Custom-search-engine adds an "overlay" results layout

This quick-tip is about a new overlay results format which Google Custom Search Engines have just introduced - and which looks like it will be their new standard. 

Custom Search Engines have announced a new layout - which appears to have become their new standard option.

Search-engine creation is much the same as it was, but at the end you only get one piece of code to install, and it can just go in the place where you want it (no more messing with editing the <header> in your template).

The search results page is shown as an overlay on top of your regular page.  As always with custom-search-engines, there are ads-by-Google at the top of the page, and if you have already become an AdSense publisher you can use your custom-search-engine to share the revenue.

The big question is - will this new layout approach work in Blogger?    If I was writing an article, I'd test it out somewhere else first, and have some advice about the options, likely problems etc.   But since this is only a quick-tip, this post is my research!   Below, you should see a search-engine, which is set up to search inside Blogger-HAT.   Search for something in it, and you will hopefully see how the overlay search results work.    (If not, I'll come back and change this post as soon as I know more about the problem and how to solve it.)

See an example of custom-search-engine overlay results format

Try it out here:

Is this layout better?

If the layout works, my next decision is whether I should switch the overall Blogger-Helper-Search tool over to use it.

 What do you think?   Like the overlay search results approach, or hate it?

A quick way to keep an eye on what is posted to interesting YouTube channels

This quick-tip is about subscribing to a YouTube channel using an RSS feed-reader, like Google Reader

Most bloggers know about other blogs and websites in their niche that they want to keep an eye on, to either know what's going on, or as inspiration for their own posts.

Previously I've explained that RSS was invented to make this simpler: you can get a summary of changes on all interesting websites in the one place (called a feed-reader), rather than having to regularly visit each site individually.

Video is increasingly popular: many bloggers are putting videos in their posts or their posts into videos, and some have even abandoned their blogs and are only publishing new content to a YouTube channel.

I've just found that it's very easy to subscribe to a YouTube user or channel in RSS / Google reader, meaning you can see a list of new videos from you reader, without having to go to the channel in YouTube.

Follow these steps:

• Find the channel or person you want to subscribe to in YouTube

• Right-click on their name or icon, and copy the URL / web-address / link location (the precise name depends on the browser you are using - you want the place that clicking the link takes you to, not the location of the image-file used to make the link)

• Go into your feed-reader, and subscribe to that link (in Google Reader, this is done using a red button near top left corner of the screen labelled "subscribe" - just click it, paste in the link and click the Add button).

The link will be something like  

http://www.youtube.com/user/MariahIsTheQueen  or http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX9_dIohJBxlizx14AozTng

If it has something else after the name (eg   ?feature=watch), then delete that part before you subscribe  you just need a link saying whether it points to a user or channel, and the name of that user channel.

Example of subscribing to a channel about rocket-science in YouTube

Remove sidebar background in the Travel template

This quick-tip is about removing the coloured section that is in the background in Blogger's Travel template.

Recently, I've been using the Travel template a lot:  it just seems to line things up more sharply on the page.

Today I noticed that there is an option for setting the Sidebar background colour under the Template Designer > Customize > Advanced tool.  However it doesn't seem to work.

Investigating the template shows that as well as this sidebar background colour (which is correctly set by the option above), the template also specifies a background image (ie not a colour) to use in the sidebars.    This isn't removed when the overall background image for the template is removed, and cannot be controlled from the template designer.

But it's simple enough to get rid of it, by following these steps:

1   Edit the template in the usual way.

2   Tick the expand widgets checkbox.

3   Find this code:

background: $(widget.outer.background.color) $(widget.outer.background.gradient) repeat scroll top left;

4   And either replace it with this code, or delete the line entirely.

/*  background: $(widget.outer.background.color) $(widget.outer.background.gradient) repeat scroll top left;  */

The first option just comment its out, meaning you could re-instate it again by removing the /* and  */. But if you are certain that you never want it back, just delete the whole line instead.

Depending on the sidebar layout chosen, there may be one or more places where the background image is.   Make sure that you do all of them that you want the background removed from.

Also, if you later choose a different layout, you make need to remove the background image again even though you haven't actually changed templates.

Teach Google-search about your blog with the Data Validator

This quick-tip is about the Webmaster Tools Tool Data Validator tool - which is an easier way to "teach" Google about the way things are described on your blog or website.

Recently, Google announced a new feature in Webmaster Tools called the Data Validator.

