Google Drive will eventually replace Docs - but not yet for most of us.

If you use Google Docs as a file-hosting option, then the recent announcement of Google Drive probably has you wondering how Docs will be affected: there's a marketing announcement on the Docs Blog, but it has a distinct lack of detail on how it will work.

But this announcement on the to Google Apps blog has more info.  Key points:

• Initial access is "on an opt-in basis via invite at drive.google.com/start"
• It's being released to Google Apps users first: It will be made available to all domains over the next 4-8 weeks.
• But [eventually] Google Drive will become the default andwill replace the documents list as the way to access files and documents.

It is introducing many changes and new features to Google Docs, including:

1. A Google Drive desktop application, available from the Chrome Web Store
2. A mobile application for your iPhone or iPad
3. Sync files between all of your devices with Google Drive for your Mac/PC
4. A different kind of search tool across your own files
5. In Google document, spreadsheet, or presentation editors, you can add a file to a folder by clicking the folder icon
6. Collections are called folders
7. More options on the Settings menu
8. More views on the left navigation: "My Drive", "Shared with me", "Activity"
9. My Drive (instead of home) to organize all of your files, folders and Google Docs.

Note that you will not see any of these changes until Drive is available to you.   In the meantime, Docs continues to work as it has been working.

If you are a domain administrator, notice that Google Docs has been renamed to "Drive and Docs" in the Google Apps control panel, and that there are new settings in this service.

Finding the gadget ID for a widget in your blog

This article shows you how to find the "identifier" for a gadget in your blog.  This isn't useful in itself, but is a set in various other template customizations, including putting a gadget on a single page only.

Sometimes you need to find the code-name for a gadget that you have added to your blog, so you can edit your template and control how and where that gadget is displayed.

This may be part of giving your blog a home-page, controlling how your blog looks on mobile devices, or various other tweaks.

Luckily this is very simple.

How to find the id-code for any gadget:

"gadget", "widget", and even "page-element" all mean the same thing.  I generally use "gadget", because the Page Elements tab currently says "Add a Gadget".  But they're absolutely the same.


Add the gadget to your blog in the usual way.

Edit it again, but don't make any changes to it.

Maximise the window, so you can see the very end of the address bar in the window - at the top of the screen.

Note the word there, entering in a number.   This is the Gadget-id.

In this example, it's Text1,   Other possible values are HTML1, Attribution1, Followers1, etc.

What does the number mean?

The digits at the end of the widget-id show to the number of times that a gadget of this type has been added to the blog:  in a complicated situtation, with lots of gadgets of the same type, it can get into double, or even treble-figures.)

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Related Articles: 

Controlling what goes on the homepage

Adding a gadget / widget / page-element to your blog

Editing your blogger template

Putting a gadget on your static-pages only - or your home page

Removing the attribution gadget from mobile template blogs

This article is about removing the "Powered by Blogger" statement from the bottom of blogs that have a mobile template.

Blogger and attribution gadgets. 

Previously I've described the attribution gadget that Blogger has added to blogs with designer templates, and various ways of removing it.

This was a real game of cat-and-mouse:   I found a way to delete the gadget, Blogger's engineers put in code to add it back in again if you removed it using that method.  But eventually I found some methods that haven't stopped working - or maybe Google saw the logic in my arguments and gave up trying. 

(For the record, I show the gadget on most of my blogs, but really didn't want it on one particular blog that is really powered by Google custom Maps:  Blogger is just a nice wrapper around the custom maps that it shows.)

Now a reader has asked about getting rid of the attribution from a blog that uses a mobile template. This is easy provided you accept the risks of editing your template.

How to remove the attribution from a mobile template:

Edit your template in the usual way - you don't need to expand the widget templates.

Use the browser search tool to find this statement:

<b:widget id='Attribution1' locked='true' mobile='yes' title='' type='Attribution'/>

The number after the word "attribution" may be different, if you've tried several other ways to remove the "powered by Blogger" statement.   This doesn't matter - just make sure the same number is used in the original statement and the replacement one.

Replace it with this statement

<b:widget id='Attribution1' locked='true' mobile='no' title='' type='Attribution'/>

Save your template .


And that should be "job done".


It is a good idea to check what your blog looks like on a mobile device.    If you find that this approach  doesn't work for your blog, please leave a comment including your blog's URL - in case there are some conditions that I've missed.

