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Showing posts with label Security and Permissions. Show all posts

Letting other people write in your blog

by Unknown / Monday, January 16, 2012 / Posted in Article, Security and Permissions, Teamwork

This article describes the ways that you can allow other people to write and publish on your blog. It looks at and the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Comments vs blog-posts, the case for team-blogs

There are two main ways that content can be put into your blog: comments and posts.

Blogger is designed, around the idea that initial discussions about new topics are started by you, and put into posts. Readers interact with you by commenting on your posts - although, yes, there are ongoing problems with readers not being able to comments, it seems mainly because of their security settings.

But there may be some people who you want to be able to do more than just comment. Increasingly people want to do more with their comments - they want to include links (eg to pictures that show what they mean), or they want to integrate comments with their social networks (for example, as shown in the ways that James from JS Blogstop has integrated Facebook and Twitter comments with his blog-comments.

And some groups of people want to work together to make a blog that they all write posts for, and are prepared to make and follow their own rules/guidelines (which aren't enforced by Blogger) to make this successful.

Team organisation vs Blogger tools

There are many ways to organise a team of bloggers.

Some blogs are run by one person (the owner or manager), who recruits people to write for them (either for payment, or as volunteers).
Some belong to a company, and are operated by an employee according to their job description.
Some blogs are owned by a committee, who delegate one person to do all the work on them.
Some have a team of writers who and designers, who all contribute equally and who make collective decisions about how things are done.

And there are many more options in between.

Unfortunately Blogger cannot set up permissions for all the different ways that real-world teams work - there are just too many options. Instead, you need to design the way your team works, using the options that Blogger does provide. So - what are these?

Have posts emailed to you

This is the simplest way to let other people write for your blog: authors write their content in the tool of their choice, and email it to you. You load it to Blogger, do any formatting or editing and hit the publish button.

Pros

Authors don't need to learn Blogger software
You have total control over what's published, and when, and how it looks

Cons

Time: You need to put time into converting each submission
Conversion problems: Some formats don't convert well (eg Microsoft Word can only sometimes be successfully converted to blogger - and should never be copy-and-pasted)
Wasted time - and risk of mistakes:
If an author has put a lot of effort into layout (headings, bold, italics, tables, footnotes, etc) you may need to recreate it all yourself - and some features, eg tables, may not be well-supported by Blogger.
Managing attached files:If a post includes a lot of graphics or videos, you need to receive these files too, and load them to Picasa (or an appropriate file-host for non-image files), and link to them from the post: your author will not be able to set up the links. Alternatively if your author has linked to pictures that are hosted somewhere, you lose control over whether these will continue to work in the future. And there won't be a thumbnail picture for the post if none of the pictures are stored in Picasa-we or Google + albums.

To make receiving posts by email less painful:

If you end up using this option because none of them others are suitable, you could ask your writers to send you HTML instead of a custom document format like Word.

Or ask them to work in Google Docs, which you can copy-and-paste from.

Or send PDF files: host these in a place that provides embed code (eg Scribd), and you keep their formatting by putting the embed code into your posts.

Have posts emailed to your blog

Blogger has the "mail2Post" feature, which lets you set up your blog to receive posts that are emailed to a "secret" address that you have set up.

You need to choose whether mail2Post submissions are automatically published or set to draft, and the "secret words" part of the mail2Post email address.

Then you need to tell the people who you want to post how to do so, ie what email address to send their contributions too, and how to handle things like pictures or videos that they want to include.

Pros:

Saves you time
Lets people post even if you aren't available to Publish
Writers can work in a familar tool, and only need to be on-line while they're sending their content

Cons:

Attached photos don't always work, your writers don't control where in the post they are put, and you don't control where the picture files are saved
There is no way to automatically add Labels to posts (you need to add them manually later)
Content that you don't want may be put on your blog if a hacker guesses your secret-words-address
There are no guarantees about formatting (bold, italics, bullet-pointed lists) being shown correctly: a lot depends on the writer's email client settings
You cannot tell who the post-author was from the Blogger dashboard
If you set incoming posts to draft, Blogger has no way of notifying you that there are new posts waiting for you r approval - you need to notice that they're there.

Making it work:

The last few problems can be avoided if you use email-forwarding and mail2Post together. This also lets you add rules / filters within Gmail, so reduces the risk of automatically publishing something inappropriate, and you can set up notifications to yourself about posts waiting your review.

Blogger Author rights:

Each blog can have one or more administrators (who can do anything), and or more authors, who can only write new posts, and edit their own existing posts. Authors and administrators are considered to be members of a team blog, and each blog can invite up to 100 people to be members.

Pros:

It's fairly easy to make someone into an author
The writer can use Blogger's tools for formatting their post, and for adding pictures and videos.
Labels can be applied before a post is publihsed
Posts can be scheduled into the future
It's easy for authors to format links nicely (eg "this article on Blogger-HAT" instead of "www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/XXX")

Cons:

You cannot force writers to always let you review posts before they're published: you can ask them to save posts as draft, but there's nothing to guarantee that they will do so
You cannot guarantee that authors will always use your preferred styles and formats
Authors need to learn to use Blogger: we all know it's not that hard - but I will guarantee that some people think it is!
You cannot stop writers from editing their earlier posts
Authors can only edit their own earlier posts, and not those of other wrtiers. (This could be a problem later if some authors move on you have new-team members: only administrators can edit the work of now-departed authors.)
You cannot control where your writers host pictures and videos: the post-editor lets them link to any location. this means that an author keeps all their photos in Flickr will write posts that don't have a thumbnail picture (because these pictures must be stored in Picasa-web-albums

Making it work:

Members of your team need to be very clear about how you work together, and what the consequences are if someone breaks the rules.