This is like a simpler way for website-owners (which is what bloggers really are) to tell Blogger about structured information that they put onto their sites - by point-and-clicking at the information on screen, rather than by learning the intricacies of Rich Snippets and the snippet testing tool.

What they've released so far is just an English-language tool for events - "such as concerts, sporting events, exhibitions, shows, and festivals".

To use it you need to

visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter".

And obviously you need to have verified the blog in Webmaster Tools before you start, and to do the "learning" with the same account.   NB   Some blogs will be automatically verified, but some won't:  if yours isn't, then the best way to do this is to choose Alternate Methods and choose HTML Tag - then add the meta-tag to your blog.

The bottom line is that for this to work, you need to put the information into your blog the same way every time (aka in a "consistent format"). What will be interesting to see is exactly how "consistent" it needs to be - I suspect that the tool will probably get smarter over time.

I haven't had a chance to try it yest,  /But I am using a Blogger to manage the website for a small choir which has a concert in January.   So I think I'll start by structuring the announcement of the last concert in June 2012, and then see how well it applies the learning to the next one.

Google product cancellations for December 2012

This quick-tip is about Google's winter 2012 product cancellations, which
appear to have less impact on most Blogger users than their recent seasonal purges.

Today, Google have announced their next round of discontinued products - they used to call it "spring cleaning", but this time around have at least acknowledged that it's winter for half the world, and summer for the other half!

Some Google Calendar features are to be discontinued, specifically:

• Creating new reservable times on a Calendar using Appointments Smart Rescheduler
• Add gadget by URL.
• Check your calendar via SMS/text message
• Create event via SMS/text message (GVENT).

My guess is that this may affect some Blogger users, who have integrated a calendar with a blog. It's a fairly specialist area, so likely to be a small number.

There are a few other discontinued features, but I suspect they won't affect bloggers to much extent:

• Google Sync a tool giving access to Google Mail, Calendar and Contacts via Microsoft Exchange's ActiveSync protocol - discontinued, except for Google Apps for Business, Government and Education.
• Google Calendar Sync
• Google Sync for Nokia S60
• SyncML, a contacts sync service used by some older mobile devices.

• Issue Tracker Data API: a tool that lets client applications view and update issues on Project Hosting on Google Code via API feeds.

• Punchd an app that keeps loyalty cards on smartphones

New rule for how many AdSense ads per page - from Jan-2013

This Quick Tip describes a new rule that AdSense is introducing to their terms and conditions, about how often the new 300x600 ad unit can be used on a single page.

Recently AdSense introduced two new sizes of ad-unit, the 300x600 Large Skyscraper and the 300x50 mobile-banner.

These aren't available from the AdSense add-a-gadget or ads-between-posts options in Blogger - but once you've been fully approved for AdSense, it's easy enough to add them to your blog by getting the code from AdSense, and installing it to Blogger the same way you install any other 3rd party code.

Personally, I like the 300x600 - it looks much more natural in several of my blogs, because it's more like the other things in the sidebar. Many of the ads it is showing at the moment are text-ads, because advertisers are still developing image-ads in the new size.  But even the text ads look better, especially in sites where I am trying to blend ads with other content. (Believe it or not, I have one niche where many of the ads work the way Google originally thought of them, providing additional information that is genuinely useful to my readers.)

But you can have too much of a good thing.

AdSense have always had a rule that each screen should have no more than

• 3 ad-units and
• 3 link-units.

Now they have announced that from 10 January 2013, the rule is that each screen can have no more than

• 1 300x600 ad unit
• 3 ad-units
• 3 link-units.

This isn't a big issue for me, but obviously there are some publishers who have taken the p*** and devoted "too much" of their screen-real-estate to ads.

Notice that there are no changes to the rules about how many ads you can show from other advertisers and affiliate programmes.

Google+ communities - another way to grow your blog's influence

This Quick Tip is about Google+ Communities, and the ways you could use them to promote  your blog.

Google+ has launched Communities - their equivalent of Facebook's Groups.

If you  want to be a market-leader in your field then you might want to create:

• A page for your blog
  (eg like I have with Blogger Hints-and-Tips' G_ Page), and

• A community about some aspect of your niche. (eg How to Use Blogger). 

Or,  if your blog is more like a newsletter for a club or group, you may want to create a community for your members instead, with less focus on the niche and more on the people.

