Enabling Blogger on Google Apps domains

For Google Apps accounts, access to Blogger is controlled by the domain administrator.  This article shows why domain administrators may want to turn off Blogger access, for their domains - and describes how to enable Blogger access if required.

Blogger and Google Apps Domains

Previously I've described Google Accounts,  the difference between Google and Google Apps accounts, and the work being done to resolve conflicting accounts.  

People who have Google accounts can use Blogger by going to www.Blogger.com.   But for Google Apps account users, access to Blogger is controlled by the domain administrator.  There are reasons why domain administrators may not want their users to have Blogger.    But there may be times when it is appropriate, so this post shows how to enable Blogger access, too.

Why limit Blogger access:

Reasons why domain administrators (from commercial companies at least) might not want to allow their users to use Blogger with their domain account, include:

• It doesn't feel like work:

Other Google products accessed with domain accounts can be set to use the domain-owner's logo.  So they look like a company tool, even though they're provided by Google.   This reminds people that they should only use the accounts to do things that are appropriate "at work".   But Blogger cannot (currently) be set up in this way - people who are using it may forget that they are using a work / organisation tool, and may be tempted to publish personal material using the account.

• Access control:

Firstly, there is currently no way to use Blogger to publish a blog that can be read by everyone using the domain, and not seen by anyone outside it.    This means that Blogger cannot be used for company businesses that should not be shared outside the company.    (The closest option in Blogger is to set up a private blog and invite people to read it - but there is a maximum of 100 invitations ever, and besides this option does open some security holes.)

• What happens when people leave

In well-managed companies, when a person leaves their domain account is deleted (perhaps after a month or two, in case they come back).    If someone has made a document or blog using domain account, and that domain account is deleted, then it's likely that the document or blog will be deleted too.   This isn't such a big deal for documents:  they can be transferred to other accounts.    But even though there is a procedure for transferring ownership of blogs, there are some items commonly found inside blogs (eg pictures, videos) that cannot be transferred given the tools that Google offer at the moment.

No Blogger access at all?

There may be times when it is appropriate to allow people to access Blogger through your domain accounts.

Currently, this is all-or-nothing:  either you give access to everyone or no one.   Google Apps doesn't have a way to let you give access to small group of your users.

If you want to give access, follolw the  procedure outlined below.    However note that it's possible to turn access off again as quickly as it was turned on.   If you do need to allow access to let a person "rescue" a blog that is attached to a domain account, it should be easy enough to arrange a limited time with them, during which they can log on, and at least give another, non-domain, account administrator access to the blog.

Also, this isn't about blocking all access to Blogger.com from the workplace.   It's only about what people can do with their "company" domain account.   If someone really wants to use Blogger at work and/or for work purposes, they can still set up a separate Google account and use that for Blogger (provided the overall security policies let them do so).    This account is an asset that needs to be managed (just like their office keys, credit card, work mobile, official Twitter account, Facebook page access, etc) - it's just not inside your domain.

How to turn on Blogger access in your domain

1. Go to the Google Apps control panel, and sign in to the domain-management function.
2. Log in, using an account with domain administration rights.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Go to the Organization & Users tab
4. Switch to the Services sub-tab
5. Scroll down to the Other Google Services category
6. Note the Terms of Service issue described on the screen - only continue if this does not cause a problem for your company etc.
7. Find Blogger in the list   (it's currently 2nd in my list, so easy to find).
8. Click the On button beside Blogger, so it goes green.
   
   
   
   
   
9. Click the Save changes button at the bottom of the list.

This will allow every user in your domain to use Blogger, by logging in to www.Blogger.com with the domain account that you set up for them.

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Related Articles:



Procedure for transferring blog wnership

Understanding Google accounts

The difference between Google and Google Apps accounts

Resolving conflicting Google and Google apps accounts.