Administrator rights

A blog administrator has full rights over a blog: they can change the template, delete the blog, add other administrators, set up mail2Post, delete posts, etc - just like you can. Giving someone administrator right is the ultimate step in letting them write for your blog.

Pros:

This has the same advantages as giving someone author rights - and granting administrator rights is just a small extra step once someone is an author
And administrators can edit the work of other authors too, which may be an advantage or disadvantage depending on your circumstances.
Having a 2nd administrator can be a good safety precaution, in case you become sick or lost access to your account.

Cons:

Someone with administrator rights has full control over the template and posts in your blog: they can do everything you can do.
They can also remove other administrators - meaning they could remove your admin rights!

Making it work:
You need very clear rules about who is responsible for what - and a very trusting relationship with the other administrators.

Mix-and-match

Realistically, if your blog has a number of team members, possibly including guest-posters, then you will probably use a mix-and-match approach to giving rights to other people.

This means you will need to make choices about who can do what - and why.

For example:

New / prospective guest-posters may be invited to email posts to you
Established guest-posters may be set up with mail2Blog, or even as authors inside Blogger
Regular writers may be set up as authors
Core team members will probably all be administrators - and you will have a range of measures (including regular backups and password change rules) to make sure that you are all honest with each other.

Your experiences?

I am keen to hear more about how people have made team-blogs work in practice: how did you decide what rules to follow, how did you sort out arguments, and prevent team-members from hi-jacking the blog? What other problems did you face?

Giving another Google account control over your blog

by Unknown / Friday, January 13, 2012 / Posted in Article, Managing blogs, Security and Permissions

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This article is about changing the ownership of your Blogger blog. As well as looking at how to make the changes inside Blogger, it also looks at some other issues you may need to think about (eg comment moderation, items outside Blogger, advertising).

Blogs and Google Accounts

Each blog is "owned" by at least one Google account. This administrator account can do anything in the blog: write posts, set up new authors, change the template, add new formatting rules, delete posts - or the entire blog, moderate comments, etc etc etc.

Initially, the account that sets up the blog is the owner. But if the person using this account gives someone else administrator rights, then there are multiple owners.

And once there are multiple administrators, any one administrator can delete all the others, or just demote them down to being authors, thus making him or her self into the owner,

So this is the very minimum that you need to do to transfer blog ownership to another Google account:

Give the other Google account author rights, then once this is successful,
Give the other Google account administrator rights.

But, unless you have a very, very simple blog, you cannot stop there: you also need to think about other things that may have been set up, inside Blogger, and in any other tools that the blog uses.

Inside Blogger

Comments
You may want to change who is notified about any comments that are left on the blog. This is done on the Settings / Comments tab: there are separate sections for

Comment moderation (one email address)
Comment notification (a list of email addresses)

Email Notifications:
If the blog is set up to notify anyone when it is published, you may want to review this - any any related Google groups or forwarding addresses you may be using to make this work.

Mail2Post:
If the blog is set up to receive postings by email, you may want to change the secret words (so the old owner no longer knows them).   If there is an intermediate email-address used so that the owner can tell who made Mail2Posts, then the new owner should either take over this account, or set up and use a new one.
All set under (Settings / Email and Mobile /Posting Options)

Mobile Posting:
If the blog is set up to receive postings by SMS, you may want to change the device that is registered, so the old owner no longer has access. (Settings / Email and Mobile /Posting Options)

Custom URL:
If your blog has a custom domain, then you'll almost certainly want to transfer control of this.

If you purchased the domain inside Blogger, then you should have set up a domain-administrator account shortly after registering the domain-name. The easiest option is just to tell the new owner the login name and password for that account - and tell them how to access it.

If the new owner doesn't want to keep the Google (ie goDaddy or eNom) link, then they can log in to whatever domain registrar that they want to use, and request a transfer.   You will get an email and need to do some things in response to make the transfer successful. Make you you read it carefully, because each registrar is different.

But I'm not currently sure if there's any way for the new owner to keep the Google (goDaddy/eNom) link.

Items controlled outside Blogger

These days, most blogs include some items which are stored outside Blogger. If you transfer the ownership of a blog, you may also want to transfer these items, or at least make a plan for what will happen to them.

I've put notes about a few that I know about here - If you know about any others that are popular, please leave a comment below and I'll update the list.

RSS Feeds created in Feedburner
To transfer ownership of an RSS feed, log into Feedburner, click on the Feed that you want to transfer, and click on the Transfer Feed link.   You are prompted to enter an email address, and Feedburner say that they will contact that email to arrange the transfer within 72 hours.

Photos / Images
Any pictures that you upload via Blogger are stored in a Picasa web-album that belongs to the account that did the uploading. Unfortunately Google doesn't yet provide any way to transfer ownership of individual web-albums.    I don't (yet) know if the recently introduced collaboration features help here or not, but they may.

Also, pictures uploaded before Blogger started using Picasa-web-albums (possibly sometime in 2007 I think) cannot be transferred.

Calendars
???

Docs files
If your blog links to any files hosted in Google Docs or Sites file stores, then these are owned by the Google Account that created or uploaded them. Check with that site to see if it's possible to transfer.

Custom Maps
I don't think that there is any way to transfer ownership of these.

An option is for the old owner to provide the export file location (view the map, right click on "view in google earth" and choose copy URL), and the new owner could then create a new map (and put this into the blog) - however this will be a lot of work if may maps are used.

