Domain Hosting Sale: January 2010

Saturday 30 January 2010

Post Options - handling line-breaks

This article explains the difference between the Edit HTML Line Breaks values of Convert new lines and Press Enter for line breaks.

What is the Line Breaks option in Blogger

Line break through Potarch Wood. - geograph.org.uk - 418605

One of the items that can be set in the Options section of Blogger's Post Editor is how line-breaks are handled.

At one time, the values for this were:

Convert new lines
Ignore new lines

But now they are:

Press "Enter" for line breaks
Use <br > tags

(sometimes in the updated interface, the <br> text has looked a little strange - but the effect of it stayed the same).

What do these settings mean:

Despite the wording change, these options mean the same thing:

Convert new lines and Press Enter for line breaks:

If you are working in Compose mode, and use the Enter/Return key to make a space between paragraphs, Blogger will put a new line into the underlying post for you. But if you look at the HTML behind the post this will show as a new line, not as <br />

Ignore new lines and Use <br> tags

If you are working in Compose mode, and use the Enter/Return key to make a space between paragraphs, Blogger will put a new line into the underlying post for you, AND if you look at the HTML behind the post this will show as <br />

This may not seem like a major issue, but it can be important to understand if you want to put code from elsewhere into your posts.

Also, if you are moving posts between different blogs it's quite important to have the same line breaks setting on each side before you copy the HTML, or else you can get strange-looking results

Saturday 23 January 2010

Amazon Associates and Blogger, an overview

A list of articles about the relationship between Blogger and Amazon Associates, including hints-and-tips for working more effectively with Amazon, and using Amazon sites other than Amazon.com.

These articles may be useful for people who use Amazon Associates ads on other blogging platforms (Wordpress, TypePad etc) - or even on other types of website. But they are targeted towards Blogger users, consider Blogger issues, and have instructions that are specific to Blogger.

Amazon Associates and Blogger - an Overview

Amazon/Blogger Integration is with Amazon.com

Adding Amazon product links and widgets to your blog.

Adding the Amazon Associates search window switches on Blogger's new editor

Changing the Look of Amazon advertisements

Buiding Image-only Amazon Advertisements

Installing Amazon Associates Product Preview into Blogger

Friday 22 January 2010

Amazon Integration was with Amazon.Com, not the other Amazons

This article looks at the integration between Blogger and Amazon Associates (Amazon.com), the fact that there is not any integration between Blogger and Amazon.co.uk (or any other Amazons), and the consequences of this.

Update: the Blogger / Amazon.com relationship has now ended. The information below is kept for reference purposes only, but is no longer up to date.

Blogger and Amazon integration

In December 2009. Blogger announced a new level of integration between Blogger and the Amazon Associates programme.

For Blogger users, this announcement was the start of

An Amazon Associates section on Blogger's Monetize tab
Being able to sign-up with Amazon Associates from this tab, and
Access to an Amazon Product-Finder tool from within Blogger's post editor: this tools makes it easy to create links to Amazon Associates products while writing a post

One key point that the Blogger documentation doesn't stress is that the integration is with Amazon.com only.

Consequences:

If you use the Amazon Associates product finder to put an Amazon link in your blog, and it's clicked by a reader from Europe, Canada, Japan, Germany ... etc, then they first go to Amazon.com (ie the USA's Amazon). But the system very will suggest (or maybe enforce) that they go to their "local" Amazon to purchase the product. If this happens, you don't get any commission for purchases they make.

An Alternative

You are allowed to sign up with each of the different Amazon's (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.jp, etc) yourself.   If you do this, you can put separate links from them into your blog.    It's probably only worth signing up for ones where most of your readers come from, since you will have to display separate links for each Amazon.   Here is a list of all the Amazons (at the moment).

You can use the same email address and web-page to sign in to the different Amazons, however you cannot use the same password.   (Which makes me think that they're integrated at some level, and hopefully this problem will go away, one day.)

The downside is that because the Blogger integration is with Amazon.com, any product links that you build with the Amazon Product Finder for the Blogger Editor will be with Amazon.com.

You need to go to the individual Amazons, and use the product builder there (or be very clever with creating links yourself) to get product links for the other Amazons.

NB If your readers aren't from the USA it's probably best to go into the Monetize / Amazon Associates tab and turn the Amazon Product Finder feature off. It will only be confusing.