Restricting your blog's readers isn't as secure as you'd imagine

Setting up your custom domain

Putting a custom +1 button into your blog

You can add a custom version of Google's +1 button to your blog, just like  Facebook's Like button.  It can go in under the title bar in the post-header or beside or below each post.  Or it can be a gadget.   And the "plus one" function can apply to  an individual post or your whole blog.   


[Updated Jul 2011 to link to the asynchronous version of the code.] 

What is Google's +1 button

+1 is Google's answer to Facebook's Like button - or at least that's what Google are hoping.

They first announced it in March 2011, and have now added it to the standard sharing buttons for Blogger.

The big difference between +1 and Like is where the results appear:

• Like shows up in counts in the Like button and inside Facebook in the feed from the person doing the liking.    
• +1 shows up in Google search results - it's still not clear if this is just in search results for your "friends" (however they're defined) or if it shows in search results for everyone, or how much influence it will have on search-result.  

Adding +1 if you don't use Blogger's standard sharing buttons

Provided you're willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your template, it's easy enough to add a customized Tweet or Facebook share button to your blog.

Adding a customised +1 button is very similar.   Just follow these steps:

1   Go to the +1 button configuration page Webmaster Central.

2   Choose the basic settings you want:  pick button size, annotation and language. 

So far, I've used the medium (20px) size, as it seems to fit best with the other share-items that I've added before.   You should be able to see it at the top of the page if you're reading this article through a web-browser.   Note that this option is slightly smaller than the default "standard" option.

Annotation is about how your number of +1s is "noted" in the button - choose the different options and watch what happens in the preview to see which one you want to use.  Or choose None if you don't want the button to show a count.

3  Click on Advanced options, and decide what you want to to apply the +1 function to:

• If you want to to put the +1 button where it can be used to on the individual post URL rather than your whole blog, then put some text like PUT-URL-HERE into the "Url to +1" box.   

• If you want readers to +1 your whole blog, just enter your blog's web-address (ie URL) into the "URL to +1" box.  
  (NB It may be possible to leave it blank in this case, but I'd rather specify exactly what URL to use, in case anyone hits +1 from an archive page or similar, which has a separate URL).

5   Copy the HTML shown.


The code provided is in two parts.  The first section is what you put into your blog whereever you want the +1 button to appear.   The second part starts with a comment:  "<!-- Place this tag after the last plusone tag -->".   This means that:

1. You only need to put the code underneath that line into your blog once, and 
2. The place to put it is immediately after the last time you put the +1 button code into your blog.  Iif you only add the button once, then put after that time.   

6   Add it to your blog in the same way that you would add add any other share-this-to-whatever social sharing button, except --- if you want the button to recommend individual posts not the whole blog, then before you save the change, replace the PUT-URL-HERE part of

href="PUT-URL-HERE"    (or whatever text you used)

  with

expr:href='data:post.url'

What your viewers will see:

Visitors who see your blog in their web-browser (not through an RSS feed reader) will see a new button wherever you choose to put it.   (People who read your blog thru feed aggregators, or by email subscription, won't see it.)


When someone clicks the button, what happens depends on whether they are logged in to a Google account at the time, and whether that Google account has a public profile.

I'm not even going to try describing all the options possible as yet (or this will never get published!) but you are welcome to try the one at the top of this article to see how it works

Later on, as the button starts to be used enough to provide meaningful data for Google, potential viewers who see you site listed in Google search results will start to see counts of the number of times that other people have "plus-one'd" you in their search results.

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Timezones at a glance: what's the time in your readers' country?

This article describes why timezone matters for bloggers, and has a picture comparing the time in the major areas of the world throughout the day.

What time is it for your readers?

Previously I've described how to plan changes to your blog in private.  But at the end of the planning, you still need to implement the changes in a way that causes your readers as little disruption as possible.

One approach is to use a statistical tool (eg Google Analytics) to see where your readers come from, and then  choose a time when the majority are probably asleep (or working, or whatever makes them unavailable to look at your blog) to make the changes.   It can be challenging to find a time that suits everyone, though, especially if you have on-line visitors from several timezones.

