Google product cancellations for October 2012

This Quick-Tip is about the products that Google is dropping, or making changes to, from October 2012.

Google's latest announcement about retiring products came out yesterday (Saturday).   Seems odd that they're calling it "spring cleaning", since it's autumn / fall in most of the countries where major Google products are based.

So what's on the list that will affect Blogger-users?

AdSense for Feeds is being switched off - this has never been much of an earner for me, but I guess it could be significant for some people who have very large subscriber audiences.   There's one line that worries me a little ""Publishers can continue to use FeedBurner URLs powered by Google, so they won’t need to redirect subscribers to different URLs." - it's saying "no change to Feedburner", but I wonder why they feel the need to say this.

Storage limits in Picasa and Google Drive "will be consolidated over the next few months" - we get five gig of free storage across both products, not in each one.   But on the plus side, people who've paid for storage in one of these services will be able to  use it in either of them.

No new Google News Badges will be issued from mid-October, and there will be no more Recommended Sections.   I don't know these products well, but they may be relevant for people who have built a blog that shows news feeds.

Insights for Search has been merged into Google Trends, and expanded to cover more countries.   Trends for Websites is no longer being updated though, which could be missed by people who use this tool to figure out what to blog about.

+1 Reports in Webmaster Tools are being removed, because Google Analytics has better tools.   I'm guessing that any bloggers who are seriously tracking their +1 performance will be using Analytics anyway.

Google Groups now has a "My Discussions" view

This Quick-Tip is about how to see the posts you made in Google Groups - in particular in the Blogger Product Forum.

I used to be quite active in the previous Blogger Help Forum.   But since they switched to the new Google Groups based Blogger Product Forum, I've been less enthusiastic:

• The design doesn't work as well on the netbook that I use a lot of the time
• It wasn't easy to look up questions that I'd answered previously to see whether the answer was helpful.   

The old system used to tell me that there were new posts in topics that I'd posted in, so it was very easy to go back and either give more help (kind of "after sales service") or hear from people who I'd been able to help (good motivation for helping other people.).

Today I noticed that a feature which is almost as good has been introduced to Google Groups.

The left-hand navigation area now has an entry for "My Discussions".  Choosing it shows all posts with author:me. 

This is a list of posts, not a list of questions, and the ones with new posts since I last logged in are not in bold.   So it's not quite as good as the previous approach.   But it's close enough for me to take more interest in questions that I contributed to previously, which is good for both me and (I hope!) the person who asked the question.

Takeout now lets you download your own YouTube videos

This Quick-Tip is about accessing your own YouTube videos, using Google's Takeout / Data-liberation service.

If you upload a video using the Blogger Post Editor's video icon, then it's stored in Google Videos - which is now retired except for the part that hosts vids uploaded thru Blogger.   (This was where they were being put  the last time I checked, which was a few months ago)

Many people dislike this, and prefer to upload their vids to YouTube first, and then link to the YouTube video from Blogger.  This gives

• Better control over the size of the video you display in your blog / website
• Video management tools (sorely lacking in Google Videos). 
• Statistics about viewers
• The chance to earn money separately from your blog if your video becomes popular
• Access to many more YoutTube features.

This is similar to the recommendation to upload pictures to Picasa independently of the post-editor, and putting them into your posts via the URL - it just gives you more control.

Now you can use Google Takeout to download a copy of the original for videos that you have uploaded to YouTube - without changing the format.   This is different to YouTube's download function, which only lets you download a transformed/transcoded version (eg a .wmv I just checked was available for download from YouTube as .mp4).

This can be used if you are:

• Moving your content away from Blogger / Google
• Transferring a blog to a different Google account:
  Currently there is no way to transfer ownership of a video in YouTube without changing the link to it, one option is to download the original video, upload it again using the new account and edit the original post to point to the new location.

Get notified about changes in popularity of pages on your blog/site.

This Quick-Tip describes the alerts that Webmaster Tools are now offering for changes in search popularity of particular pages.

Google Webmaster Tools have added to their alerts features.

Basically, this means that they try to notice the changes "that could be most interesting for you", and send the website owner a message when they spot something.

You can view these messages in the Webmaster tools site, or by signing up inside Wesmaster Tools to have alerts forwarded to your email.

The newest(*) alert they added is for Search Queries.   ref:   http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ie/2012/08/search-queries-alerts-in-webmaster-tools.html

This features shows "impressions and clicks for your top pages over time."

