How to remove the numbers in blogger post URL's

Featureso Tuesday, 24 November 2015

Using Labels to categorize your Blogger Posts

Featureso Monday, 2 November 2015

Article , Labels

Edit

This article explains how to use Labels to categorise the Posts in your Blog, and how you can get around some of the limitations in Blogger's categorising tools.

Why categorise your Posts

watermelon salad recipe can be labelled / tagged as fruit, salad, dessert and pink

Grouping your blog's contents makes it easier for people who have reached your blog via Search to find other posts that they may be interested in - provided you add tools to your blog that let them navigate using labels.

It's essential if you want to make it look like you have put your Posts into Pages.

And it helps you to find posts yourself.

Blogger's tools for working with categories

The only tool that Blogger provides for categorising or grouping Posts is Labels.

In short, Labels are tags that you apply to posts.

Each post can have as many Labels as you want (there is an upper limit of 5000 labels-per-blog, but most people don't get near it).

And you can use labels for different purposes. For example, a post titled "Photographing Long-haired Black Cats" could have three different labels

Cats - the the animal it's about
Photography - for the functional category
Jane Smith - for the author

The Labels gadget lets readers choose which groups of posts to see: when a visitor clicks an item on the labels gadget, they are shown a list of posts that have the selected label applied to them.

You can add the Labels gadget as many times as you like, selecting which specific label values to show each time. In the example above, you might add it three times, once for ainmals (showing Cats, Dogs and Rabbits), once for function (showing feeding, grooming and photography), and once for author (showing Jane Smith and Joe Bloggs).

There are three steps that you need to follow to make effective use of Labels in Blogger.

How to add Labels to your blog

Step 1: Label your Posts

For each post, add one or more labels. You can add labels either:

In the post-editor, in the Labels section at the right side of the post-editor o

From the Posts tab, tick the posts you want to put the labels on, and then use the drop down arrow from the top icon that looks like a small luggage-tag: choose the label or "New label ...").

Step 2: Add the labels gadget

Add the Labels gadget to your blog - the same way you would add any other gadget . You can add it as many times as you need, choosing which labels to show each time.

Warning: If you choose to show only a certain selection of Labels in a gadget, then this is all that it will show even if you add new labels to your posts later on. However if you don't restrict which labels are shown, then new ones are automatically shown in the gadget if they are associated with published posts.

Drag-and-drop the labels gadget to wherever you want it: some people put it just underneath their header, to make readers think they've looking at a more traditional web-page.

Step 3: Add Labels navigation

Another way for your readers access labels is from the display in the post header or footer of the list of labels assigned to each post.

This is turned on by default in most templates: you can change the setting and move it around using post-templete settings found under Layout > Blog Posts (edit).

What your visitors see

A List of Posts:

If a visitor to your blog clicks on an item in the labels gadget or in the labels-list that is show for apost, then the "labels-view screen" is used to show them the posts that have the selected label.

This screen is like the main screen: is only shows a certain number of posts and visitors need to use the newer-posts and older-posts links to move back through the list.

Like the main screen, if you have used jump-breaks in your posts, then the list only shows the first part of each post. If you haven't used jump-breaks, then the whole posts are shown.

A summary message:

Unlike the main screen, in most templates there is a message at the top of the page saying:
"Showing newest posts with label WHAT-EVER-YOU-CHOSE. Show older posts"

Or if there are no published posts with the selected Label, the message is slightly different. Some people change their template to customise or remove this message: Chuck in The Real Blogger Status has written an excellent description of how to do this.

What Labels aren't - but appear to be

Many people think that Labels are a way of actually putting Posts into pages. However the Posts aren't actually moved around. The labels-screen is just a way of viewing a smaller-than-usual group of Posts, and can make it look like you have put your posts into sub-pages.

Making multi-level categories

Currently, Blogger only supports one level of grouping. The only way you can make sub-groups of Labels is to add two categories to each post - one for the "major" category, and one for the "minor" category

For example you might use labels like these

Major category: Minor categories:
Recipes: Sweet, Savory, Wheat-free
Party-games: ice-breaker, run-around, silent, outdoor
Music: lively, soft & gentle, traditional, instrumental

Each post would need to have at least one label from the major category, and one from the minor categories.