Also, if  your blog offers follow-by-email or has a feed set up with Feedburner, then one of the options you can set in Feedburner is the time that your daily email to subscribers is sent out:  depending on your blog's niche you may want your email to be hitting people's inboxes either first thing in the morning (professional blogs), or late afernoon / early evening (personal blogs).


Comparing time zones with a picture:

There are many, many time-zone calculators on the internet:  typically they tell you the time right now in two different places (your and one other), and the difference between the time in each place and GMT.  However this leaves you with some calculations to do if you need to compare several time zones, or if you want to think about very different times of the day.  

An alternative approach is to draw the day in color-coded three-hour slots, like this::

Then you can use a table that summarises the time-zone in different areas of the world like this:

Of course it's not possible to show every country like this, or to take account of daylight savings time (which operates in different months in different countries).   But hopefully the countries shown will give you an idea of different parts of the world, and the time in each one of them.

To use the chart, find your country and read up and down the table and get a rough idea of the time in different parts of the world, at the different times in your day.

For example, if you're in the east of America, and you have a lot of readers in South America and Asia, you can see that when your time is 9pm, theirs is roughly midnight (South America)  and 9am-noon (Asia).

A more sophisticated approach?

If you have installed Google Analytics, then Google keeps data about each person who visits your blog, including the time of day that they arrived.

You can access this through the Analytics application   .. and I'll try to write about this in some detail when I remember exactly how to find the time-of-visit statistics.

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Related Articles:



Setting up Google Analytics for your blog

Plan changes to your blog - in private

Follow-by-email - an easy way to set up email subscriptions

Getting started with Feedburner

Copyright, Blogs and Bloggers

Showing a presentation on your website / blog as a slideshow
.

Post.snippet and post.thumbnail: tools for summarizing your blog

The snippet and thumbnail attributes now appear to be available for all Blogger posts, even though they're not documented in Blogger's official list.  This article shows documents what I've found out about them.

"Fields" in Blogger:

Many people are used to computer systems that are based on databases which have rows (records) and columns (fields).

Blogger does use a database.

But instead of record.field notation, Blogger templates use XML tags to access the data  that make up blog posts.

This means that Blogger templates can be made up of statements like this:

<b:if cond='data:post.title'>
      <h3 class='post-title entry-title'>
     <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
       <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>
     <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
          <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
        <b:else/>
          <data:post.title/>
        </b:if>
     </b:if>
      </h3>
    </b:if>

This basically says "If the post has a title, and if it has a link, then show the title value linked to the URL.   If it just has a title but no link, then just show the title.   Otherwise don't show anything in this spot.   And if something is shown, format it with the header-3 style."

A list of the tags (much like fields or attributes in other programming languages) that Google has told us about is available in this help article (I have a link to it in the "handy tools" section of the sidebar).

But recently people have noticed two new tags that are not included in this list, and have started writing Blogger tweaks, hacks etc to make use of them.   They are are

• data:post.snippet
• data:post.thumbnail

I haven't been able to find any official documentation about what these tags refer to.

But I have done some investigations in a test blog    (by altering the template to explicity show these things, and then making posts with particular possible values.    And this is what I've found.



Post.Snippet

If a post has a jump-break before character 140, then the snippet is all the text before the jump-break.

But if the post does not have a jump-break, or it is after character 140, then the snippet is the first 140 or so characters.   (Line breaks are shown when the snippet is displayed, in Blogger, but they are not included in the character count).

Currently, the only way to control what is in the snippet is to put the contents at the start of the post.  There is no other way to edit it.    (You may notice that all the posts in Blogger-Hints-and-Tips start with a paragraph or two in bold.   This is how I flag the "snippet" code to myself.)


Post.thumbnail

I haven't been able to work out the rules for this item by testing options.   So far I know that:

• Not every post has one, sometimes it's blank even if there's an image in the post
• It's not automatically the first image in the post
• It's not automatically the last image in the post.
• It's not the automatically the biggest image in the post.