To get links without using the Amazon Product Finder for the Blogger Editor, go into the Amazon site that you want links to, sign in, and choose Link-Builder.   The process is fairly simple, and it gives you access to a wider range link sizes and types.

Example Amazon.com links

A text link

See how Amazon do business by reading Big Shots, Business the Amazon.com Way: Secrets of the Worlds Most Astonishing Web Business (2nd Edition)

Product links generated from the Product Finder for Blogger:

A product link generated inside Amazon.com

(Notice the different background colour: making links from Amazon itself gives you a lot more control ove rt eh look of the too.

A banner:

The Blogger / Amazon.com relationship has now ended

Building customised Amazon product links for use in Blogger.

Building Image-only ads from Amazon

Changing the look of Amazon advertisements

Product Preview (Amazon Associates)

Email Posting - knowing who posted what

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?

Wednesday 20 January 2010

About Blogger-hints-and-Tips

Blogger Hints and Tips has grown from a personal yellow-stickie collection, into a collection of articles focussing on integrating Blogger and a range of other tools.

Where did it come from

Blogger-hints-and-tips was originally going to be an on-line "yellow sticky" - getting all those bits of paper on my desk (and draft emails in my in-box) into one tidy place. Lots of them were useful fragments of HTML or, as I learned more, links to how-to articles that I knew needed to use "soon".

Then I started having to find solutions for problems that (apparently) no one had solved before - because I couldn't find answers by googling. Problems like how to insert AdSense ads right inside Blogger posts, not just on sidebars. After figuring these out, I decided that keeping my notes about the right answer would be a good idea, in case I need the again later.

At the same time, I started answering some questions in the Google Help Forums (instead of just asking).   I learned a lot, and found that I was writing the same thing over and over.   So I made a few posts based on answers to common questions, or based on important facts that the usual answers leave out - for example the answer to "How do I transfer my blog to another owner" really does need to think about more than just Blogger.

And I wanted a real blog to test out some new things (well new to me).   My main site is getting 10-30 visits a day, and I don't want to take the risk of it turning into custard for a few days while I undo a silly experiment.    BHAT seemed like a good candidate.

And then I noticed a funny thing: without even trying, Blogger-Hints-and-Tips was getting search hits.   And I realised that other people were probably facing the same problems I was, and getting the same lack of answers - or getting to my site.

What now

Since then, I've put a lot more effort into the format and layout, and also into the contents on the site. Often I look at the ways Blogger can be used with other tools - but sometimes I write explanatory articles about basic topics too. In mid 2011, I started a total review of all posts, mainly reformatting, but also checking and updating the content. This review is about half-complete.

Blogger-HAT is still an experimental blog-site. It's a lot more organised than it was, with multiple ways of navigating within it, and articles that try to be in-depth and informative. It has a bit of a focus on hints for using blogger, especially with other tools, and is written from the perspective of an IT-analyst who's used to working on big-iron computer systems.

How to insert AdSense ads right inside Blogger posts

Questions in the Google Help Forums

How do I transfer my blog to another owner.

Installing Amazon's Product Preview tool

This article is about fixing a problem with installing Amazon's Product Preview feature into your blog or website.

Amazon's Product Preview code:

As you build your Amazon Associates product links through Amazon's website, you might notice that, in the sidebar, there there is a link to put the Product Previews feature into your website.

The instructions say to place the HTML "after your content and before your closing tag", which is fine provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your template, and are not using a dynamic template.

Is it that easy?

When I first discovered this, in Jan 2010, I tried to install it got this error:

"Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure that all XML elements are closed properly.
XML error message: The reference to entity "o" must end with the ';' delimiter."

After a little investigation, I found that this was an example of 3rd party HTML that needed to be "escaped" before it could be put into my template.

In particular, I had to change the & sign to &-amp-;
(but without the dashes, they're there to stop Blogger from display just an ampersand sign on this page!)