Why bother

"Fantastic - yet another social media channel to grow and keep up to date.   Just what we all need.   Not!"

I sympathize ... but  this time around, I suspect it will be worth the effort.

Firstly, if building communication and relationships between people who are interested in your niche is one of your blog's goals, there are strong reasons to move away from Facebook Groups and onto Google+Groups:   On Facebook, Facebook's rules choose which posts are shown to your members.  And people have been complaining that Facebook is showing non-paid updates to fewer people than before.   In Google+, everything shows up in your members stream.

Second, unlike Facebook groups, everything that is posted to a Google+ community is indexed and so might be returned in Google search.

If enough people join the community - which you own and can therefore influence the direction of - then your blog may increase its authority in the niche area, because you are acknowledged as the founder / thought-leader.    You can use this technique this on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc too.   But Google+ communities are new, the best names aren't gone - and there will almost certainly be better SEO benefits from doing this inside a Google product than doing it elsewhere, even though people aren't 100% sure how it will all work yet.   (Assuming that SEO matters for your blog - remember that it's irrelevant for some blogs.)

How to get community members

So far, there don't appear to be any gadgets, badges etc.   I suspect they'll come.   (Although the relative relationship between blog-commenters and community-members could be interesting to work out.)

But you can invite circles, or individual email addresses from within Google+ Communities

And you can put an invitation on your blog, like this

"Click here to join the How to Use Blogger community now, to see how communities work - you are free to leave at any time, and I promise not to spam you."

Limiting AdSense ad types for individual websites is now available

This quick tip is about a new feature that AdSense have just announced, which lets you control the types of ads that are banned - by website, instead of just for your entire AdSense account.

For a long time, I've recommended that Blogger-users who use AdSense should:

• Protect their account from malicious use, and 
• Stop sexual-content ads from showing to be sure that they meet Blogger's Terms and Conditions.

The second of these steps is basically about telling AdSense not to show certain categories of ads on your blog. One of the bug-bears with this is that, until now, it's been all-or-nothing:  you could ban ad-categories from either all your sites or none of them.     For example, one of my sites is likely to be visited by people who are unhappy with the idea of dating agencies using suggestive photos of young women in the ads.   Until now, I've had to ban this category from all my sites, to be certain that they weren't show on the sensitive site. But now AdSense have announced that they support site-level blocking:  this means that you can tell them not to show particular categories of ads on certain sites, but leave them on others. To use the feature, you will need to

• Tell AdSense what URL / domains / web-addresses you manage (if you haven't done it already) and then 
• Set up blocking for individual sites as required.

The good news is that you can still choose "all sites" - and you can block by category from just sub-domains if you want to. It maybe that you cannot use the website-level blocking yet:  Google started rolling it out in AdSense accounts late last week, and it will get to everyone eventually - I don't have it yet myself, but am looking forward to it eagerly.

Simpler - but more limited - AdSense sign-up for Blogger users

This quick tip describes an announcement from Google about an upcoming simplified process for applying to use AdSense on Blogger or Hubpages.

New simpler AdSense application process

Google AdSense have announced that from today there is a change the application process for new publishers who apply to use AdSense through a "host partner site". Currently Blogger and Hubpages are AdSense's "host partner sites" - meaning ones where the "host" provides internet space to store the monetized content, rather than the content-owner buying the internet space themselves.

They say that

"publishers approved for AdSense accounts via a host partner site will be able to place ads on and earn from policy-compliant content they’ve created on any host partner site. If they then decide to show ads on their own domain, ... they’ll need to complete an extra approval step similar to the application process at www.google.com/adsense."

What this means is that if you sign up for AdSense with a host-partner, you will only be allowed to use AdSense ads on host-partner sites. If you want to use AdSense elswhere later on, then you need to do a 2-step verification process, which involves:

• Applying to become a "full" publisher
• Generating ad code,
• Implementing it on a live page of a non-host-partner site.
• Someone from the AdSense team will reviews that site and the ad in it.

If Adsense approve your other site, they give you permission to put ads on any sites other than host-partner sites (of course they still need to meet the AdSense Terms and Conditions). If they don't approve, you can still put ads onto host-partner sites (ie Blogger blogs or Hubpages pages), but you cannot use AdSense on other sites until you have fixed the problem(s) that stopped you from being approved..

Google have said that these changes don't affect people who are already approved as AdSense publishers - so I won't be able to see their effects first hand.