They say

"For most sites, these numbers follow regular patterns, so when sudden spikes or drops occur, it can make sense to look into what caused them. Some changes are due to differing demand for your content, other times they may be due to technical issues that need to be resolved, such as broken redirects. For example, a steady stream of clicks which suddenly drops to zero is probably worth investigating."

They're still working on what levels of change to report: it should be interesting to see how they cope with the wide variety of seasonal patterns.  For example, I have one site that has weekly content: each week's post builds interest in the preceeding three weeks, then has strong traffic until a certain day and then drops to pretty close to zero.   It will get popular again, but not until almost three years have passed - simply due to the niche that this blog is in.    Now, I don't want to be alerted to this, because it's pattern I know very well! But I wouldl be interested if they could tell me that the expected "strong growth in the last week" isn't happening.



(*)   I originally wrote this in late August, but somehow forgot to publish it.    Found it again just now, and decided to share it, even though it's not as fresh as it was then.    Hopfully it will still help someone.

How to put pictures into unusual shapes, using PowerPoint

This article explains how to put a picture that is one shape (a "square peg") inside an image of another shape (a "round hole" - or star, elipse, octagon, etc) - using Microsoft PowerPoint.

Original title:   How to put a square peg into a round hole - in pictures

Recently, I've been using PowerPoint to make the thumbnail image for my posts. This means that I own the copyright of the pictures, so can share them without worrying about copyright issues.

One approach I've used is to find an interesting copyright-free picture that is related to the theme of the post, and then put it inside a shape that adds some visual interest or has some words along side it.  Another thing that I'm going to try is using multiple pictures in this way to make a more-interesting-than-usual collage.

How to put a picture inside a shape

NB PowerPoint commands are based on Office 2007 and 2010 - but the same principles most-likely apply in other versions where the commands may be slightly different.

1   Get your image file, and save it somewhere on your computer.

A wide range of picture-file formats are supported by PowerPoint:  in the 2007 version this includes as shown in this list:

2     In PowerPoint, make a blank side (Home > Layout > Blank)

3     Then add a shape (Insert > Shapes, click on the shape you want)

Intially, the shape with have the fill-colour and border that are the current default values. But you can change this, which is what we are going to do.


4    Right-click on the shape, and choose Format Shape from the pop-up menu

5    In the Fill tab, choose Picture or Texture Fill, then click the File button and navigate to the image file you got in step 1, and click OK.

6   Make sure that the portion of the picture that you want to show is in the picture:  to start with the shape is centered on the middle of the picture.

Change this using the Offsets to move the shape to the left or right over the image.   You can make the offsets positive or negative as shown.

You can monitor the results of different settings in PowerPoints slide thumbnails (on the left hand side, if you have it showing), or by dragging the pop-up menu to a different place in the screen so that you can see the shape itself.

Job Done - at this point, you have an image that is cropped to the shape that you chose - now you just have to put it into your blog.

Using the picture

There are (at least) three ways to get the shape-cropped-picture from PowerPoint into your blog.

I usually copy the item from PowerPoint, and then paste it into a picture editor (Paintbrush etc), manually.   This is an old-fashioned approacb - but it lets me adjust the size and position of the image, and save it (usually a .png) with a file-name that describes the image really well which is good for mating the blog come up in search results (SEO).   The this picture can be inserted into a post just like any other picture.

Another option is to choose File > Save As from Powerpoint, and choose to save the slides in an image format, eg JPEG which can also be inserted into a post in the usual way.  You are likely to be asked whether to put all the slides in one image, or to make one image per slide. Usually, it would be best to make one image per slide - but I don't use this method because the image that is created is the size of the whole slide, rather than just the pictures on it.

A third option is to display the PowerPoint file as a slideshow. This isn't something that I'd do for only one shaped image, but may be relevant in some situations.

Adjusting the size and quality of the picture

One thing that you don't have any control of inside PowerPoint is the zoom level of the inserted picture.

If you make the shape larger, it doesn't show a larger proportion of the picture. Instead, it just shows the existing picture in a larger size, as you can see in the slides shown here.

I suspect that if you want to zoom in to a particular area of the image file, the only approach is to edit the picture in another tool, crop out the bit that you do not want to show, and only keep the part that you want to include inside your shape.

However PowerPoint does have some limited control over the contrast and brightness of the picture, from the Picture tab of the Format Shape window.

Can you do this in other tools?  Why PowerPoint?

Yes, you can.

Photoshop, and similar commercial tools almost certainly have features like this, and I'm certain that GIMP (like a public-domain, less powerful version of Photoshop) and Inkscape (another public-domain image program which is more focussed on scalable-vector-graphics and objects than on pixels) also have these features.