For example:

What Amazon gave me:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.co.uk/s/link-enhancer?tag=YOUR-AMAZON-ASSOCIATES-ID&o=2">
</script>
<noscript>
<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.co.uk/s/noscript?tag=YOUR-AMAZON-ASSOCIATES-ID" alt="" />
</noscript>

What I needed to change it to:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.co.uk/s/link-enhancer?tag=YOUR-AMAZON-ASSOCIATES-ID&amp;o=2">
</script>
<noscript>
<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.co.uk/s/noscript?tag=YOUR-AMAZON-ASSOCIATES-ID" alt="" />
</noscript>

What your readers see:

I don't have Amazon Product Preview installed in this blog, because that's not the effect I'm looing for - but I am going to try to install it into this post.

If I've been successful, then you will see it when you hover your mouse over the Amazon product ad to the right of this paragraph. (Though last time I checked, it had not been successful.)

Saturday 16 January 2010

Pictues, Albums and Slideshows - Advantanges and Disadvantages

This article summarises the advantages and disadvantages of using individual pictures, album links and slideshows in your blog.

In the Picasa overview article, I described Picasa web albums as a tool that stores individual pictures, grouped into albums. It also has tools that let you display the pictures from an album in a slideshow.

When should you use each type of Picasa item

Really, the answer to this depends on your blog, the amount of time you want to spend, and what you want to show your readers. This table helps to work through the options.

	Advantages	Disadvantages
Individual picture	Quick and easy The best option if you only want one or two photos. You have total control of how the text is shown relative to the picture (with some HTML coding) Readers don't have to click anything - they're shown all the pictures when the page loads.	Very time consuming if you want to do more than a few pictures. Readers have to see/download all the pictures on the page, even if they're only slightly interested. Captions that you've entered in Picasa are not shown to readers.
Album link	Gives readers a "taste" of your set of photos, with them having to download all of them. You can apply extra security (requiring sign-in to view particular albums) Captions you've entered in Picasa are visible	Some readers won't think to click on the album, so will miss out on seeing the photos except for the album cover. Readers who click the link are taken away from your blog to the Picasa-web-albums application to view the photos. Some readers will be confused because they don't understand the Picasa-web-albums application.
As a Slideshow	Readers don't have to leave your Blog to see all the photos. You choose if the slideshow plans when the page is loaded, or only when the reader clicks the play icon. (NB only if you use the slideshow-code generator from Picasa-web-albums. Not currently part of the standard slideshow Gadget) Captions you've entered in Picasa are visible (optional unless you use the standard Gadget)	"All or nothing" - a slideshow includes all the pictures from the selected album, not just a subset. Auto-advancing photos in a slideshow may be very distracting for readers. Readers cannot control how quickly the slides in the slideshow are advanced, and sometimes the caption can appear before the next photo does - this may not be good for readers who have a slow internet connection. (However they do have buttons for previous, pause and next if you don't use the Slideshow Gadget - and they have buttons to take them to the Picasa-web-albums application to view the slideshow).

Putting an album into your sidebar

This article shows how to put an album link into your sidebar (or anywhere that you can put a gadget on your template) in Blogger.

Make your album

Previously I've introduced Picasa and Picasa-web-albums (PWA), and listed some ways that you can link PWA to your blog.

Go to Picasa Web Albums
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) - and that you are allowed to publish all of the pictures
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. One of these is "Link to this Album".
Click on "Link to this Album".
This opens two options, showing the code to use to link to the album in an email, and one with the HTML to embed in a website.
Copy the entry under "HTML to embed in website".

Put it into your blog:

The HTML code that you copied from PWA is just like HTML code from and other 3rd party source, so it can be in stalled the same way: option 1 in this article shows you how to put it into a gadget.

Once it's there, you may like to move it to a new location (while you're still in the layout editor), or centre-align it.

What your readers see:

Amazon recommendations

This puts a picture-link to your album into your sidebar (or wherever you chose to put the gadget): it will have a white border (like the one beside this paragraph) - though you may want to edit the HTML to make it look different.

When a reader clicks on the picture-link they are taken to the Picasa-web-album, where they can view, but not edit, the album you've linked to.

Related Articles:

Picasa & Blogger - Part 1, What is Picasa?

Picasa & Blogger - Part 2, Options for linking Picasa into your Blog

Putting 3rd party HTML into your blog

Centering gadgets

Copyright, blogs and bloggers - copyright applies to pictures too.

Friday 15 January 2010

Understanding Picasa (under development)

This article (when finished) will describe in detail how Picasa web albums manages photographs. In the meantime, it's just a stub, put here because I published under this topic heading a long time ago, and never finished it. Apologies for any inconvenience.