Custom-searches
I don't think that there is any way to transfer ownership of these.

Videos
(if you own them - not ones owned by others that you're just linked to)

Social Network sites
For example Facebook pages, Twitter accounts.   (These may not be inside the blog at all, but may be a key part of it's promotional tools - if you are taking over ownership of a blog, you will probably want to take over these too.)

For items that cannot be transferred, you need to transfer them manually (if this is possible), or to reach an agreement between the old account owner and the new account owner about what will happen to the items. For example, you may agree that the old account owner will not delete the web-albums for one month, and that they will download the photos and provide them on CD to the new account owner - who will then upload them, and change all the photo links in the blog to the new URLs.

If your blog has any advertising (eg AdSense, Amazon Associates, Chitika, or indeed any other advertiser) you may need to transfer the account that this is linked to.

For AdSense, if the advertising was set up through Blogger, you can change the account under the Monetize tab. However if any ads were put inside individual posts, these posts will all have to be edited, and ad-units for the new owner will need to be added. (I don't think you can just replace the Publisher-ID, because the ad-unit has and ID as well.

I'm not sure how sophisticated this is as yet: if you want to keep the advertising, rather than removing and then re-creating the advertising, it may be a good idea for the new account to set up advertising accounts for itself on another (test) blog first, and then switch it over in the blog that's being changed, so that the existing ads/ad-structures are kept.

An Alternative:

Depending on how many items-outside-Blogger that the current account owns, it may be better for the person who owns the current account to just give it to the new owner, and to get themselves a new account.

Even better: If there's a chance that the blog will ever change hands, set up a new account just it when you start the blog. I'm going to write a whole post about this one day soon - but for now I'm convinced that you really need to think about the future as soon as you start your blog.

Setting up a new Administrator for your blog

by Unknown / Monday, December 26, 2011 / Posted in Article, Security and Permissions

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This article shows you how to set up someone else (ie another Google account) as an administrator for your blog.

What is a blog administrator

An administrator is a Google account (controlled by a person!) that has full rights over your blog: they can do anything that you can do, including write posts, edit anyone else's posts, change the template, add gadgets and formatting rules. Also they can grant and remove author and administrator rights.

This last point is very important: if you add someone as an administrator, then they immediately have the power to remove you as an administrator. This means that you need to be very careful who you give these rights to.

How to give someone administrator rights

Firstly, give them author rights.
To do this, you may need to log in as the other person, or to wait for them to accept the invitation themselves. If you log in as them, then make sure that you either:

Use two computers,
Use separate browsers on the same computer (eg Firefox and Chrome, or Internet Explorer and Safari), OR
At least clear your cache and restart your browser between each login.

Then upgrade them by logging in to Blogger as yourself (ie with an account that has administrator rights already).

Pre-Sept-2011-Blogger (ie the old interface):

Go to the dashboard, Settings > Permissions tab.
Every account that has accepted an invitation to be an author will be listed. Choose the one want to make into an administrator, and click the Grant admin privliges link to the right of their email address.
Click Grant admin privileges button on the confirmation screen

Post-Sept-2011-Blogger (ie the new interface):

Go to the dashboard ("home" button), Settings > Basic tab.
Scroll down to the Permissions area.
Every account that has accepted an invitation to be an author will be listed. Choose the one want to make into an administrator, and choose Admin using the drop-down arrow to the right of their email address. (Note: this is an immediate change, you do not have to click Save.)

Note that there are also options here for removing administrator rights, and removing author rights too.

Very important:
If you are doing this before removing your own administrator rights, eg as part of transferring a blog from one account to another, then it is very important make sure that the transfer has been successful before removing yourself: you do not want to be in a situation where your own account is no longer an administrator, but you don't have access to the actual administrator account.

As before, ways of doing this include

Using two different computers,
Use separate browsers on the same computer (eg Firefox and Chrome, or Internet Explorer and Safari), OR
At least clear your cache and restart your browser between each login.

Other things to consider

Comment moderation:
Only blog-administrators can moderate comments, so you may need to:

Set up comment notification so that the new administrator is emailed when a comment is left
Make sure that they know the policies that are applied to comments
Agree who is responsible for moderation at what times

Custom domain administration:
If you have a custom domain, and the new administrator may need to be involved with this, then you need to tell them about the domain-administrator account that you set up after purchasing the domain.

Or if you are using a domain from an external domain registration company, they may need some other information about how to manage the domain.

Other blog settings:
Because an administrator has full control over the blog, they can do a number of things including:

Editing posts made by other authors
Change the template, layout or gadgets
Edit any of the blog's Pages
Granting and revoking other people's permissions
Change the default language and date/time settings
Changing the RSS feed settings in any way
Edit the Adult-content warning setting, or the blog's Open-ID URL.

You may need to agree how changes like this are to be done on your blog - including ensuring that backups are stored safely.

Making someone an author on your blog

by Unknown / Friday, December 9, 2011 / Posted in Article, Security and Permissions

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This article shows you how to set up another person (ie another Google account) as an author for your blog.

Google, Blog-Authors and Blogger

Setting someone up as an "author" in Blogger is one way that you can let other people post to your blog.

It's easy to do: you tell blogger to create an invitation, which sends the person an email saying you would like to be an author, they click a link in the email and then sign in with a Google account to accept the invitation. And once it is done, the person can write and edit their own posts.

All you need to know is the person's email address: it doesn't matter if it's a gmail address or not. You can send invitations to people with hotmail, yahoo, and indeed any email address where your invitee can read their email.