Note:   test so far make me thing that this setting is kept even if you change which mobile template your blog uses, and even if you switch off the mobile template and then switch it off again later.

---

Related Articles:



Removing the attribution gadget from designer-template blogs

How to edit your blogger template

Editing your blog's template:  advantages and disadvantages

Showing Google custom Maps on your blog

Why your blog may need a mobile template - and how to give it one.

A new advertising option for Blogger: Google Affiliate Network

If you are already an AdSense publisher, then today's announcment about Google Affiliate Network: Introducing Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger may be of interest.

Google Affiliate Network (GAN) is a different type of advertising programme:  instead of getting paid per click, you get paid per purchase (or whatever other key action the advertiser decides).

So far, it's limited to Blogger users who are based in the USA - presumably because this is where most advertisers are.   It's also limited to "select bloggers" - this seems to mean ones whose blog is a good fit with the available advertisers, and the criteria for "a good fit" is as decided by Google.  This is unlike regular use of the Google Advertisers network, where you apply to a particular advertiser based on your own assessment of the fit.

After you have signed up for AdSense (and, I guess been approved!):

IF GAN options are available to you
THEN they will be shown when you are editing a post, in a gadget that appears in the right-hand Post Settings area.   

This means they will only available from the "new", ie post-Sept-2011 blogger interface.

I guess you will be allowed to copy the HTML code for the GAN advertisement from the post editor, and put it into a regular gadget - since you can put regular GAN adverts into your blog in this way.  But this is a detail that should be checked against their terms and conditions:   as with AdSense, the additional requirements for GAN are glossed over when you are accessing it via Blogger, but I expect that they will still apply.

Test HTML rich-text post snippets before publishing them

Rich snippets. are a tool that Google uses to give website-managers some control over how their sites appear in search-results (while enhancing the quality of search results, of course).

Blogger users are website-managers - the process that we follow to add meta-tags to our blogs is similar to what other web-developers, who don't have simplified software like Blogger, have to do.

Google have added a HTLM rich-text testing facility to their Webmaster-tools: this lets you see if you've got rich-snippet code (eg XX) right before hitting publish - because of course the effect on Google is one thing that you cannot test in a private pre-publication blog.

Putting files into Blogger's root directory

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog.

Turnips (Brassica rapa) 
from Wikimedia commons 
Originally posted to Flickr 
by thebittenword.com.   
Licensed under the terms of 
the cc-by-2.0.

If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory.   They may even tell you to use an FTP  tool to do this.

Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger.

Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking you to change the website code itself.

How to add a file to your blog's root directory:

The short answer for Blogger users is "sorry, you cannot do this".

 The long answer is still no:  "there is no way to do this, but see the rest of this article for an explanation of why, and some suggested work-arounds."

Why not?  Every other website tool lets me do this.

Posts:  Blogger's tool for managing
the content on our blogs

If you're clever, and have lots of time, you can make a website just using a text-editor like notpad, a graphics programme, and ftp software that lets you put the files into the right places on computer that's connected to the internet.

Tools like Dreamweaver take away a lot of the time-consuming work, and some of the need for cleverness.  But you still need to know a lot about the internet to do things in a way that makes a good website.

Content management systems make this easier still: they let a technically-minded person do the nuts-and-bolts work to make the website, and give authors / artists / editors / content-creators simpler-to-use tools that let them put "stuff" (ie content) into the website, without needing to worry about the details of how it works.

Blogger is a (very simple) website content-management system, it creates our web-pages for us based on data that we put into certain places. Administrators can set up and change templates, other people, eg authors simply make posts.

When we use Blogger, the main way that we change the data in our web-pages is using the Blogger software. 

Some items inside posts or gadgets can be changed using other software, eg Google Docs, provided they were were set up using that other software in the first place. But - key point - there is nothing in the way that Blogger is put together that means we need to access the base directory. So they don't let us do so.    And I doubt that this this will change anytime soon.

What to do instead

The options for getting around this restriction depend on how the file that you need to put into your root directory is intended to be used.