If you do this, you need to be clever about adding two levels of gadget, with only a selected group of labels shown in each gadget. You might even need to edit your template, to only show certain gadgets in certain situations.

Posts, Pages and Navigation

Setting what goes on the Home Page

Editing your blog's template: advantages and disadvantages

Making it look like you have put your posts into pages.

Article , Labels

Using Labels to categorize your Blogger Posts

Featureso Monday, 2 November 2015

Copying all the posts from one blog to another

Featureso

Article , Managing blogs

Edit

This article is about how to copy all the posts from one blog to another, using Blogger. There is a separate article about copying individual posts, or pages, from one blog to another.

New Holland tractor with NH 850TL front loader

To copy all the Posts from one blog to another, you need to export them from the first blog, and import the file that was created into the second file.

Any Pages (see The Difference between Posts and Pages) in the first blog, need to be moved individually, because pages aren't currently included in the export file.

If you want to totally replace the contents of the destination blog with the contents of the source blog, then you should delete the existing posts from the destination blog before you import the file. (NB Delete posts by going to the Posting / Edit Posts screen, and pressing the Delete button that is beside the post. Don't delete the entire blog, or you will lose access to the URL).

Follow these steps to copy all posts from one blog to another

1 Log in to Blogger.

2 Go to the export tab from the Settings / Other tab.

3 Click on Export Blog.

Export-blog window on the old Blogger interface:
the new interface looks a little different, but has the same links

3a If you are using the new interface, click Download Blog on the confirmation message window:

4 Your computer will download a file. For Windows users, it will probably be put in the My Documents / Downloads file. Or you system may use another place, or it may ask you where to put it. Whatever happens, you will need to know where this file is saved to.

5 Open the blog that you want to move the posts to
(You may need to log out and in again, or perhaps just switch to different browser or tab)

5 Delete (using Posting / Edit Posts) any Posts that are already there, but which you don't want in the refreshed blog.

6 Go to Settings > Other and click Import Blog. When the box opens, choose the exported file that you made earlier, and enter the security-text.

Import file selection screen in the new interface:
the old version of Blogger is very similar.

7 Choose whether or not to automatically publish all imported posts.
Only tick the box if you DO want the posts automatically imported. If you don't tick it, the posts will be loaded, but with have status of Draft, so won't be visible by readers until you publish them.

8 Click Import Blog.

9 Check that the import worked successfully, by looking at the blog, and also at the list of posts under Edit Posts: are the right number of posts there, do they have the right labels etc.

Results

All the posts from the source blog will be copied to the destination blog.

Many of the post characteristics will be the same as in the original blog. This includes:

title
post contents
published-date and time
label(s)
post-author.

Any comments from the source blog will also be copied over - sometimes it takes a few hours for the links for them to be re-establshed properly.

The URL for each post will be based on the URL of the blog you have imported them into and the publication-date that the posts had in the source blog - for example:

www.YourNewBlogName.blogspot.com /2009/05/name-based-on-post-title.html

Any internal links in the blog will still point to the post in the old blog

For example this link points to a popular article in Blogger-HAT.

If I export-and-imported this post into a new blog, the link would still point to the same place, ie the post in Blogger-HAT - not to the post in the new blog.

Any pictures, videos etc in the old blog will still be in the same place that they were in (Picasa-web-albums, YouTube, Google Videos etc).

If you have imported more than the number of posts that Blogger allows per day (currently 50 I think) then to make any more posts today you will need to complete the captcha-test (ie entering the letters in the funny-shaped word). This will go away approximately 24 hours after you last enter more that the maximum-posts-per-day.

Importing to the same blog

If you try to import posts into the same blog that you exported them from, Blogger will not import any posts, and give you an error message.

If you do want to do this (eg to create a duplicate set of posts), then do the export, change some small detail of the original posts title or date/time, and then do the import.

The Difference between Posts and Pages

Moving individual posts, or pages, from one blog to another

Converting Posts into Pages

Moving some posts form one blog to another

Deleting blogs and blog-posts

Article , Managing blogs

Copying all the posts from one blog to another

Featureso

How to set the URL for Blogger posts

Featureso Sunday, 18 October 2015

Article , Post Editor , SEO

Edit

This article shows how to use the Permalink options to control the URL used for a post in your blog.