However the other person will need to use a Google account (which doesn't necessarily include Gmail) to accept the invitation: don't waste time inviting people who are allergic to Google and not willing to sign up for an account.

How to make someone a blog author

Send them an invitaton:

Pre-Sept-2011-Blogger (the old interface):
Go to Settings > Permissions > Add Authors
Enter the email address of the person you want to invite
Click Invite

Post-Sept-2011-Blogger (new interface):
Go to Settings > Basic > Permissions
Beside Blog Authors, click + Add Authors
Enter the email address of the person you want to invite
Click Ok

A few minutes later, the email address that you sent to receives an email invitation, like this, from no-reply@google.com:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: You have been invited to contribute to AnotherTestBlog
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:47:45 +0000
From: THE NAME OF FROM YOUR BLOGGER PROFILE
To: maryc@act.nz

The Blogger user Mary has invited you to contribute to the blog: AnotherTestBlog.

To contribute to this blog, visit:
http://www.blogger.com/i.g?inviteID=468-GEEKY-LOOKING-CODE-973&blogID=31-GEEKY-LOOKING-CODE-83

You'll need to sign in with a Google Account to confirm the invitation and start posting to this blog. If you don't have a Google Account yet, we'll show you how to get one in minutes.

To learn more about Blogger and starting your own free blog visit http://www.blogger.com.

When the person who gets the email clicks on the link, they are taken to Blogger, and asked to sign in

Once they have clicked the link and sign in, the Google account that they log in with has "author rights" to your blog (just the one you invited them to, not any others you've made).

The person does not need to have a gmail or Google account for you to invite them to be an author - but they will need to sign in using a Google account (new or existing) to accept the invitation.

What you will see:

Once the person has accepted the invitation, the Google account name (which looks like an email address) that they use to accept it is shown as an author on the permissions tab (the one that you went to to invite them to be an author):

If they accept the invitation by signing to Google in with a differnt email address than the one you invited, you will get a message telling you about this. It says

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Your invitation was accepted using a different email address
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:51:33 +0000
From: Blogger
To: YOUR-EMAIL-ADDRESS

Your invitation for THE-EMAIL-ADDRESS-YOU-INVITED for your private blog "AnotherTestBlog" has been accepted, but using a different email address. It has been accepted by THE-ACCEPTING-EMAIL ADDRESS.

If your invitation has been accepted by someone you do not know or did not intend to invite, please visit the Permissions tab of your blog where you can choose to revoke access.

Thanks,
The Blogger Team

What your new author will see:

When your new author logs in to Blogger.com - using the Google account they accepted your invitation with - they see a regular Blogger dashboard, except that they only have access to a limited range of functions:

An author can:

Create a post,
Edit the date for posts they have made
Turn comments of for posts they can edit (provided the default setting is On)
Edit a post that they made
Add a mobile device so they can post using SMS/MMS - (this may only work in certain countries)
Set themselves up to post using email (the mail2Post feature) - note that their "secret words" address is different to yours - and that an author could use this feature to let anyone else post from their account.
Remove themselves as an author

An author cannot:

Edit posts made by other authors or administrators
Change the template, layout or gadgets
Change the blog's URL, title or description
Set up for any email address to receive comment-moderation alert messages
Moderate comments (even about their own posts), or change the global comments settings
Edit any of the blog's Pages
See the blog's statistics
Install AdSense into the blog (although they can put ad-units of their own inside their own posts)
Give other people permission to write on the blog - except by sharing their own mail2Post "secret words" address.
Change the default language and date/time settings for the blog
Alter the RSS feed settings in any way
Set up Google Analytics for the blog
Edit the Adult-content warning setting, or the blog's Open-ID URL.

Troubleshooting

Be sure your transfer works:
If you are accepting the invitation yourself (eg you are transferring the blog to another Google account that you control), then make sure that you either

[Recommended]: use a different browser for each Google account, or
Each time you need to change Google accounts, log out of the present account, clear your cache and re-start your browser.

Make sure the emails arrive:

We sometimes see questions in Blogger Help Forum from people who say that they sent invitations, but the email message was never received.

The most common solution is that the author-to-be needs to check their spam folder - very often that's where the messages have gone. If that doesn't work:

Try sending the person an email address from your regular email account - so you know if there's a problem with their email.
Cancel the invitation (there's a link in the Invitation screen), wait a few minutes and try again.
Try sending an invitation to a different email address that you control, and forwarding that message (without clicking the accept link) to the person.yourself.

If none of this helps, post a question in Blogger Help Forum: tell us your blog's URL, and exactly what options you have tried.

More things to think about:

As well as giving the person rights, you may also need to work with them to make sure they understand how you use certain features in Blogger:

What's your editing and quality-assurance approach - how you do make sure you've got posts right before you publish them? Do you allow adult content? What about content that might not suit advertising that your blog is showing.

Do you use labels? How do you decide what labels to apply? This is especially important if you put your posts into pages.

What time of day do you post (to get maximum benefit from your RSS non-email subscribers)

How are posts promoted on social media - do they need access to your blog's Twitter account or Facebook page too?

What policies do you have for responding to comments - Who is notified about comments left about their posts? What guidelines are followed about complaints? How do you deal with spam and abuse - and what do you regard as abuse?

How do you organise pictures, and other external files that your blog uses?
I always upload pictures to Picasa-web-albums outside of Blogger, LINK so I can control the picture size/resolution. If you do this, you need to make sure that your new author knows where to file their pictures.

Have you got a place where you keep policies, documetation, ideas for new posts, etc (eg I use a separate documentation blog for this) - does your new author need access to this?

Next:

Giving someone administrator access to your blog.