All about ...

On your PC, file are stored in folders, and folders can have sub-folders inside them.

In the Picasa application program on your PC, photos are stored in folders, which correspond to folders on your PC. But there are also albums, which are not the same as sub-folders on the PC: an album is a collection of links to photographs within their folders, not of photographs themselves. So if you delete an album, you aren't necessarily deleting the photos too. (NEED TO DOUBLE CHECK THIS)

The same thing is true in Picasa-web-albums: you can create albums, which are logical collections of photographs, and indeed slideshows of these albums.

... more, including diagrams, coming soon

Rules for using Amazon Associates on Blogger

This article has links to the official Amazon Associates terms and conditions, and has some brief guidelines about complying with them. are available on Amazon's site, currently here.

Always refer to the official version for definitive answers about any programme's Terms and Conditions.

Amazon Associates Terms and conditions:

Each Amazon site (remember, Amazon has different sites for different markets) has its own set of terms and conditions, usually called its Operating Agreement. They are similar, but there are subtle differences between each one, and in how each of the Amazons interprets things.

You always need to make your own decisions about whether a particular approach meets their rules.

You can find the operating agreement for each of the sites, as at the time of writing, at:

Amazon Europe: UK and Ireland, Germany, France and Italy. (The English language one is definitive, accourding to Amazon at Sept 2011).
Amazon Canada
Amazon.com - ie USA and rest of the world - except for China and Japan

In Summary:

I prepared the following guide for myself when I first signed up with Amazon.com, using to help me make 100% sure that I meet the terms and conditions. It is not definitive, and not up to date (new T&Cs have come out several times, and while I've read the change summaries, I haven't updated the following.. Also, it's only for Amazon.com, not the others (which Blogger did not integrate with).

Associates must:

Use any data, images, text, or other information obtained from Amazon in connection with the agreement, only in a lawful manner and only in accordance with the terms of this Agreement.

Promptly delete any Content that is no longer displayed on the Amazon Site or that Amazon notify is no longer available for use.

Display a logo (a small graphic image that identifies the site as a Program participant, provided by Amazon ) or the phrase "In association with Amazon" somewhere on their site.

Use the graphic images and text provided by Amazon to identify their site as a Program participant and to generate Product sales.

Comply with laws, regulations, licenses, etc - ie any requirements of any governmental authority that has jurisdiction over them. This means pay tax (among other things!)

Stop participating in the Amazon Associates programme if any change to the terms and conditions is unacceptable to them.

Associates may:

Buy paid search advertisements to send users to their own site and then, when the user affirmatively clicks on a Special Link on the site, direct the user to the Amazon Site.

Associates must not:

Buy products during sessions initiated through the links on their own site (for personal or commercial use, or re-sale) [it is ok to click on links - just not to purchase thru them? double check this]
Offer incentives (ie rewards) to people for using links on their site.
Read or change how the user interacts with the Amazon site [I guess Google Analytics use is ok ... surely it records an exit to Amazon?]

Change how anything on the Amazon site works.

Do any transactions on Amazon on behalf of any third party, or help anyone else to do any.

Do anything that could reasonably cause customer confusion about their relationship with Amazon or about the site on which things (e.g., search, order, browse) are happening on.

Show advertisements or material promoting Amazon around or in conjunction with the display of the Amazon Site (e.g., through"framing" or pop-up or pop-under windows), or assist, authorize, or encourage any third party to take any such action; - except for displaying advertisements provided by Amazon.

Try to get around the referral fee schedule or artificially increase their referral fees.
This could include encouraging people to buy low-price items in order to exceeding any referral fee threshold or causing any page of the Amazon Site to open in a customer's browser other than as a result of the customer clicking on a Special Link on their site)
[so no referral links in emails, Facebook, Twitter, etc - some of the stuff on the AA discussion forum seems to say differently]

Try to intercept or re-direct traffic from or on, or divert referral fees from, any web site that participates in the Program;

Use any Content or Special Link in connection with any handheld, mobile, or mobile phone application without our prior written approval; [BUT HERE WILL BE SOME MOBILE USERS - ESP OF BLOGGER SITES ...hmmm]

Try to purchase or register any keywords, search terms or other identifiers that include the words "amazon," "endless," "kindle," "javari" or any other trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, (inlcuding variations or misspellings)