So why use PowerPoint?   In short, its (relatively) cheap and many people have access to it already.   It's also very easy to learn, compared to the other packages, and what you learn is likely to apply to lots of tasks and not just in making pictures for your blog.

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Related Articles:

Putting a picture into a blog-post

Post.thumbnail and post.summary - ways of describing blog posts

Showing a PowerPoint slideshow in Blogger

Copyright, blogs and Blogger/Google

Using a domain purchased from another domain registrar or blogging-platform for your Blogger blog

This article is about how to use a domain (URL) that was purchased outside of Blogger / Google as the custom-domain for your blog.
 
Blogger and custom domains

The easiest way to give your Blogger blog a custom domain is to pick an URL that is currently available and purchase it through the Settings > Publishing  tab.   If that is s successful, all you need to do is set up an administrator account for your domain.   (Sept 2012:  this option is currently unavailable - hopefully it will be back soon.)

But sometimes the URL you want will not be available through Google / Blogger:

• Maybe it's owned by someone else
• Maybe you own it  already, because you purchased it through another domain registrar.  
• Maybe you don't have a credit-card so cannot purchase through  Google.  
• Maybe it's for a country that Blogger doesn't sell domains for (eg Ireland).

In these cases, you can't use Blogger to manage the domain.  Instead, you need to buy it another way - or get control of it if someone else already owns it.

Then after you own the domain, you need to set it up with the correct settings to work with Blogger.   To do this, you need to use the settings information that Blogger provides and the domain management tools (usually a control panel, aka CPanel) provided by your domain registrar.

If you are buying a domain from a registrar

If you need to (or already have) obtained them domain name through a domain registrar, you need to  purchase both:

• Name registration, and 
• DNS Hosting

You do not need to purchase file-hosting from them, because Blogger provides this for our blogs.

There are some registrars that don't offer domain hosting separately from other hosting packages.   In this case, it's your choice whether to use this company or to use another one.   There is no harm in purchasing file hosting that you are are not going to use - except that it's a waste of money.

If you find that your registrar doesn't offer DNS Hosting at all (unlikely) or that you don't want to pay the fee that the charge (which may be quite high if they only sell it with file hosting), then you need to transfer the domain to another registrar (which does offer DNS hosting) before you can use it for your blog.



Setting up a domain for your blog

Once you have control of the URL, follow these steps to set up your blog on it:


Go into www.Blogger.com and using the now-standard (ie post Sept 2011) interface.  


In  Settings > Basic >  Publishing > + Add a custom domain >  Switch to Custom Domain > 

1. Fill in your domain name, then
2. Click Settings instructions
3. If you are told "You have unsaved changes that will be lost.   Leave this page anyway"  (or similar) - choose OK / Leave this page.

This opens a page of instructions which contains the values you need to use in the next step.


At the top of the page, you are asked the following question.

Where would you like to host your blog?

•  On a top-level domain (www.example.com).

•  On a subdomain (foo.example.com).

If you don't understand this, just click on the top-level-domain option.   (If you do understand it, you don't need me to tell you which option to choose!)



2)    In the domain-management tool for your domain, set up the DNS records (ie CNAME and AName records), using the values from the page that is opened.

The way of setting up the domain records is different for every registrar.  You may need to read the help file, or ask the domain registrar's customer services department for help.   Or, if your domain registrar is GoDaddy, then this tool makes it especially easy.  (That said - at the moment it is not setting up the 2nd CNAME record for you - still need to do it yourself.)

You need to setup up two CNAME records.

• The first CNAME record should have your domain URL and ghs.google.com
• The values for the second CNAME record are buried in the text of the instructions page - I've underlined them in the following picture to help you find them.   (Hopefully Blogger will make this easier to read soon.)

You also need to set up four ANAME records - see further down in Google's instructions page for the values to use for these.


Wait an hour, and then go into www.Blogger.com again   (NB  you may not need to wait the full hour, but it's safer).  
NB   If you wait too long, then the 2nd CNAME combination that Google gave you will have expired, and you will have to do that step again,    So I'd suggest waiting an hour, and no more.


In Blogger, go to  Settings > Basic > Publishing > + Add a custom domain >  Switch to Custom Domain > 

• Fill in your domain name (yes, again).
• Click Save (just under the pane)

If get a message

We have not been able to verify your authority to this domain. Error 32. Please follow the settings instructions.

then you did not get the set-up in correct in your domain-registrar (or maybe you haven't waited long enough - or waited too long!)