Installing code:

If you have code to install into your blog, and a file to go with it, then you just need to

1. Host the file somewhere else (maybe in your Picasa-web-album for the blog, if it's a picture)
2. Change the code to point to the full path of where you have hosted the file, instead of the relative path used in the code

For example, here is the code for a button linking to my blog, with the picture in the root directory:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="//Logo.png" width="100" /></a></div>

To change this to use a specific location, I just add a file-path and the file-name of the picture wherever it is hosted.

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeN0Hb7-arUkIfbNDOOQa2-eeiLrXgz9rdUMc-MdlyY7wRy_fIi51kLFPRQ5JdzH2Tw-k_8NFsDOmqxNICkT8yK0OX4zKgQPQNzAxbmpEcWWr3WF3D-Kw5GREYa_mMX878T3zLImzY1QnR/s320/Logo.png" width="100" /></a></div>

TIP: blogger's editor sometimes gets links mixed up, so it's important to start the filepath with "http://"

Verifying ownership:

If someone wants to use a file's position to check that you control a website, then they will have code on their own website that looks for the file in your root directory.

You cannot change this code. And you cannot place the fie.

So you need to ask them for an alternative way to verify, that is suitable for people without root directory access.

 If they don't have any alternatives, try lobbying for this on their product support forum:  by not having alterantives, they are ensuring that Blogger users, among others, cannot use their service.

If the official answer is still "no", then you could also ask in other on-line forums if anyone has found any other work-arounds.


What other reasons have you found for installing files to your root directory?   
What work-arounds have worked for you?

An afterthought:   what isn't recommended

I've recently seen someone suggest in a help forum that people with custom domains can put files into their blog's root directory by FTP'ing the files into place.

 This may be true, if the service that you are purchasing from your domain registrar includes file-hosting. But file hosting(*)

1. Isn't necessary for a custom domain used in Blogger (since Google hosts our files for us), and
2. Isn't available as part of the services when you buy a custom-domain through Blogger.

So it's not a general solution for most Blogger users, though it may work for some.

Initially I was a little sceptical of the idea: Blogger doesn't expect to see any files in our root directory, so I was concerned that it might do strange things if it found them there. But on reflection, I think there is probably a low risk of this happening, since the file-location is outside Blogger's control.

(*) To avoid any confusion, file hosting and DNS hosting are not the same thing. If you buy a custom domain for your blog from a registrar without going through Google/Blogger, then you do need to pay for DNS hosting, but do not need to buy file-hosting.

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Related Articles:



File hosts - places to store files used in your blog.

Picasa-web-albums: a quick introduction

How Blogger data is organised

Setting up a new administrator for your blog

Options for letting other people write in your blog

Adding meta-tags to your blog

This article describes meta-tags: why and how to add them to your blog.  


It applies to any type of meta-tag except the description-tag:  Blogger introduced special editing tools for them in late March 2012, so they are covered separately.

What is a meta-tag, and why would you use one

A meta-tag is a piece of HTML code that is found inside a webpage, and contains information about the page.

When HTML was invented, meta-tags were used for data about who made each page, what it's about, and what keywords apply to it. Originally search-engines used these tags to build indexes (ie databases) about where to find things.  However this doesn't often happen now: spammers used meta-tags to lie to the search-engines, so the search-engines got smarter and ignored meta-tags.

Today, however, meta-tags are still used to give "information" about websites to electronic visitors, for  many purposes.

For example, a search-engine or directory may ask you to prove that you do own a website which you claim to own, by adding a meta-tags of their choice to it. PInterest lets website-owners opt out of having their sites shared / pinned by adding a specific meta-tag that effectively says "Nope, you're not allowed to pin this one". And Facebook uses (still? maybe it's used now) open-graph meta tags to let us set the picture and text that are shown when a page is shared.

There are a wide variety of meta-tags still in use on the web today.  And they are a clever idea: no one needs to set the "rules" about what meta-tags are allowed - they just need to be available to whatever electronic-visitors see them on a website.


What does a meta-tag look like:

These are some example meta-tags:

<meta name="description" content="Adding pictures to your blog without using gadgets" />

<meta name="keywords" content="HTML,images, filestore, picture" /> 

<meta name="author" content="Mary Smith" />

Each one has two parts (in technical terms, this arrangement is called a "name/value pair"):

1. some text that says what the meta-tag is about  (eg description, author)
2. some text that contains the value for this case (eg  "Mary Smith")

This idea has been used in other ways too - instead of "name" some meta-tags use other values, like

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />  

If you look at your blog's template, you may find that there are already meta-tags there, which Blogger added to every post and page.   For example in Blogger-HAT's template I can see:

<meta content='some-verification-codes-from-Google' name='google-site-verification'/>

<meta content='IE=EmulateIE7' http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible'/>

<b:if cond='data:blog.isMobile'>
      <meta content='width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0' name='viewport'/>
<b:else/>

The first is a verification tag from webmaster central that I added a long time ago, while the others are meta-tags that Blogger developers decided would be good to have.