If they bid on or purchase keywords ib keyword auctions on (eg on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or any site in their respective search networks (e.g., AOL, Ask.com, etc.), - then the paid search advertisements they purchase may not send users to Amazon without a click by the user on that intermediate site. [NEEDS BETTER WORDING]

Show or refer to a trademark/logo of a 3rd party seller on the Amazon Site;

Obscure or change a “Privacy Information” link or Amazon trademark (logo or text that's is a Special Link which Amazon provide

Use Content relating to any Excluded Merchant or any product sold by any Excluded Merchant;

Change any graphic provided by Amazon, except to resize it;

Change any text link provided by Amazon, except to shorten it;
[LAST TWO CONTRADICT ONE FURTHER DOWN?]

Sell, redistribute, sublicense or transfer any Content;

Use Content provided by Amazon to send sales to any other site

Use any Content, including any name or likeness embodied therein, in a way that implies endorsement, sponsorship, commercial tie-in or other association with, any product, service, party or cause.(e.g., placing it close to unrelated 3rd party materials)

Issue a press release about the Amazon Agreement or their participation in the Program.

Misrepresent or embellish the relationship between themselves and Amazon, or between Amazon and anyone else.

Use images or text supplied by Amazon in any offline way manner (e.g., in any printed material, mailing or other document).

Change graphic images or text, or any of Amazon's images.

Penalties may include:

withhold referral fees (from permitted and non-permitted activities) and/or
terminating the Agreement.

Wednesday 13 January 2010

Linking to a Picasa web-album in a blogger post

This article shows how to put an album link into your sidebar (or anywhere that you can put a gadget on your template) in Blogger.

Make your album

Previously I've introduced Picasa and Picasa-web-albums (PWA), and listed some ways that you can link PWA to your blog.

Go to Picasa Web Albums
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) - and that you are allowed to publish all of the pictures
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. One of these is "Link to this Album".
Click on "Link to this Album".
This opens two options, showing the code to use to link to the album in an email, and one with the HTML to embed in a website.
Copy the entry under "HTML to embed in website".

Put it into your blog:

The HTML code that you copied from PWA is just like HTML code from and other 3rd party source, so it can be in stalled the same way: option 2 in this article shows you how to put it into a post.

Once it's there, you can use any of the regular options for formatting items in the Post Editor - though you will probably need to use HTML mode to this, because the code from PWA puts the album inside a table, which is something that the Post Editor doesn't handle well.

Amazon recommendations

What your readers see:

This puts a picture-link to your album into your sidebar (or wherever you chose to put the gadget): it will have a white border (like the one beside this paragraph) - though you may want to edit the HTML to make it look different.

When a reader clicks on the picture-link they are taken to the Picasa-web-album, where they can view, but not edit, the album you've linked to.

Targeting AdSense ads to a subset of page content

There are some websites where contextual targetting is not a good idea, because they attract the wrong sort of advertisements. For AdSense, one work-around is to target your ad-content to a certain sub-section of the overall post..

Contextal Advertising

Google's AdSense is perhaps one of the best known contextual advertising programmes.

It works by looking at the page that and advert is to be shown on, and choosing a suitable ad for that page based on the key words shown on the page.

In many cases, this works well: a page about losing weight will have lots of words that attract ads from a weight loss company, for example.

But there are cases when it doesn't work so well: a blog exposing the "myths" of conventional medicine, and suggesting natural remedies for many problems may well target advertisements from mainstream practitioners and companies.

To avoid this, use section targetting.

Section targeing tells Google what sections to take more (and less) notice of when matching ads to page content.

It can be particularly useful to get some parts of sites ignored. For example, if you have a paragraph like

"my site shows blah, blah, blah, excluding foo1, foo2 and foo3"

and foo1, foo2 and foo3 are things that there are a lot of irrelevant ads for, then using targeting to say "ignore the bit starting with excluding" might be a good idea.

For instructions how to do section targeting that works with AdSense, see: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23168

What your readers see

Ideally, the only difference that your readers will see is more relevant advertising.

Inserting a picture into a blog post

This article about integrating Picasa and Blogger has instructions for inserting a picture into a blog post or page.

It applies no matter whether the picture comes from, but has particular information about pictures that are already in Picasa.