If you do not see that message, then your re-direction was successful.   However you may need to allow a bit of time (maybe a few minutes, maybe as long as three days) for the changes to take effect.

Test whether they have been applied by typing your custom-domain into a web-browser:  you should be taken to your Blogger blog.

Ask for help if you need it:

There are many things that can go wrong when you are setting up a custom domain, and error messages like "Another blog is already hosted at this address" are quite common.

If the process described above doesn't work after three days (72 hours), or if you get an error message other than "site not found" before that,  the post a new question in the Blogger Product Forum:  Include these details:

• Your custom-domain name / URL, 
• Your blogsplot URL 
• The date andtime that you made the change (don't forget to include your timezone)
• A description of what's happening.

Some of the helpers in BPF are expert at diagnosing what's wrong and telling you how to fix the domain, and very happy to help provide you give them the information that the need to work out what's wrong. 

What if someone else owns the domain

Before you start, you need to own, or at least control, the domain.

If someone else currently owns a URL that you want to use, you need to:

• Negotiate with them, and get them to agree to transfer the domain to you
• Set up an account with a domain registrar
  (GoDaddy are the registrars that Google currently uses for Blogger users:  if you use them, you can be certain that the domain-management tools provided will do everything Blogger needs you to do.
  GoDaddy also have a tool that makes it extra easy to use one of their domains for Blogger - log in to your GoDaddy account, and go here to access it).
• Using that domain-registrar account, request that the domain is transferred to you
• Do anything else (eg make a payment) that you told the current owner that you would do (eg make a payment)
• Make sure that the current owner does whatever is needed to transfer the account to you.

Even though Blogger provides some "nice" tools that make URL management easier for "first time buyers" of custom domains, they are not a domain registrar themselves.  This means you cannot transfer a domain that was purchased through another domain registrar to Blogger / Google.   Instead, you need to follow the steps below to use the domain-name for your blog.



A note about Google Apps and Sites domains:
If you purchased a domain through Google Apps or Google Sites, then you already have control over it.

But you may need to disable sites in the account management screen before you can use the domain for your blog.

And after you have done this, you can go straight to Step 3 of the next section, because the CName and AName records are (already set up to use Google's servers.

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Related Articles:

Setting up an administrator account for your new custom domain.

Switching your blog from one custom domain to another.

Using a custom domain that you own for something other than Blogger

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts matters for your blog.

Putting a custom search engine on your blog

Stop malicious use of your AdSense account ID.

Desktop search turns a downward corner?

This Quick-Tip shares an interesting observation about the trends in search-volumes - and is a reminder to think about what your blog is like for readers who use mobile devices.

Today I noticed an interesting post from on-line marketing firm Blind Five Year Old, who've been tracking comScore search-engine ratings for seven years.

comScore's ratings are all about relative market share of the search-engines.

But BFYO has used them to look at overall search engine volumes and has noticed that

August 2012 was the first time that US desktop search volume declined year-on-year

This means that there were less desktop searches (in the USA) in August 12 than there were in August 11. Year-on-year comparisons are often better than monthly ones because they can cancel out the effects of seasonal patterns (holidays, starting school, major events, etc)

Now this doesn't mean that people have stopped doing more searching than before. Most likely it means that they've started to do more of their searching on mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, etc).

For Blogger users, it means that:

If your blog depends on search to get readers (or even just new readers)
   and
Your blog topic is one that people will search for using a mobile device
   then
You need to think about how how your blog looks and works on mobile devices, and most probably to enable a mobile-template for it.

This doesn't apply to everyone. For example, Blogger is primarily desktop software, so I'm not really worried about the mobile experience given by Blogger-Hints-and-Tips.   But my public-transport blog now gets about 25% of its visitors from mobile devices - and I think this will grow. So it matters there.

Even if you don't think that your blog would have "mobile-appeal" or appear in local search results - don't forget that many people now like to catch up on reading using their smartphone in in-between moments.  If your blog is "a good read" rather than desktop-specific reference information, then being mobile-friendly might be the difference between whether people subscribe to you or not.

Mobile templates, by the way, are fantastic because they let Blogger-users deliver sites that are responsive with far less effort than owners of conventional websites are having to put in.

Google Affiliate Network has a widget for UK Bloggers

This Quick-Tip is about the Google Advertiser Network widget becoming available for Blogger users based in the UK.

Today, Google Advertisers Network announced that their Blogger widget is now available for some Blogger users in the United Kindgom.