Conflicting Google and Google Apps accounts

by Unknown / Tuesday, June 21, 2011 / Posted in Account management, Article, Google Apps, Security and Permissions

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This article is about resolving conflicting Google and Google-Apps accounts: an issue that is is going to start for people who set up a blog using an email address that is being moved to Google Apps.

Google accounts vs Google Apps accounts

Previously, I've described Google accounts and Google-apps accounts

As at October 2010 the two types of account were not the same, even though they looked similar. Therefore it was easy for one person to have :

A Google account called Joe.Bloggs@AnyCompany.com (because that's just any old email address)
A Google Apps account also called Joe.Bloggs@AnyCompany.com

The Google Apps account can only been set up when a new custom-domain was registered or purchased for AnyCompany.com - or when the existing AnyCompany.com domain moves to Google Apps.

Joe should know about the Google account (assuming he's still actively using it).   But if he isn't aware of all the things being done in the IT department of AnyCompany, he might not even know that the Google Apps account was created when the IT manager was quietly testing options for a move to Google Apps.

Merging Google and Google Apps

In recent months the number of programs included in Google Apps has grown massively.

But to include the "older" tools like Blogger, Picasa-web-albums etc, they had to move to a new infrastructure. To do this, they needed to fix up situations like the one described above, where there are two different accounts called Joe.Bloggs@AnyCompany.com

The work to enable this has been done.  Organisations that use Google apps have been moved to a new infrastructure, which needs the apparently duplicate accounts to have been fixed.

So, when this happens for AnyCompany, cleaning up the conflicting Joe.Bloggs@AnyCompany.com accounts needs to be done.

Google decided (I believe wisely - more about that later) that the two accounts will not be merged: they aren't, and never will be, the same account.

Google have written about the conflicting accounts issue.  They say that the first time that Joe Bloggs logs into Blogger (or Gmail, or various other Google tools outside of Apps) after AnyCompany has moved to the new infrastructure, he willl be shown a special screen where he must rename the Google account.

[Even though Google' account transition process is now complete, it's likely that Blogger users will continue to see this request as the log into to infrequently used Blogger accounts in the future.   This is why I have updated this article now (June 2011), rather than deleted it.]

What to rename the Google account to

It looks like you can rename the existing Google account to any other text string that looks like an email address - and of course isn't already taken.   (Again, I haven't tested this yet, but it would be consistent with how Blogger works now).

Personally, I suggest renaming it to some other real email address that you control - ideally a new address that is just for the purpose.

I don't think it will be possible to rename it to a gmail address, since creating the gmail address will create a Google Account, but in this case the Google account already exists.

Scenario 1: Google account relates to the company:
If the blog(s) etc owned by the original Google account are related to AnyCompany, then one option is to rename it to Joe.bloggs2@AnyCompany.com.   This will work, provided there's not already an account with the same name.   But it may create issues (for the companies domain administrator) if another person called Joe Bloggs comes to work for AnyCompany in the future.

In general, if the Google account relates to company business, it would be a good idea to consult with the IT department to see how it shoudl be treated.   It's often a good idea to use a generic account name (eg blog.Editor@AnyCompany), and to simply hand on the details for this account when you leave the organisation. That way, at very least the administrators of the domain will be able to get access to them because they'll control the email address that matches the Google-account name.

Scenario 2: Google account not related to the company:
If the blog(s) etc owned by the Google account are personal, or related to something other than AnyCompany (which could be AnySchool or AnyNonProfit, etc), then I would strongly recommend that the account is renamed to some valid address which is outside the control of AnyCompany, for example Joe.Bloggs@yahoo.com.

You need to make sure you keep control of and access to the email address, so that you will continue to have access to the Google account even after you've left the company (or school, etc).

Aside: this is why I think it's a wise decison not just to merge the Google and Google-Apps accounts: there is far too much chance that people will have used their work (or college etc) email address to set up a Google account that has nothing to do with work etc.

Combining the Google and Google-Apps accounts

Currently, Google don't provide any tools (that I know of) to let you combine accounts.

Some Google-products (eg Feedburner) have tools to let you transfer ownership of items in them to another Google account. But some products don't have any features like this.

Blogger lets you transfer blog ownership by giving another account administrator access and then removing yourself. But unless you are certain that you can successfully transfer all the items in the blog (remember, Picasa-web-albums currently has no way to transfer album ownership, ditto videos, calendars, etc) you still need the original Google account to exist. (You might choose to log into it with gmail and set message-forwarding and then never use it again. That's fine ... just so long as you don't delete it.)

Putting a slideshow from Picasa into your blog

by Unknown / Saturday, May 21, 2011 / Posted in Article, Picasa, Pictures, Security and Permissions, Slideshows

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This article is about how to put a Picasa slideshow into your blog, using Picasa's slideshow tool.

It also looks at the security issues that may be involved in doing this, and suggests some ways around these.

Picasa, Albums and Slideshows:

Previously I've explained what Picasa is and how it is used by Blogger as the default place to store uploaded pictures.

You can also use Picasa in more complicated ways. You can put a set of pictures in a separate "album" (Picasa's word for a user-defined group of photos), and it will give you the HTML code to use to show these photos in your blog (or any other website).

There are two ways of doing this:

Link to the album: clicking on the link takes your visitor away from your website and into Picasa-web-albums, where they can use the PWA tools to look through the pictures
Link to a slideshow: this scrolls through the photos that are in the album at the time, right inside your website. Here's an example of a slideshow:

This article is a step-by-step guide to the second option, is showing a Picasa-web-album in your Blogger as a slideshow. A similar approach will work for other websites, thought the details will vary slightly.