But I'm wondering if perhaps people who are only approved as "host partner publishers" won't have access to www.Adsense.google.com at all? This would be painful, because:

• The reports on the Earnings tab are not nearly as good as the ones in the Adsense interface.
• Some options (eg showing image-only ads, or re-using custom colour palettes, or accessing new mobile-friendly ad-sizes like 300x15) are not available from Blogger's Adsense ad generator.

Also, I'm wonder if perhaps Google have any plans to pay lower rates to people who they provide hosting and unrestricted bandwidth for?  Nothing has been said, but I can see why they would think this is reasonable.

How to sign up

If the site that you want to put AdSense ads on has a blogspot address   (www.example.blogspot.com), then the only way you can now sign up for AdSense is from Blogger's earnings' tab.

If it has a custom domain, then I don't know if it's possible to use the regular AdSense sign-up process, or if you have to use the Blogger one.

Either way, I still recommend that you should protect your AdSense account from malicious use, and also make sure that the ads you display meeting Blogger's Terms and Conditions too.

Add Google Drive's one-click-new icons to your blog or website

This Quick-Tip is about Google Docs / Drive's new short-cut buttons for making a new document, spreadsheet or presentation - and how you can install them into your blog.

Google have announced that one-click icons to create a Document, Spreadsheet or Presentation (now called Docs, Sheets, and Slides respectivly) are available as apps in the Chrome Web Store (a place where you can get various useful tools to install to your Chrome desktop or toolbar.

This is great for people who use Chrome - but some people don't,  for whatever reason.

Another option is to simply put links to the new commands into a place that you visit often - like your blog.  I've done this with a gadget called "Make a file in Google Drive" which you can see in my sidebar now.

To add this to your blog, simply add a HTML/Javascript gadget in the usual way, and put this code into the contents field.

<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;">
<a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/document/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig7s6jihEt7lLFrRIs7NF5EpOHigsSvmegskVJ8Khn6uqXpFib0vI0a3AJW3yMkNf59qioArMfNK5IJAQuQnBs2fqqycn1y0MC18U_gNu5ul8usvm9bQ2nbw1q1leDHmrIepukWY_0yybV/s80/made-new-word-processing-document-google-drive.png" /><br />
Document</a></div>
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;">
<a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzufvvtaKHu5PDb154P5GQYdfqEN2oFPW1-WsNuDX7Hqp58SsDMM4ugt_IDeuZG7BzIBTSvtlJ1BkZma_vUSIdfrDVq9tJ52HHY5npYo0gDrrpfk1MNio0QxMbicec7lHJhIVRqGKLnTA_/s80/made-new-spreadsheet-google-drive.png" /><br />
Spreadsheet</a></div>
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 0;">
<a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixcV763UApzNQ_5fApUAANv0RDZAvkZswRVPuxfn5ez4__wmuC11Yq2KM36uoxQ_Y4r1PJIOag_A2xKYgirfw6NwvIMPTnANTGNJEY2vehh3hO5LDdjVgahsEJn-TIU0r8APVbYOVByyS9/s80/made-new-slideshow-google-drive.png" /><br />
Presentation</a></div>
</div>
<!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

Features

• There is no gadget title in the code, so that you can put whatever title you want into the title field of the gadget. 
• People can click either the picture of the text to create a new document - and when they do, the new document will be opened in a new tab or window.  Your blog (etc) will stay open in its current tab or window.
• There is one "em" of space between the icons - this is enough to look good on most blogs.   However if your sidebar (or wherever you put the gadget) is particularly wide you might like to increase it - do this by finding "1em" in the code above, and replacing it with a larger value.

Code for just one type of document

You don't have to put the code into a gadget - it can go equally well into  a post - for example if you want to tell people to make a document of their own, and do it "right now".

In this case,you might like to show just one type of document icon, rather than all three.   The blockks of code for that are shown below - note that I would usually recommend pasting them into the HTML view of the post editor, to be 100% certain that they work correctly.

