simple way around this:

1. Use another (set of) characters that don't appear in the table instead, and
2. Before you use the the generated code, use a text-editor (eg Notepad) to change them to the required special characters.

Other ways to make table contents

There are lots of other ways to make the table-contents HTML code.

• Using MS Access would probably be eaiser (but lots of people don't have it). 
• Using Google Docs - spreadsheets is free, but I haven't tried out the string functions yet.
• GreenLava of BloggerSentral has recently recommended Tabelizer:  I haven't used this myself yet, but it also looks promising.

What other options can you suggest?

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Related Articles:

Why use tables in your blog

Get your posts right before you share them with the word.

Adding a new CSS formatting rule to your blogs' template

Putting HTML into your blog

Understanding Google accounts

File hosts - places to store files you use