How to insert your slideshow:

Go to Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/home), and log in with the Google account that owns (or you want to own) the album.

Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
(and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now)
Choose an album by clicking on it.
The album view opens, showing you a thumbnail of all the photos in it on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen, there is a sidebar of useful tools.
Under the Edit drop-down (the one in the album, not the edit menu in the browser), check that Visibility is set to either "Anyone with the Link" or "Public on the web"
Click on "Link to this Album" (currently it's in a small font, 3/4 of the way down the right-hand sidebar - this may change if Picasa changes its interface)
Click on "Embed Slideshow" (currently this shows up underneath "Link ... " - and only AFTER you've clicked link...)
This opens a new dialog box, over the top of your current browser window.
Fill in the details you want
(slideshow size, whether or not to show captions and to autoplay the slides, etc)
Copy the HTML from the box at the bottom of the left hand-side (the one labelled "Copy and paste ..."
Go to Blogger and log in with a Google account that has rights to edit the the blog - note that this doesn't need to be the same account that owns the Picasa album.
You can put the code that you copied into your blog in the same way you would adding any other 3rd party HTML to it.

What you see in the Post Editor:

If you put the slideshow into a blog-post, the the way that the post-editor currently works with code means that the slideshow is not visible while you are editing the post. This means it's easy to accidentally over-write or delete the code.

One way around this is to put some "marker text" before and after it.

For example, I've put in <hr /> and <blockquote> </blockqoute> statements before and after the code just underneath this paragraph. While I'm in the editor, all I can see is a pair of parallel lines, with nothing between them. But (because you're visiting the blog after it's published) you can see a slideshow in between.

This makes the code look like:

<blockquote>
<hr />
<embed flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=https%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F105223767362417288786%2Falbumid%2F5439615839989953921%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26authkey%3DGv1sRgCK7yg5XUpNHZtAE%26hl%3Den_US" height="192" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="288"></embed>
<br />
<hr />
</blockquote>

What your visitors see - and can access:

The steps above puts a slideshow of the photos in the album at the current time into your blog post.

You can use the examples above to get an idea of how these slideshows work: they have next, play / pause, and previous buttons, and you can toggle captions on/off. The top example has auto-play ON, while the second one has it OFF.

On important thing to note: when your visitors click on the slideshow itself (anywhere but on previous / play / next buttons), they are taken to the place in Picasa-web-albums where the album is.

From here, they can get to ANY other albums owned by the same Google account that are either Public or Visible to Anyone With the Link.

This may or may not be a problem for you - but it's something that you should be aware of. It certainly was a problem for me initially, and I had to go and get a slideshow in a Google account with no personal pictures to make the examples in this post.

If you are not willing to live with this level of security, then I suspect (am yet to confirm) that using the RSS feed provided by Picasa with Blogger's own slideshow gadget may be a better approach. This will only work in places where you can put a gadget - although it may be possible to use a 3rd party service that converts a feed into Javascript to make code that can be put inside a post. Or totally different solution is to put your pictures into a PowerPoint slideshow and display it in your blog.

Stop malicious use of your AdSense account ID

by Unknown / Wednesday, May 11, 2011 / Posted in Adsense, Article, Security and Permissions

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AdSense's Allowed Sites feature, is an important safeguard for any blogger who is worried that others may try to mis-use their AdSense account and/or get them in to trouble.

The article is written with Blogspot users in mind, but the advice applies to ANY AdSense publishers.

Overview:

By Андрей! (Own work) [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

Previously, I've described setting up Adsense in Blogger, and putting AdSense ads right inside your posts.

The way that AdSense works with web-browsers, any person, or computer, can look at the source-code for you page (eg with the View / Page Source menu-option in Firefox), and see what your AdSense publisher ID is. If they're clever or malicious enough they could potentially put ads with your publisher-id onto sites that don't meet AdSense's program guidelines (eg ones that encourage readers to click the ads). And then they could report "you", and get you banned from AdSense for doing this.

Luckily, AdSense has the Allowed Sites feature to combat this. Basically, you enter the URLs (ie names) of sites you own, and only earnings from only those sites will be recorded in your account. You aren't held responsible for any other sites where your publisher-id is used.

How to turn Allowed Sites on:

Log in to AdSense (www.google.com/adsense/)

Inside AdSense:

In the Home tab, choose Account Settings from the left-hand navigation list.
Scroll down to the Access and Authorisation section (currently at the bottom of the page)
Click the edit link, beside Sites authorised to show ads
Make sure that Only allow certain sites to display ads for my account is ticked
Enter the list of sites that you own in the Authorised Sites list
(for each one, just enter the "naked domain", ie foo.com, not www.foo.com)
Click Save at the bottom of the section.

What do do next:

If you put your AdSense ads on any other blog or websites in the future, you do need to remember to add them to the Allowed Sites list.

Also, along with allowed-sites list, AdSense shows a list of non-allowed, websites (blogs and others) that have also tried to use your Publisher-id. Check this occasionally, in case you've forgotten to add a new blog/website to the list, or in case you'e added a feature (eg the Translate this page widget) that effectively creates one. The list is only updated weekly, so sites will still be on it for up to a week after you've allowed them. However the Allow feature works immediately.

Restricting your Blog's readers isn't as secure as you thought

by Unknown / Monday, April 25, 2011 / Posted in Article, Security and Permissions

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This article explains some of the issues with restricting readership of your blogspot blog to just people who you choose, and why you can appear to have unexpected readers.

When you first set up a blog, anyone in the world can read it (if they can find it - how to get them to there is a different story!).