URLs and Blog Posts

When you first publish a post in blogger, an URL (called a permalink in blogger) is automatically generated for that post. It looks like:

www.yourDomain/yyyy/mm/WORDS-ABOUT-MY-POST

In this URL:

yourDomain is either your custom domain (eg fred-fish.com) or your blogspot domain if you aren't using a custom domain at the time (eg www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com)

yyyy/mm is the year and month of the post's original publication date.

Years ago, Blogger chose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-MY based on the title, or the first words in the post if the title was blank. They used some rules eg leaving out "the" and other common words, and putting numbers on the end so that every post has a unique URL (called a "permalink" in Blogger).

However Blogger have now provided a tool that lets you choose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST separately from the post-title.

How to change the customisable part of the URL for a post

1 Edit the post in the usual way.

2 In the Post Settings area (currently at the right hand side of the editor), there is a section called Permalink.

3 Click on Links to show the options in it.

4 Click the custom URL radio button

5 Type the words that you want to use in WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST into the Custom URL box

6 Click Done.

7 Finish the post, and Publish it.

Restrictions

The only characters you can use are:

lowercase letters (ie a, b, c ... z)
uppercase letters (ie A, B, C ... Z)
digits (ie 0, 1, 2 ... 9)
underscore (ie _)
dash (ie - )
full-stop, also known as a period (ie .)

It looks like there is no restriction on the number of characters you can put into the URL. For example, I was just able to make a post in my test blog, with this URL:
http://bhat-draftarticlestore.blogspot.ie/2012/07/123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-.html
(you cannot see the post, because that particular blog isn't open for public reading.)

If the combinaton of yyyy-mm from post-date (which you can change - see Setting the Post Date) and WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-BLOG is not unique, Blogger will leave out the last character(s), and put in numbers to make it unique.

It only applies to Posts, not Pages: the only way to influence the URL / permalink for a Page on your blog is to choose the initial words in the page-title very carefully. (Ref: the difference between Posts and Pages)

Why should you bother? What words should you use?

Firstly, it's only worth changing the custom words in your post-URL if SEO matters for your blog.

If you think the change is worth it, then you need to think about what specific words
1) accurately reflect the content of your blog, and
2) are likely to be the words that people search for.

Unless you're a spammer, there is no point in making your post url www.myBlog/2012-07/hot-and-sexy-topic if your post doesn't have any content about hot-and-sexy-topic. (And if you are a spammer, you may as well leave Blogger now, before you get kicked off anyway.)

Leave out smaller filler words like "the" "a" "and" - unless they are relevant to the post-contents. For example include "the Who" if your post is about the band called The Who, but leave it out if your post is about the cats who can fly.

Lastly, many SEO experts (self-proclaimed and otherwise) say that dashes are better than dots or underscores. Only Google and Bing know if they'are correct or not. But it's probably a good idea to use xxx-yy-aaaa instead of xxx_yy_aaaa or xxx.yy.aaaa, just in case they are.

Changing the post-title after publication

Google's help-article about the custom-permalink feature says:

"because Blogger automatically creates the URL from information from your post title, your URL would change should you decide to edit the title. This would result in broken links, and fewer visitors to your blog"

This isn't the way Blogger worked before: until now, I often published a post with one title using the words I wanted in the URL, and then very quickly edit it and change the title to the words I wanted in the title. For example, for a recent post

the URL is http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2012/07/html-code-for-popular-gadgets-in.html
the post-title is now: Where to get the HTML code for popular gadgets in Blogger

I just tried this again in my test-blog, and found that it's still true: even if you change the title, the post URL doesn't change.

Changing the custom-URL words after publication

Originally, after you hit the Publish button for the first time, there was no way change the permalink: if you click on the Permalink option in Post Settings, you are shown the custom value that you chose, but you cannot change it.

However you can now:

Edit the post.
Click the Revert to draft button.
Edit the post URL in the same way

and the URL of your post will be changed. Note that if you do this, the post characteristics (view count, comments) are kept. This means that Blogger must be associating them with the unchanged internal post-identifier, not the URL.