You don't control whether you see the widget or not.  If you:

• have an AdSense account, and 
• have linked it to your blog's Earnings tab, and 
• are blogging in an appropriate niche (ie one that Google Advertiser Network has advertisers for), 

then the widget will show up in your post editor (I'm guessing on the right hand panel) when you are editing a post.

I can't see it myself at the moment, so I have no idea whether you can get rid of it, like you can with the Zemanata post-editor gadget.

Actually, I'm wondering how Blogger decides where someone is based, and why it's relevant: one of my blogs is very specific to Ireland (where I live) but gets a lot of interest from the UK - and lots of people from Ireland buy things direct from the UK anyway.  So I could see some of the UK GAN advertisers being quite relevant.

And as I've mentioned before, this gadget makes it easy to put ads into a post.  But if you can see the gadget, you could easily enough put them into a widget (ie sidebar header or footer) by taking the HTML from the post editor's HTML view, and putting it elsewhere in your blog just like any other 3rd-party code.

How to link posts together in Blogger

This article shows how to link from a new blog post to one that you have already written. It is part of the Blogger-Basics series.

Sometimes, when you're writing a blog-post, you want to refer to a post you wrote before.

• It means that you don't have to repeat information, and can focus on writing it really well in just one place.
• It encourages visitors to read more than one post, and doesn't bore people who already know the related information..
• It's good for SEO (encouraging search-engines to give your blog a good place in their result lists)

For example, many of the posts here on Blogger-Hints-and-Tips are about how to get other tools (eg Facebook, Feedburner, AdSense) to work with Blogger:  in general these posts describe how to get some HTML code from the "other" site, and then how to install it into your blog. Originally, I repeated the "how to install" instructions in every post - but when Blogger changed how this was done, this meant I had to update dozens of posts.  To make this simpler the next time, I just wrote one post about installing third-party code into Blogger.

Follow these steps to link two posts together

1   Write the first post (the one you want to link to), and publish it. (You cannot link to it until after you have published it.)


2  Copy the URL / web-address of the first post.
The URL will start with https:// and then have your blog's url and the post information, like this:

http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2010/04/adding-separator-line-between-your.html

You can see the URL at the top of the browser in the address bar, when you choose to View the post from the list of posts in the Dashboaurd. Or you could right click on the View link and choose "copy target".

3  Edit the second post, ie the one where you want to put the link.


4  Find the text that you want to put the link on, and select it.

• This is called the "anchor text", because you attach your link to it.
• It's best if you use descriptive text like "worn with a formal dress" rather than words like "click here", because they help visitors and search engines know what the other article is about).

5  Click the Link icon in the toolbar: it's the one with the word  "link" on it - or in older versions of the Blogger software, it had a pictures that looked like a chain.   It also shows the word "link" if you hover the mouse over it.

6  In the window that opens, paste the address of the other post into the Web-address field.

7  At this point you can also choose whether clicking on the link shows the other post in the same window, or in a new one, using the "open in a new window" checkbox.
(Some people think it would be good to always open linked posts in a new window - but it can be very annoying for a user if they end up with a lot of open windows. Personally, I usually make links to my own site open in the same window, and links to other sites open in a new window.)


8  Click ok

What your readers will see

When someone reads the post that you put the link into, they will see your post in the normal way. The anchor-text (ie the linking-words that you chose) will be formatted in the same way that other links in your blog are formatted.

This is true for readers who are looking at your blog through a web-browser, and for ones who subscribe to your blog by email or who read it in a feed-reader.

When they click on the link, it will be opened in the way that you said - either in the same browser or in a new window.

Linking to or from other things?

In this article, we've talked about linking from one post to another post, using text.

You can also go back and re-edit your first post, and put a link to the second one in it - in exactly the same way as described above. (If you look at some more Blogger-Hints-and-Tips posts, you will see that I use lots of an lots of links to all sorts of posts.)

Or you could put the link onto a picture instead of onto text.

Or you might want to link to an email address, so that people can easily send you a message.

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Related Articles:

Getting started with blogger

How to edit a post that you have already published in Blogger

The follow-by-email gadget: a quick way to offer email subscriptions to your blog

Why do some blog-visitors use feed-reader software

Using a picture as the link-anchor in Blogger

How to show a working email address in your blog

Verifying blogs and their Google+ pages

This quick-tip describes verifying Google+ pages, based on a recent post in the Inside AdSense blog.

Verifying Google+ pages is about making an official link between a page and a website, as a way of getting exposure for both the site and the page.

