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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.