To make a new word-processing document:

<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;"><a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/document/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEig7s6jihEt7lLFrRIs7NF5EpOHigsSvmegskVJ8Khn6uqXpFib0vI0a3AJW3yMkNf59qioArMfNK5IJAQuQnBs2fqqycn1y0MC18U_gNu5ul8usvm9bQ2nbw1q1leDHmrIepukWY_0yybV/s80/made-new-word-processing-document-google-drive.png" /><br />Document</a></div></div><!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

To make a new spreadsheet file:

<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;"><a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzufvvtaKHu5PDb154P5GQYdfqEN2oFPW1-WsNuDX7Hqp58SsDMM4ugt_IDeuZG7BzIBTSvtlJ1BkZma_vUSIdfrDVq9tJ52HHY5npYo0gDrrpfk1MNio0QxMbicec7lHJhIVRqGKLnTA_/s80/made-new-spreadsheet-google-drive.png" /><br />Spreadsheet</a></div></div><!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

To make a new Google Docs / Drive presentation:

<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 0;"><a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixcV763UApzNQ_5fApUAANv0RDZAvkZswRVPuxfn5ez4__wmuC11Yq2KM36uoxQ_Y4r1PJIOag_A2xKYgirfw6NwvIMPTnANTGNJEY2vehh3hO5LDdjVgahsEJn-TIU0r8APVbYOVByyS9/s80/made-new-slideshow-google-drive.png" /><br />Presentation</a></div></div><!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

Creative Kit photo editor works in Google+, if not in Picasa

This Quick-Tip is about using the Creative Kit - which as been giving me grief recently when I tried to use it from Picasa-web-albums.

For ages, I've occasionally used the photo-editor in Picasa-web-albums (the online version of Picasa) to edit photos that I've already uploaded, and want to change without changing the URL.   This editor was originally Picnik - until Google sold that product and replaced it with Creative Kit (which seems like a cut-down version) a while ago.

This has sometimes been slow - which was annoying, but I put up with it because it was just so useful.  

But recently it stopped working totally:  it would load, the progress-bar would get about half-way along the screen, and then hang, with a message:

We noticed Picnik is loading slowly. It’s possible waiting
may solve this issue. If you’re still having trouble:
[t1]   Click for Assistance»

Waiting never solved the problem for me (trust me, I tried), so eventually I tried the help-link, which went to this Picnik help page.

After following lots of the instructions, I finally found this helpful line in the Adope Flash Player re-installation instructions:

If you are using the Google Chrome browser, Adobe® Flash® Player is built-in but has been disabled. To enable Flash Player, follow the steps in this TechNote

Which sounded hopeful - it's only recently that I've switched to use Chrome all the time, so maybe this was the problem.   But it didn't help - despite what they said, Flash was enabled in my setup.

Eventually, it occurred to me that since I have a Google Plus profile, my albums are now accessible via the Plus interface too.   So I went there, chose Photos, found the album, opened a photo, chose creative kit ... held my breath for a few seconds ... and the editor opened up and worked nicely.

I'd still like to get this working from Picasa, because it just looks so much nicer from the small screen that I use a lot of the time.   Suggestions are very welcome!


PS   Thanks to Hardeep of Widget Craft who used the picture that I'd made as the thumbnail picture for How to Edit Your Blogger Template in one of his articles, and thus inspired me to start putting my own name onto the image files I make.

Making custom domains work without the www at the start

This Quick-Tip is about an issue that some people have had with their "naked" custom domain not re-directing to the www-at-the-start version, and how to fix it using a feature in your Google Apps account.

Since Blogger released their initial fix to the custom-domain mapping problem of mid-September 2012, some people have found that it's not possible to set up the custom domain so that my-domain.xxx works as well as www.my-domain.xxx does.

There is an option for this in Blogger's Settings > Publishing area.  But last night, when I set up a "subdomain" style entry for news.my-domain.xxx and directed my latest-updates blog from my-domain.blogspot.com to news.my-domain.com, found that this didn't work.
(Obviously I didn't use my-domain.com - but the principle applies.)

However today I found an approach that does seem to fix this:

1   Log in to the Google Apps domain administration account (the same one you used to set up the 2nd CNAME record - if you don't know how to get into it, some of the information here may help)

2   Go to Domain Settings > Domain Names, a

3   Sroll down to where it says:  Redirect the naked domain (http://YOUR-DOMAIN.INFO) to ... (whatever it says now)

4   Click the Change Redirect link under this.

5   Make sure that www (lower case) is entered in the field.

6   Click save.


I cannot guarantee that this will always fix the problem.   But it did for me just now, and I've seen a couple of other posters saying that it helped them too.    So I thought it was worth sharing.

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.

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.

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.

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.