For some reason it was recently described in the InSide Adsense blog (thought I'm not sure what it's got to do with AdSense), where they say

Verifying your +page confirms that the +page actually belongs to you. Once your +page is verified, it’ll appear with a checkmark designed to help our users find what they’re looking for.
and

Verified +pages that are popular and engaging may appear on the right side of relevant Google.com search results, for users who are logged in. .... Please keep in mind that to be eligible, the +page also needs to be active with regularly-updated content

To verify your page, you need to

1. Link your +page to your website: Fill out the ‘About’ section of your Google+ page, being sure to enter your site’s top-level URL.
2. Link your website to your +page: Add a Google+ badge or code snippet to your site, ...
3. Complete ... [the]  verification request form.
4. ... continue posting regularly to your +page ....

The verification form, at http://support.google.com/plus/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=page_verification&rd=1 states the conditions a little differently (boldness mine);

• Your Google+ page must be authorized by your commercial entity, organization, brand, or product.
• Your Google+ page’s profile must contain a link to your organization’s website.
• Your organization’s website must connect to your Google+ page, by adding the Google+ badge or by adding a snippet of code.
• A meaningful number of people must have added your Google+ page to their circles.

This should be simple enough for most of my sites - I own the website and the G+ page.   Though it should be a little more challenging for one or two community groups that I do things for, where the ownership is a little ore "vague".

However I guess it depends on what "a meaningful number" means:   I tried doing it for my Blogger-HAT page, and just got a message saying:

Dear User,
We’ve reviewed your verification request. Unfortunately we’re unable to verify your page at this time.
For more information regarding our guidelines governing verification, please consult the verification request form at http://www.google.com/support/plus/bin/request.py?contact_type=extended_verification
If you have any further questions please consult the Google+ help center at http://www.google.com/support/plus/?hl=en-US&p=help_center
Thanks,
Google+ Support Team

This was pretty unhelpful - it doesn't tell me whether I've got the page / site links wrong, or whether there aren't a meaningful number of +1s yet.

I'm wondering if anyone knows what might count as "meaningful"?

Introducing Quick-Tips: notes about interesting changes in other blogging tools

This quick-tip introduces "quick tips", a new type of post in Blogger-Hints-and-Tips.

In January this year, I started Blogger-HAT-Lite. The idea was to make  short posts about changes in other products which Bloggers often use, but which I didn't have the time or information to write a good-quality article about.

Since then, I've found, that the changes in other products don't happen often enough to justify maintaining a separate blog: while it's "just another blog", each one needs to be monitored, designed, etc - and I now need to consolidate.

So, effective yesterday, I've decided to try a new approach.  From now, Blogger-HAT will have two main types of posts:

Articles
Starting with "This article shows ... ", these are in-depth explanations of a topic, or answers to a common question. They explore the non-obvious-but-still-important aspects of the topic, and explicitly look at what different typess of blog-visitors will see. And I will do my best to keep them up-to-date as things change. 

Quick-tips
Starting with "This Quick-tip ... ", these are short, quickly written notes about new and interesting things - especially in products that Blogger-users often use. They will ask lots of questions, may have factual errors (because I won't be researching them thoroughly), and won't even begin to work through all the issues about the topic.

To save time, quick-tips will always have the same picture. For now, it's the exclamation-mark button at the top of this post, but it may change if I have a clever idea about a more suitable picture that gets across the idea of Blogger, speed, interest and possibility.

You can find Quick-Tips using the Quick-tip label. I'm still working out how I'll put topic categories on them, either with general topic labels, or specific "QT" ones.

I haven't decided whether to move the existing "LITE" posts into Blogger-HAT, or whether to just leave them where they are.     Suggestions welcome.

Post author is now the first person to save a post, not the first to publish it

This Quick-Tip (more about them soon), is about a change that I noticed in Blogger's Post-editor a week or so ago - and I've just confirmed again that it's still happening now.

In short, the post-author is set to the first Google-account that saves a post - not the first one that Publishes it.

Verify your Google + page to get more exposure in search results

I spotted an interesting post in the AdSense blog just now.

It's actually been deleted from the blog (probably because it was supposed to be posted on the Google+ blog, not the AdSense one), but the original feed content is still available, for now, at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tuAm/~3/30qIWIcbTMk/social-fridays-gain-visibility-by.html

According to the feed, it's all about verifying Google + pages, ie making an official link between a page and a website.   They say

Verifying your +page confirms that the +page actually belongs to you. Once your +page is verified, it’ll appear with a checkmark designed to help our users find what they’re looking for.
and

Verified +pages that are popular and engaging may appear on the right side of relevant Google.com search results, for users who are logged in. .... Please keep in mind that to be eligible, the +page also needs to be active with regularly-updated content

To verify your page, you need to

1. Link your +page to your website: Fill out the ‘About’ section of your Google+ page, being sure to enter your site’s top-level URL.
2. Link your website to your +page: Add a Google+ badge or code snippet to your site, ...
3. Complete ... [the]  verification request form.
4. ... continue posting regularly to your +page ....