What does each meta-tag apply to

Odd One Out
Nigel Chadwick [CC-BY-SA-2.0],
via Wikimedia Commons

Before adding a meta-tag you need to decide whether it applies to every screen (ref:  Blogger, blogs and bloggers, Posts, Pages and screens) that your blog shows, or whether it only applies to an individual post.

As a general rule, think about what the content of the meta-tag means:  unless you can see how it specifically relates to material in a post, then you are probably best adding it to your whole blog.

How to add a meta-tag to a blog-post

Description meta-tags are a special case, and I'll be publishing a separate article about them very shortly.

But for all other types of meta-tag, Blogger's Post-editor doesn't allow any other sort of meta-tags: even if you go into HTML mode and type them in, they will be automatically removed when you publish the post or look at in again in Compose mode.

So to add other tags to specific posts, you need to


1)   Edit your template - don't expand the widgets.


2)   Find this text:

<head> 

You may need to look for <head SOME-OTHER-STUFF>, depending on what template you are using. Usually I  search for "<head", ie without the closing bracket, and make sure that I do what is needed after the closing bracket >.

3)   Add this line of code after the <head> tag:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "PUT-THE-POST-URL-HERE"'>
< THE META-TAG YOU WANT TO ADD>
</b:if>

replacing:

• <THE META-TAG YOU WANT TO ADD> - with the actual meta-tag details, and
• PUT-THE-POST-URL-HERE with the full address of the post. 

This means you cannot add the meta-tags until you know the post's URL, ie after the post has been published for the first time. This is a little tedious, but not impossible. You just need to publish the post, get the URL, and then edit your template and add the meta-tag info for the post

Alternatively, you could just apply the tag to your so-called home page by adding the tag with a "home page only" conditional, eg

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
THE CODE FOR YOUR META-TAG(s) GOES IN HERE
</b:if>

Adding meta-tags to your whole blog:

This is most appropriate for tags that genuinely should apply to every single page on your blog:   what these are depends on how your blog is organised, and what you expect the meta-tags to be used for.

Again, description meta-tags are a special case, and will be covered separately.

You can add non-description meta-tags by editing your template and putting the meta-tag statement somewhere in the header, ie

after  <head  SOME-OTHER STUFF>
before  </head>

Make sure that you put the meta-tag statement in-between the other HTML statements in the header, ie after a closing > and before an opening one>


What your readers see

People who visit your blog won't see anything different provided you've installed the meta-tags properly.

But search-engine-spiders and other computer-based visitors will read the contents of the meta-tags. This may cause them to display things about your blog differently at their end (eg a description within Facebook), but won't make any difference when a human visitor is looking at your blog.


Is it worth it?

Only you can decide if it's worth the trouble of adding meta-tags to your blog.

If you're doing it so your site ownership can be verified, then it's almost certainly worthwhile.

And obviously Blogger thinks that description tags are worthwile - because they've given us a way to edit them inside the post-editor.

But if you're doing it for SEO, so that your blog ranks higher in search results, or looks more attractive / clickable on the result-pages, then the only answer is "it depends". There area a lot of unknowns about SEO: there are experts who are adamanent that certain meta-tags are essential for your blog to do well in search. They may be right.  They may have been correct - for a few weeks or even months or years, but some people believe they are not correct now.   Others say that meta-tags still matter, because tags, especially description tags, influence what body-text is shown in seach-engine-result-pages (SERPS).   But really, only the search-engine makes know the real answer.   And even then, their answer may change tomorrow if a new search-algorithm change is applied.

What do you think?

Do you have specific examples where adding a meta-tag has made your blog better in some way?

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Related Articles:



Post snippet and post-thumbnail:  summaries of your blog post

Blogger, blogs and bloggers, Posts, Pages and screens

Giving your blog a home page

How to edit Blogger posts that have already been published

Comment management policy and moderation principles

This article explains the policies that Blogger-HAT applies in accepting, moderating and responding to comments.