How to change the date for a post

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Use a private blog to get your posts right before publish them

Linking your blog and the social networks

Moving material from one blog post to another

Article , Post Editor , SEO

How to set the URL for Blogger posts

Featureso Sunday, 18 October 2015

How to change or remove the Newer Post and Older Posts links

Featureso Monday, 5 October 2015

Article , Blog structures , Navigation tools

Edit

This article explains how to hide or change the format of the "Older Posts" and "Newer Post" and "Home" links that are shown at the bottom of Blogger blogs with Layout or Designer templates.

Why are the older and newer posts links used

Most designer and layout templates have links at the bottom of your page of blog posts which let readers navigate back and forward among the list of posts.

This is basic to how a blog is intended to work: you post regularly, and give people a way to get back to previous posts.

The pager-links are particularly important on pages that are reached using the Label or Archive gadgets, which may show more posts than you normally have on your home page, or displaying in your blog.

But some people want to remove them - and this is fine provided readers have other ways of navigating around the blog.

How to remove "Newer Posts" and "Older Posts" from your blog

To totally remove these items, you just add some new CSS rules to your template in the usual way.

To remove "Older Posts" add:

#blog-pager-older-link {
float: right;
}

To remove "Newer Posts" add:

#blog-pager-older-link {
float: right;
}

Or to remove both of them and the "Home" link that appears in between them, add:

#blog-pager {
display: none;
}

How to format the "Newer Posts" and "Older Posts"

Changing the way that these links look is very similar, you just add the same codes, except instead of

display: none;

you need to use the CSS element for the effect you want. For example, to make the text bigger and bold, you might use rules like

font-size: 150%;
font-weight: bold;

You need to put these commands inside the curly brackets, where the display: none; is now - make sure that each component has a semi-colon at the end of it. It makes the code easier to read if each component is on a new line, but this isn't necessary.

Another option is to swap the "float" commands around to put "older posts" on the left and "newer posts" on the right (I've never quite understood why they were the other way around).

You can also use background images and colours, with elements like:

background-image:url('URL OF YOUR IMAGE');

background-color:#cccccc;

How to change the "Newer Posts" and "Older Posts" text

If you want to change the text values - either to different words, or by replacing them totally with pictures, you need to accept the disadvantages of editing your template. If this is ok, and you you want to proceed then:

1 Edit your template in the usual way

2 Replace the existing links:

To replace the "newer posts" link, find <data:newerPageTitle/> in your template, and replace it with whatever text you want.
To replace the "older posts" link, find <data:olderPageTitle/> in your template, and replace it with whatever text you want.
To replace the "home" link, find <data:homeMsg/> in your template, and replace it with whatever text you want.

In each case, the code you are replacing will be inside some other code, like this:

<span id='blog-pager-newer-link'>
<a class='blog-pager-newer-link' expr:href='data:newerPageUrl' expr:id='data:widget.instanceId + "_blog-pager-newer-link"' expr:title='data:newerPageTitle'><data:newerPageTitle/></a>
</span>

Make sure that you only replace exactly the code listed above, including the < and >'s. The other code around sets up the links to the actual older or newer posts, and you don't want to change this.

Also, if you want to use a picture instead, replace it with <img alt='...' border='0' src='THE URL OF YOUR PICTURE'/> - of course with the right picture URL put in.

Do make sure that the meaning of your pictures is obvious though - what may look like a cute "newer posts" symbol to you might be totally meaningless to someone else.

How to add a CSS rule to your template

How to edit your blogger template

Understand the advantages and disadvantages of template editing

Finding the URL of a picture in Picasa-web-albums

Understanding designer and layout templates

Article , Blog structures , Navigation tools

How to change or remove the Newer Post and Older Posts links

Featureso Monday, 5 October 2015

How to centre-align the sharing-icons from AddThis in Blogger

Featureso Tuesday, 29 September 2015

AddThis , Template editing

Edit

This article shows how to get and then centre-align the row of sharing items that you can get from AddThis (and it's likely that a similar technique applies to sharing buttons from other services like ShareThis, too).