Pictures and blog posts

When you want to put a picture into a blog post, you can either upload it through Blogger's editor, or upload it to somewhere on the internet first, and then just link to that location from Blogger.

I recommend uploading pictures outside Blogger because you can control the size and picture quality of the uploaded files: if you do the upload through Blogger, then the resolution is often reduced and this can make your pictures look fuzzy. However I do recommend using Picasa-web-albums as the "somewhere else on the internet, because only pictures stored in Picasa can be used as thumbnail images for your post.

How to put a picture into a post

1 Make sure you know where the original picture is and that you have copyright permission to use it.

2 If the photo is not already on the internet, upload it to Picasa-web-albums, or another tool (eg Flickr, Photobox, etc) that will give you the link to the picture.

3 Copy the internet-location (ie the URL) of the picture file, (This article tells you how to find the location of a picture that's stored in-Picasa web-albums.)

4 Click the picture icon on the toolbar:

4 Enter the picture location into the box that opens.

If the picture is on your computer use the "Upload an image" dialog, or if it is on the internet, use the "Web address(URL" option.

5 Click Ok.

6 The picture you have chosen appears in your Edit Posts window.

Controlling the pictures in your post:

Size and alignment:
When you click on a picture, a small menu opens (generally beside or under the picture), with options to:

choose the size (small, medium, large, extra-large),
align it (left, centre or right)
remove it

If you want the picture to sit in the middle of a paragraph of text, rather than underneath it,

Go in to Edit HTML mode
Locate the picture you want
Delete the line before it that says

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">

Delete the first line after it that says

</div>

Picture Position:
Quite often, pictures that you add through the toolbar are put at the start of the post, or perhaps the start of the current paragraph, instead of exactly where you want them.

You can often move a picture around by drag-and-drop (click the picture, drag it, and drop it where you want it to go) - though sometimes this doesn't work as well as it should.

You may need to edit the HTML to move the picture around: to do this, go into Edit HTML mode, and find the code for your picture relative to the other text in your post. Every case is a little different, but in general the code for a picture looks like:

<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/tkoGx2454hA/s1600-h/Inserting+a+picture.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJebNqCKxCwl0DDKsU49a1879mxHlGifrIIxL4GFrO3lPHqrR2AVPMayf5ghituDmQRbcx5R1-x-lNO0BTIDLdmkuQkpJdsDIstlektVAGdZNT0p8BOEW99MyZBRMhF_ZdLoRaXf57Uvzh/s400/Inserting+a+picture.gif" /> </a>

If you want to move a picture by editing the HTML, make sure that you take all the code between the opening <a href .... and the closing </a>

For more information about how picture code is structured and how you can change it, see stopping pictures in your blog from being "clickable". and putting text and pictures side by side.

Putting a Picasa slideshow into your sidebar

This article shows how to put a slideshow from Picasa-web-albums into a gadget on your blog.

Overview

Previously I've described the options for linking your blog and Picasa-web-albums, and noted that putting a slideshow into a gadget is one option.

A slideshow is a set of photos that automatically advance from one to the next - it's a little different from an album, which is just a collection of photos with no auto-advance feature.

There are two approaches you can take to putting a PWA slideshow into your blog:

Getting the code from Picasa and using a HTML/Javascript gadget.
Using Blogger's slideshow gadget.

The 2nd option is easier, but the first (usually) gives you more control over how the slideshow works.

HTML/Javascript Gadget Approach:

(NB a similar approach will work for other blogging tools, eg Wordpress, thought the details will vary slightly)

Go to Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/home).
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. One of these is "Link to this Album".
Click on "Link to this Album"
Click on "Embed Slideshow"
This opens a new dialog box, over the top of your current browser window.
Fill in the option 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 ..."
You can now put this HTML into your blog, the same way you would add any other 3rd party HTML : option 1 in this article describes how to put it into a gadget.

Alternative:

You may be able to use the slideshow gadget instead. To do this, follow steps 1 and 2, and then:

Go to Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/home).
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)
Return to Blogger, and:
In pre-Sept-2011 Blogger, go to Design / Page Elements in Blogger, or
In post-Sept-211 Blogger, to do the Layout tab
Click "Add a gadget" in the area where you want to put the slideshow.
Choose the Slideshow gadget,
Choose these options - in the order shown (ie work down the page - some of the bottom options won't have the right values availabl until the earlier ones are set)

Source = Picasa web albums
Option = Album
Username = the name of the google account where the album is stored. (eg, mine is maryc.fromnz)
Album = which ever album your photos are in.