I now strongly suspect that it's the first image in a post that is both hosted in Picasa-web-albums and  over a certain size.


What readers see:

Unless you edit your blog template to use these values in a visible way, then your readers will not see anything different.

But there are some specific ways that you might to use them, including:

• Setting the post-description meta-tag to the value of post.snippet
• Editing the template to only show the snippet or thumbnail on certain types of pages.

And if you allow your visitors to see your blog using Dynamic templates, then I'm 99.9% sure that the post.snippet is the picture used to represent your blog in some of the more graphical formats.


Using these tags

If you are happy to accept the disadvantages of edit your blog's template, then you can show the snippet and thumbnail anywhere inside the blog post area.

The code to use to display them is:

<data:post.snippet/> - for the snippet, and

<img expr:src='data:post.thumbnailUrl'/>  - for the thumbnail

You need to put the thumbnail into an image tag because, of course, it is an image.



Do you have any more information?

In this article, I've documented what I have found out about these two fields by doing some testing.   But it's likely that I've missed some things out.

Have you been able to find, or work out, any more detailed rules about what post.thumbnail shows?

What else have you found out about these tags - or any other tags that are available in our blog-templates but not in the official list?

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Related Articles:



Installing code into your blog

Centering gadgets in your blog.

What are dynamic templates

Advantages and disadvantages of editing your blog's template

Putting text and pictures side-by-side

Sharing blog posts to a Facebook page instead of your personal profile

You can share from your blog to a Facebook page, instead of a profile, by switching to use the Facebook page before you carry out the share.

Sharing blog posts to Facebook

There are several  tools that anyone who is reading your blog (including you) can use to share it on Facebook, provided you have implemented them.   They include Blogger-provided social sharing buttons, Facebooks' own like / recommend / send social plug-ins and share button and 3rd party tools (AddThis, ShareThis etc).

And in the most low tech-option of all, anyone can just copy your post's URL and manually paste it onto Facebook themselves.

But no matter what option is chosen, one thing stays the same:   the place in Facebook is the share or like goes to is controlled by how the person doing the sharing is logged in to Facebook.   It is not controlled by you, the blog-owner who is providing the share / like / etc button.  This is true even if you are sharing your own posts:  it's your Facebook settings that matter, not the settings in your blog.


Switch to a page so you can share to it:

If you want to share your own blog to a Facebook page instead of your personal account, then you need to have switched to use Facebook as that page before you do the share (or like / recommend etc).  
 

Doing this is quite easy, provided you are an administrator for the page:

1   Log in to Facebook.

2   Choose Use Facebook as Page from the Account menu (currently a drop-down in the top right corner ... it may move around in future).

3  Click Switch beside the name of the Page that you want to share to, from the list shown.   (There may not be a list if you are only an administrator on one page)

This will take you back to whatever Facebook screen you were on before.  However when you do anything (eg click Top News or Recent, post to someone'e Wall, etc), it looks like it was the Page, not your Profile, that did the action.

This means that you can share a blogger link in the usual way, and it will look like it was shared by the Page - and it will be shared to the Fans of the page, not to your personal Friends.

And if you are not an administrator?
If you're not an administrator for a Facebook Page, then you cannot switch to it.   You may be able to post to its wall, depending on the security settings that the administrator has entered - but you will need to share the blog (etc) manually.

Current limits and problems:

I'm 99% certain that you need to be logged in to Facebook  and reading the blog using the same browser (ie in two different tabs or windows) for this to work.

Also, at the moment, there is a problem with Facebook's own social plugins (the Like / Recommend / Send buttons, and at least some of the other badges):  when you are using Facebook as a page and looking at a website which has the Facebook plug-ins installed, then the wrong thing is shown.   For example, on Blogger-HAT I'm currently seeing

• My Facebook profile picture instead of the Like / Send buttons above and below posts, and
• A big Facebook logo instead of the Like badge for my page.