But some people want to keep their blog private, just for them and their friends (or teachers, students, other parent, classmates, etc). This is fine, provided they don't mind that only up to 100 people - ever- can be invited to read the blog, and that it doesn't have an RSS feed so cannot offer email subscriptions.

Stopping everyone from reading your blog:

In the Settings / Permissions tab (old interface) or Settings > Basic: Permissions tab (new interface), there is an area where Blogger lets you restrict the readers of your blog to anyone, selected people, or authors only.

(this picture is from the old interface - then new one is very similar)

Restricting access to readers only

If you tick "only people I choose", the screen lets you enter email addresses of people who you want to invite to read the blog.

When you email someone an invitation, they get a message like this:

"To view this blog, visit:

http://www.blogger.com/i.g?inviteID=someNumbersThatIdentifyYourBlogInvitation

You'll need to sign in with a Google Account to confirm the invitation. If you don't have a Google Account yet, we'll show you how to get one in minutes, or you can view the blog as a guest for up to 30 days."

When someone clicks the link in this email, they are asked which Google account they want to use to sign in to your blog, or given the opportunity to sign-up for a Google account if they don't have one already.

This is good, because it lets you invite people who don't, yet, have google accounts to view your blog. But it does mean that your blog may appear to have readers who you didn't invite.

Signing in with a different address

There is noting that forces the email address associated with that Google account that accepts your invitation to be the same as the one that you sent the invitation to.

Once someone has accepted an invitation, the list of readers just shows you the emails of the readers you have: it doesn't show you the link between them and the person who you sent the invitation to.

For example, if you emailed an invitation to mary@gmail,com, but the Mary also has a Google account with manager@google.com as it's email, she could choose to reader your blog with the manager account - and you would see manager@google.com in your list of readers.

Exception: Forwarded Invitations

People who you invite can forward the invitation-email to other people, and they too can sign into your blog. (Each invitation can be used multiple times).

If this happens, the readers are put into a group, and the Permissions tab shows you the email address that you send the invitation to, and the emails of the people who've accepted the invitation. And it lets you remove the permssions either from individuals, or from the whole group at once.

Guest sign-on:

If the person you invited wants to, they can choose to sign in as a guest for up 30 days. However Google bases this on the IP address they are using at the time. This causes a couple of issues:

If they're on a shared computer, then anyone else who uses that computer can read your blog (if they can find it - for example, by looking in the browser history file).
If their internet service (ISP) uses dynamic IP addresses (ie you get a new one every time you connect) then the person who accepts the invitation will only be able to read the blog during their current internet connection. And anyone else who gets the same IP address in the next 30 days will be able to read the blog (though it's unlikely that they will be able to find it).

An Example

Sample Blog Permissions screen, with selected readers options

(note to spammers: using the wonders of MS Paint, I have changed every single email address to something invented - so don't bother!)

In this example:

An invitation was sent to Hazel@gmail.com, but she chose to sign in as UglyDuck with an email of motherUgly@gmail.com

An invitation was sent to KevinLotus,

KevinLotus accepted it but signed in as Enquiries,
He also forwareded it to IrishTransport who signed in as herself.

An invitation was sent to mary@nxtrix.gen, but she chose to view the blog as a guest for 30 days, so it looks like her invitation is outstanding.

Email isn't secure!

Having said all the above - remember that email isn't really secure anyway. Security experts usually say that email is just like a a post-card: your messages can be read, in plain text, by every postal-worker whose hands they pass through. Or in computer terms, by every server that that the pass through on the journey between you and the recipient.

So, if someone really, really wants to read you blog, they may figure out how to "sniff" your email. This isn't easy (and someone who can do it may be able to find easier ways to hack into your blog anyway), but is possible.

If what's in your blog really is super-sensitive, you need to choose whether it's worth taking the risk of using tools like this (and I think it is, in many cases, because the risk is small-ish), or whether you need to look for a set of tools that is more secure.

AdSense and the "Request-URI Too Large" error message: sometimes a work-around is good enough.

by Unknown / Friday, March 4, 2011 / Posted in Adsense, Article, Managing blogs, Security and Permissions

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This article is about an error message that I sometimes see when logging into AdSense - and a way of thinking about browser problems that you might have with Blogger.

What happens:

Every so often, when I'm logging in to AdSense, I get a screen like this

The error message is,

"Request-URI Too Large
The requested URL /accounts/SetSID... is too large to process."

And the window title is "414 Request-URI Too Large "

It doesn't happen every time, or even most times, and I cannot spot any trends (eg only when I first open the browser, only when I have seven tabs open, etc) - except perhaps that I've only seen it in Firefox. But Firefox is the browser I mainly use, so it may be coincidence.

My problem, or Google's?

I've searched for the error message: most of the results were for descriptions of cases when it happened every time someone tried to log in to a system. It appears there was even a case, a while ago, when this happened for Gmail in some situations.   But this isn't my scenario, though, because it doesn't happen all the time.

There are suggestions that it may be related to browser cookies settings.   I'm sure that is true, sometimes. But it's not 100% true for me: I can get the message once, try again immediately and not get it the next time - and there's no way I changed my cookie settings in between.

What to do about it:

I've found a very simple solution:   open another tab, and go to AdSense again.    Every time (so far ;-) ) AdSense has loaded correctly on the 2nd try.

If this didn't work, the next things I'd try would be (in roughly this order):

Clearing the cache and re-starting my browser
Trying to get into AdSense from a different browser
Restarting my computer
Checking that I was using the most-recent releases version of the browser (NB this is the supported, released version - not a Beta version that's being tested).