Save the gadget, and check that the position is correct.

Some people advise against saying that Picasa-web-albums is the source: they suggest choosing Other, and just pasting in the album's URL. I haven't yet found any reasons for this, but it's worth trying if using Picasa as a source doesn't work for you.

Options for linking Picasa into your Blog

There are various places on your blog where you can put items from Picasa - and different options from Picasa too (individual pictures, albums, slideshows). This article describes them, and links to articles with specific instructions about each combination.

Where to put Picasa items on your blog:

Previously, I looked at how Picasa manages pictures, and the advantages and disadvantages of using each type of Picasa item in your blog.

In short, you can choose where to put Picasa pictures, album links or slideshows in your Blog.

Options include:

inside an individual post,
as a gadget in your sidebar
as a gadget in some other part of the blog that is set up to take gadgets (eg the header or footer)

The advantanges and disadvantages of each position are just the same as they are for other types of item (widget, diagram, map, graph, spreadsheet, etc) that you might put on your blog, ie they're not specific to Picasa items, and they vary a lot depending on your blog's design and niche. So I'm not going in to them here..

How to put Picasa items into your Blogger blog:

(may of the principles here will work with Picasa and other types of blogging software - eg Wordpress, Typepad, etc - but these articles are targetted to Blogger)

	Inside a Blog Post	In a Gadget
As an individual picture	Putting a Picture into a page on Blogger	Inserting a Picture as a Gadget.
As an Album link	Linking to a Picasa album in a Blogger post	Linking to a Picasa album in your sidebar (or other gadget)
As a Slideshow	Putting a Slideshow (from a Picasa album) into a Blogger post	Putting a Slideshow (from a Picasa album) into your sidebar

Picasa & Blogger - series overview

Blogger-Hints-and-Tips has a series of posts about integrating Blogger and Picasa. This is the "home page" for the series, and has links to all the articles.

Articles in the series include:

What is Picasa - a very basic introduction

How Picasa Manages Pictures: Understanding Picasa, Picasa-web-albums and Blogger (under development)

Advantages and disadvantages of using each type of Picasa item

Options for putting things from Picasa into Blogger (with links to detailed how-to instructions for inserting pictures, albums and slidehows into Blogger posts and gadgets)

Finding a picture's URL in a Picasa-web-album

Wednesday 6 January 2010

Stopping some pages appearing on the home page

This article is about how to make sure that a given post never appears on your blog's so-called "home page".

Blogger and Home-pages

As explained previously, Blogger's usual approach is to show new visitors to your blog your most recent post - since hopefully they are return visitors coming back to check what you've written recently.

However there may be some things that you don't want to appear first when users go to your blog.

For example, contact details or lists of committee members, which users normally reach by clicking on a menu or link.

Option 1: pre-date the post

To ensure that a page is not what a reader sees when they arrive at your blog's home page, you just need to: make sure that its Post-date (which can be set in the Post Editor) isn't in the top N dates used in your blog, where N = the number of posts per page that you have selected. This is set:

in the Blog Posts area which is under Design / Page Elements. Or
under Settings > Formatting > Show at Most

By default, in most templates, it is set to 7. In many of my blogs, I've set in to 1, so there is only one post on each page. And even if Blogger chooses to show less posts than you have selected per page, this approach will still work.

Give a far-in-the-past date to pages that you never want to appear first. But don't make it so far in the past that they will seem like nonsense if Google ever converts historic posts. A date like 2-3 years ago might be a good compromise.

However if you follow this approach, then it would be a good to not display the post-date on ANY of your posts. If you do display it, and it's out-of-date, the reader will think

"gosh, those contacts haven't been updated since <>, they can't be right".

So you need to turn it off (also on Blog Posts), and if date is relevant, put it in the text of your posts.

Option 2: Use a Page instead of a Post

Blogger's so-called "static" pages are a far simpler was to meat this goal. Simply put the material that you do not ever want onto one of your regular Pages", an d"home page", and guaranteed not to show up on your home page or in your RSS feed.

This option was not available when this post was originally launched, but it has a lot to recommend it.