This means that I cannot use the Like/Send buttons to recommend new posts to my Page.  However the old-style Share button does still look and work correctly (I just tried it out on BloggerSentral, to be sure - see the result here).

For my own posts, I don't think this is much of a problem:  I'd rather do the sharing manually, so that I can customise the message to the section of my audience who follow my blog on Facebook rather than on Twitter or through RSS or using a follow-by-email subscription.   But it may be more of an issue if you want your readers to share your blog, and they would like to do it on their own Facebook Pages instead of their Facebook Profiles.    Lets hope that Facebook fix this soon.

Automatically sharing to a Page:

Many people would like a Page to be automatically updated when they post to their blog.  

I've heard lots of people saying that this can be done, and talking about doing it via RSS feeds etc - but personally I've not succeeded in making this work reliably.   For one of my pages that has quite a few fans, it worked occasionally - and it was a bit annoying when I couldn't control the timing of the page update because the feed seemed to be delayed.

Have you found a method that works every time?

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Related Articles:



Adding Facebook's Share button to your blog

Putting a badge for a Facebook page into your blog

Putting a badge for your personal Facebook account into your blog

Tools for linking Blogger and the social media

Putting "follow me on Twitter" into your blog

Why RSS matters to bloggers

Making an email sign-up option for your blog

Putting a "follow me on Twitter" button onto your blog

This article explains how to put an official "Follow me on Twitter" button onto your blog.

"Follow-me" VS "Look-what-s/he said"

Previously, I explained the diferent approaches to linking your blog and the social media.   In particular, I looked at the difference between "follow me" and "look what s/he said over there".

If your blog has a Twitter account, you may want to offer your readers a quick way to follow your tweets  rom their own twitter accounts.   This is an example of the "follow-me" approach, and is what this article is about.


How to add Follow Me on Twitter

1  Go to Twitter
If you don't already have a Twitter account for your blog (or for yourself, if you blog is a personal one), you may need to sign-up with one.  Or if you do have one, then just log on.

2  Look at the buttons they offer
Today, you get to this by clicking on the Resources link, which is in the panel at the bottom of the left-hand-sidebar.

This takes you to:  http://twitter.com/about/resources: where you can find lots of useful things including Follow button options.

(Last time I updated this article, you had to click Profile on the top menu bar, then click Resources which was near the bottom of the right-hand panel.   Twitter seem move this to a different place on their page fairly often, so do have a good look around for it - or for Buttons or something similar if you can't find the resources link.)


3  Choose Follow, and set the options you want:

• Check that your Twitter account name is correctly in the User box (it should be, if you're logged in to the right twitter account at the time)

• Choose whether or not to show your Twitter account name

• Choose a button size (large or not)

• Choose what language to show the button words ("follow ... on") om/

4  Copy the HTML

5  Go to your dashboard in Blogger, and add the code to your blog.  

There are several ways to add 3rd party HTML to your blog, depending on where you want to put it.  A "follow me on" button is probably more appropriate in a gadget (option one in that article) than in a place in your template where it relates to individual posts.


What your readers see

If you use a new style follow tool:

• A reader who is not logged in to Twitter when they click your button is asked to log in.
• After they have logged in to Twitter, they are added to your Twitter followers list, and the icon-label displayed on your blog changed from "follow" to "following".

If you use the old style button, then:

• When a reader clicks your Follow-me on Twitter button, Twitter loads in the current window.

• If they are already logged in to Twitter, they're shown a summary of your profile, with Follow, Add to List and Block buttons.

• If they are not logged in to Twitter, they're shown a welcome message that describes Twitter and invites them to sign-up or to log in.

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Related Articles:



Putting a "follow me on Facebook" button onto your blog

Adding a "Tweet" button (ie look what s/he said) to your blog

Putting a "share this on XXX" button into your blog

Adding 3rd party HTML to your blog

Giving a Share this on LinkedIn option on your blog

Options for linking your blog and the social networks