The verification form, at http://support.google.com/plus/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=page_verification&rd=1 states the conditions a little differently (boldness mine);

• Your Google+ page must be authorized by your commercial entity, organization, brand, or product.
• Your Google+ page’s profile must contain a link to your organization’s website.
• Your organization’s website must connect to your Google+ page, by adding the Google+ badge or by adding a snippet of code.
• A meaningful number of people must have added your Google+ page to their circles.

This will be simple enough for most of my sites - I own the website and the G+ page.   Though it should be a little more challenging for one or two community groups that I do things for, where the ownership is a little ore "vague".

My only decision is whether to start the verification process now, or to wait for this to be announced on the right blog!

What bloggers need to know about Responsive Web Design

This article is about responsive web design, and what it means for Blogger users.

Some of the information is relevant for people who use other platforms (especially Wordpress) but much isn't, because Blogger does so much of this for us.

What is Responsive Web Design?

One of the biggest changes to how people use the internet recently is the range of screen sizes.

Back in the day, we had ever-increasing screen resolutions, so most people went from 800x600 to 1024x768, etc - the specific varied along with the type of monitor and graphics card.  But the constant was the annual joke about "What's your New Year's resolution?" - the answer always got larger each year.

But now there are smartphones, tablets, and giant TV screens in the mix. Users may be looking at websites in anything between 300x200 to 4096 × 2160 - or more if they're using a TV.

To start with, no one was quite sure how websites should cater for this. Many people made two sites: one for their "regular sized" users and one for "mini-screen" users. Sometimes this led to  duplicate-content, which didn't amuse Google's search-engines. It made more work (of the boring kind) for people maintaining websites, who had to update two places. And it didn't cater for the super-size-screen folks at all.

After much thought, in June 2012, Google announced that a technique called "responsive web design" was their recommended approach. Basically, it says to have one version of the website, but to put instructions into it (usually with CSS) saying whether or where to show things based on the size of the user's screen - ie, effectively by "responding" to the user's settings.

This article from Blacknight Solutions goes into a lot more detail - and uses more technically precise language to describe the challenges and the approach.

What does Responsive Design mean for Blogger users?

This infographic is a quick-and-visual summary of the area of responsive-website design.

It recommends various books and in the "toolkit" section, it lists options for Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla and JQuery.

Of these, JQuery is used for display tools that a number of Blogger-helpers provide - so I would expect to see "responsive" being added to their features soon. 

Apart from the JQuery front, initially I thought that responsive website design didn't matter for people who use Blogger: as Ive explained before, we simply don't have much control over the web-pages that are made to display our blogs. But it made me wonder about how Google might change Blogger so they were following these guidelines fully themselves.

But after thinking some more, I realised that Blogger is already starting to use the responsive design approach with mobile templates: if one is enabled for your blog, then the gadgets that are shown a different on mobile and non-mobile devices ane the way that posts are displayed is different - but the underlying site content (posts and pages) is the same.

And there are things that we can do in our posting and template editing that will help Blogger make our sites work better on devices with different screen sizes.

So, what should we do?

Set the maximum width for pictures.

In the post-editor, you can choose to make pictures small, medium, large, etc - and the values that are used for this are absolute numbers of pixels height and width.

But what happens if you set the width to, say 400 pixels ("400px"), and a user has a screen which is narrower than this?  The question is hard to answer, because mobile devices apply some scaling-down so that in many situations the picture fits, and look fine.

I recently read an article from an English coffee-drinker, showing how to change these sizes to any values you want and to control the picture quality at the same time.   At first I thought that this would solve the problem.

But there are cases where it won't work properly, eg if you want text and pictures to be side by side, and use a table rather than a "<div>" statement to do this. If the amount of space that you allocate to the picture is wider than the space on the screen, then the results my be unpredictable, or the text may be very, very narrow.

I was originally going to suggest working around this problem by specify the width in terms of percentages instead of pixels, for example:   style = 'width: 80%;'  But, as I found tonight, if you float your pictures to the left or the right, that approach doesn't quite work - the way that the post-editor puts in <div> statements means that scaled down pictures can be left inside empty larger empty divisions, etc..