Comments are one of the ways we can let other people write on our blogs.

Blogger lets us choose whether or not to allow comments overall, and also on individual posts. And it provides options for Blogger administrators to choose whether comments are automatically published, or if they must be approved first. This approval process is called moderation.

The following sections describe the policies that I apply in moderating Blogger-HAT and Blogger-HAT-Lite.

You are welcome to use this as the basis of your own comment-management rules - but please make sure that consider each suggestion, to see how it applies your blog, and acknowledge Blogger-Hints-and-Tips as the original source by placing this line in the footer of your own posted policy

Modified from the comments-moderation policies applied by Blogger-Hints-and-Tips.

Comments Policy

Blogger-Hints-and-Tips welcomes genuine comments from readers.

This blog retains the no-follow option set by Blogger in most default templates. This means that web-addresses put into comments left here will not help to get your site indexed.   But if you write interesting comments, I will probably look at your site, and may subscribe to your blog's RSS feed or share it on my Facebook page, which will give you some credit with most search engines.

All comments are moderated, using the moderation policies outlines below.

Blogger-HAT aims to review and act on all comments within 3 days: however there may be delays if time is needed to research issues.


Moderation principles

• Only English-language comments are accepted.   Others will be deleted, or marked as spam.

• "+1", "me-too" and "thanks, that helps" comments may be published, provided the number of them does not detract from other visitors experience of the blog.

• Comments that provide specific feedback about problems you have with the advice in an article - or about changes in Blogger etc since the article was written - are especially welcome.

• All comments are published, or rejected, as is: I do not edit or alter your comments in any way.  (See the section below about copyright for more information about this.)

• Comments that are spam will not be published, and Blogger's spam-filters will be alerted.

• Comments that do not relate to the article that they are left on will not be published: they will be deleted.

• Comments that are "signed" with a blog or website URL/address will not be published, unless there is a direct link between the URL and the content of the article and the comment you left. 

• Comments that contain email addresses or other contact information (eg phone numbers) will not be published.  (This is for your own protection - even if you think it's not necessary, I do not want to be responsible for you being harassed.)

• Comments that include personal names will not be published, unless the name is common enough that you are not readily identifiable.

• Comments that do not meet Blogger's publication standards (including racism, hate-speech, violence etc) will not be published, and maybe reported as spam at Blogger-HAT's sole discretion.

• Comments that conflict with the terms and conditions of Blogger-HATs advertisers (including AdSense and other advertisers) will not be published.

• Application of all these principles is at Blogger-HAT's discretion.

Help with your blog:

By Gnome-help-faq.svg: GNOME icon artists
Gnome-emblem-generic.svg:
GNOME icon artists derivative work:
Ower 89 (Gnome-help-faq.svg Gnome-emblem-generic.svg)
[GPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)],
via Wikimedia Commons

I do not provide advice about specific problems on individual blogs via comments on this site: if you need help with a specific blog problem, post a question on the Blogger Product Forum.
.
But comments that link to posts in the Blogger-Problem-forum are welcome, and I will try to assist you in the forum if you link to your query ina comment left here.

Why the difference? It's because advice I give in the forum is quality-assured by the other helpers who also read the posts there: If overlook something, one of the other helpers is likely to spot it. Similarly, if your problem needs knowledge that I don't have, someone else may be able to help. As Blogger grows more and more complex, solving problems needs a wider range of skills, and the chance of one person knowing everything gets even smaller.)


Copyright:

The content of all comments is owned by the person who left the comment.

By leaving a comment this blog, you are giving me the non-exclusive right to display your comment here, and to repeat it within blog-posts provided the source is acknowledged.  

You also note that my blog has RSS-feeds for comments enabled, so you comment may be published elsewhere too.



Comments submitted to alternative channels:

Messages left on Blogger-HAT's Facebook page or Twitter stream or Google+ page will be responded to in those forums.

Comments sent by email via my personal Google+ Profile will generally not be responded to.


What else? 

Are there other issues that you think a comments policy should cover?   Please let me know if you think I've missed an important issue.

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Related Articles:



Ways of letting people write on your blog.

\Basic copyright info for blogs and bloggers