Why I'm posting this:

If you use Blogger or other Google products - or indeed any other internet-based publishing products - a lot, it's likely that you will run into situations like this.

Most probably, the underlying problem will be a bug in the software, or some subtle combination of security settings in your computer and/or browser software.

Tracking down what's happening can be difficult and time-consuming, and involve learning a lot about topics that you don't otherwise need to know. And knowing what's causing the problem doesn't always help: If only a few people are having the same problem, so Google probably won't be keen to fix it, even if something in their software caused the issue.

The key message of this post is that when you have a problem with Blogger (etc) doing strange things, you should firstly look for a good-enough way to work around the problem.

If you can't find a work-around (ie if nothing works, or if the time or effort required are too big for you to put up with), then you should look for a solution. The first step is always to see if other people are having the same problem - to do this you could either do a google-search for the error message, or post a question somewhere like the Blogger Help Forum.

And IMHO, you should only start in-depth investigation PC and browser security sessions if all else fails - or if the time/effort required to get around the original issue is greater than the time and effort needed to search for a solution.

Email Posting - knowing who posted what

by Unknown / Friday, January 22, 2010 / Posted in Article, Mail2Post, Security and Permissions

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Blogger's mail2Post tool lets you - and others - post to your blog from using email. But it shows the post-author as the person who set up the mail2Post address that was used, and doesn't show the email address that the post was from. Combining mail2Post with email forwarding tells you the email address, and gives some other tracking and post-management options.

Mail2Post and Blogger.

The mail2Post feature (sometimes known as Post-to-profile or M2P) is one way that you can lets other people write to your blog - or that you can post yourself without using the full Blogger tool.

It's easy to set up, and works well enough, although there are some limitations (no labels, pictures may not be handled well).

But if you want other people to write for your blog using mail-to-post, one problem is that all posts that are send to your blog via mail2Post are shown as having the same author, ie the profile name in the Blogger profile of the Google Account that set up the mail2Post feature. So you have no way of knowing who sent in which posts.

Email fowarding is a way around this, and gives you a tool for fixing other problems (eg pictures not showing up in emailed posts) too.

How to set up mail2Post with a forwarding address, using Gmail:

Note: These instructions use Gmail to make the forwarding email address. You need to log in to and out from your Google account several times - it may be better to use a separate browser, or even to use a different email system that supports forwarding (e yahoo mail, hotmail, your ISP) to make the forwarding address.

1 Firstly, set up mail2Post for your blog - and remember the secretWords address that you set up.

2 Turn off your blog's RSS feed.
(This is so that you don't accidentally tell the world about SecretWords address when you approving the forwarding.)

3 Set up a new gMail account, just for this purpose.
I'll call this the mail2Post-forwarding-address in the rest of this article. Make sure that you remember the password for this account.

4 Request mail forwarding in this account, by

Choose Settings from Options gear-wheel (NB this is based on the "new look" gmail - see Gmail help if you need to find the equivalent option in the older gmail interface).

Choose the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab

Click Add a Forwarding Address

Enter your secretWords address in the window, and press Next

Click Ok on the message telling you that a confirmation code has been sent.

5 Go back to Blogger: in your blog, there should be a new post which contains the message with the verification code. View this post.

(The formatting of this message may seem a little strange - it's written to be handled as an email, not a blog post - but the approach works.)

6 Click the verify link that is shown in this post. (fyi, your blog is the ONLY way you can access your secretWords "email address" - there is no way that you can send email messages from it).

7 Test that forwarding is working correctly, by using your personal email to send a test message to your new mail2Post-forwarding-address.

8 Check that the test message from your email appears in your blog as post, either draft or published depending on what settings you used. If it's not there, go back and double-check the mail forwarding options.

9 Once forwarding is working correctly:

Delete the test-postings and the forwarding-validation email from your blog.
Turn the RSS feed on again.

Result:
You, and anyone else you tell the address to, can now use the mail2Post-forwarding-address to make posts to your blog, according to the options you selected when you set up mail2Post.

What your readers see

Your readers, even ones who use RSS-readers or follow-by-email, will see posts in the normal way, authored by the author associated with the mail2Post address. To them, everything will look the same.

What you can see, and do:

Your blog will look the same to you - both when you're viewing it and in the dashboard screens and postings list.

But you can also log into email using your mail2Post-forwarding-address - and here you can see all the email messages that were forwarded to your secretWords address. This lets you see who they came from. It also gives you some more options.

Pictures and videos:
If attached pictures that haven't made it through mail2Post correctly, you can save them to your computer and then put them into the post in the usual way.

Notifications:
As well as forwarding incoming posts to your secretWords address, you can add extra rules to notify other people (eg blog-administrators or authors) of new posts.

Advanced filtering:
Maybe there are some posts that you would like to be automatically posted, while others should stay as draft. You cannot quite achieve this - but you may be able to use gMail's filtering rules to send some posts to your blog and some to you.

Spam and hackers:
Any email address, including your secretWords address and you mail2Post-forwarding-address, may get some spam. Gmail's filtering tools will remove most of this (which is an advantage of using just your secretWords address, which AFAIK has no spam filtering). However:

If hackers guess your secretWords address - you need to change your secretWords address and then change the auto-forwarding rule in your mail2Post-forwarding-address.

If hackers guess your mail2Post-forwarding-address, you can either add extra filters yourself to deal with them, or just delete it and set up a different mail2Post-forwarding-address and only tell it to appropriate people.

And more?
I have a hunch that this approach will let you do other things to - what can you think of?

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