A better alternative is to continue to use small / medium / large etc, and also to add a CSS rule  saying that pictures can take more than a certain proportion (ie percentage) of the available. space.    (Thanks to Paul of Spice Up Your Blog who suggested this, as a way to stop pictures from spilling into the sidebar).  

Luckily it's very easy to do this - just add a CSS rule in the usual way for your template.   The specfic rule to add is

.post img {max-width:98% !important}

When you copy and paste - don't forget the dot (.) at the start of that line.

Also, you may like to experiment with values - you might even go as low as 80% on some blogs.   The beauty of this rule is that it specifies the maximum - if your photo is smaller than that, it's not affected.

Width of other embedded elements, eg PDF files

Pictures aren't the only things that have a fixed width - the same thing can happen to embeddded documents / PDF files, slideshows, maps, forms, etc. They can be more challenging to use on sites with smaller screen sizes. Somteimes their code might cater for differnt sizes. But one good overall principle is simply to remove the height statement from the, and specify the width in terms of a percentage.

That said, I don't do this for the embedded Google custom maps on one of my sites: as a user I very much prefer to see the map at full size, and to scroll around as I need to - so I've assumed that my visitors prefer the same approach.   It all depends on the nature of your site, and how people use it.

Responsive AdSense ads

If you use Adsense via Blogger's gadgets, then appropriately sized units will be placed on your blog. And (unless you choose the "ads between posts" option in the Blog Posts gadget) - this includes inside mobile-template viewers.

But many Bloggers use AdSense by getting the code and installing it to their template or putting it into an HTML/Javascript gadget, perhaps because they want better control over the ad colour-scheme, or to have the option of image-only AdSense ads.

Fortunately it's pretty easy to adapt these ads to be responsive - this excellent article from Digital Inspiration explains this technique in more detail.

Sidenote: I was quite amused with recent announcements by some Blogger-helpers (eg Paul in Spice Up Your Blog) that we can now use AdSense in Dynamic Templates.  As far as i know this has been the case since Dynamic Templates were introduced: provided AdSense is enabled in your blog with a gadget (not embedded in posts, or put into HTM/Javascript gadgets), then the Dynamic Template view promised to show an advertisement in an appropriate place (most likely the footer, I think). In princple, this is just another dimension of being "responsive" to different screens and ways of reading website content.

What else

My instinct is that there are other things which blogger users will need to think about as we move into a "responsive" world - at least Bloggers who care about visitors from different screen sizes will need to be busy.

At a minimum, consider whether you need to enable a mobile template for your blog, and set up some specific gadgets just for it.


What else do you think is relevant here?

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Related Articles:

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Who Blogger converts out posts into web-pages

Giving your blog a special template that only mobile users see

Showing Google maps inside your blog

Getting image-only AdSense ads

Putting 3rd party HTML into your blog

How to add a gadget using Blogger

Adding a CSS rule to your template

Pinterest Twitter friend notification email messages

A while ago, Pinterest removed the need to request an invitation to sign up:  you can now go to www.Pinterest.com and register immediately.

It now looks like there are three options for signing up:

• Using your Facebook account
• Using your Twitter account
• Using an email address.

(However I can't confirm that the email address works or not - it didn't the last time I tried.)


Now, if you sign up via Twitter, there'a a question at the end of the registration process about whether you want your Twitter followers to be notified that you've joined Pinterest.  I'm pretty sure that this wasn't there the last time I signed up for a Pinterest account using a Twitter account.   But I ticked it - expecting that people might get some type of notification inside Pinterest.

However what actually happens is that an email message is sent to the email account of any Twitter followers who are already on Pinterest, telling them that you have just joined and inviting them to "make you welcome" - presumably by following you on Pinterest too.

The message reads

"Hi <<recipient's Twitter account name>>
Your Twitter friend <<your Twitter account name>> just joined Pinterest.   Help welcome <<your Pinterest account name>> to the community."

I'm fairly sure that the message is only sent to Twitter followers who are already registered in Pinterest themselves - not all your Twitter followers.

But I was a little surprised by this.

Sending an email is a little more invasive than I'd expected (and maybe shows that Pinterest is looking to do things with the linking data it collected when forcing us to sign up via our existing Twitter or Facebook accounts)####

Really I don't expect my Twitter followers to be following me on Pinterest.   I'm looking for a different target audience on Pinterest, not more of the same people who are following me already.  

And I'm a little worried that Twitter followers might think I've spammed them by telling them that I've joined Pinterest.