If you think that Blogger's own social sharing buttons a just a bit too small and difficult position, then you may decide to use a service like AddThis to generate buttons that are more elegant all round.

Signing up with AddThis is easy: just log in to your Blogger account, and in a separate tab open up AddThis.com. Choose Create Account, and then Continue with Google. This links your Google account and your AddThis account, and is the easiest approach - but there are other options too, like creating your account with your Facebook or Twitter accounts, or even just signing up the old fashioned way with your email address.

Once you have signed up and chosen a plan (personally I just the free "Basic" plan), you need to actually install the AddThis buttons on your site. To do this:

Select one or more sets of sharing buttons (from the options available to your account type),
Choose the settings which apply to that set of buttons
Choose Activate (button in the bottom right corner of the setting screen), and
Install the code that AddThis gave you into your blog.

Installing the code that AddThis gave you is pretty much like installing any other piece of code. Typically the code you have to install has two parts:

For the piece that says:

Step 1: Add the following code to the <body> of your website.

Search for "<body" (note: no closing angle-bracket because some templates have extra instructions in there), and then put the code from AddThis after the angle bracket that goes with the <body

For the piece that says:

Step 2: Paste this code into whichever page you would like this tool to show up.

Find the location in your template that you would like the gadget (eg an HTM gadget, or inside the post statement itself - read more about the options), and copy and paste the relevant code from AddThis.

But it's not in the right place.

If you install the code as is from AddThis, you will find that the row of sharing buttons is pretty tightly linked up with the rest of the page, and left-aligned. Fortunately this is easy to change.

How to centre (or right align) rows of buttons from AddThis

To put the set of sharing buttons from AddThis at the middle of the page, you need to surround the 2nd piece of code from AddThis with another Div statement, like the one in bold below:

<div style = 'width:100%; text-align: center; margin-bottom:3em; margin-top:2em;'>
<div class="addthis_sharing_toolbox"></div>
</div>

The exact details to use depend on how exactly you want to set up your sharing-bar form AddThis. I wanted it to be centre-aligned on one of my sites, with some extra white space above and below, so I used these commands:

width:100% - says to use all of the page-width in deciding where to put the sharing bar (by detfault, it would just use the width of the sharing bar itself

text-align: centre - means that he bar will be put in the middle

margin-bottom and margin-top put some extra space above and below the gadget, so it sticks out more-so.

But you may use a different approach, depending on what your blog is trying to achieve.

What your readers see

Visitors using a web-browsers

Will see your AddThis buttons, as you defined them

Readers who subscribe to your blog's RSS feed

Will not see your blog's AddThis sharing buttons, unless they happen to click through from their feed-reader to your blog.

Readers who follow-by-email

Will not see your standard social sharing buttons at all, unless they visit your site. (AddThis does have some email newsletter buttons, but these don't automatically go into emails generated from Blogger).

Is it worth it?

For what it's worth, I recently made the change from custom sharing buttons that I'd made myself to classier looking ones from AddThis, and saw quite a jump (50% or more) in the number of social shares, across all my sites.

YMMY, of course.

Installing 3rd party code into Blogger

Using Div statements to control layout

AddThis , Template editing

How to centre-align the sharing-icons from AddThis in Blogger

Featureso Tuesday, 29 September 2015

How to put pictures into unusual shapes, using PowerPoint

Featureso Tuesday, 8 September 2015

Article , Pictures , PowerPoint

Edit

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

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

Wooden clothes peg in a customized rectangle with rounded corners.

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

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

How to put a picture inside a shape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Using the picture

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

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

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

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

Adjusting the size and quality of the picture

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

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

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

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

Can you do this in other tools? Why PowerPoint?

Yes, you can.

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

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

Putting a picture into a blog-post

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

Showing a PowerPoint slideshow in Blogger

Copyright, blogs and Blogger/Google

Article , Pictures , PowerPoint

How to put pictures into unusual shapes, using PowerPoint

Featureso Tuesday, 8 September 2015

How to find the URL for a picture in Google Photos

Featureso Monday, 20 July 2015

Article , Google Photos , Pictures

Edit

This article describes how to get the URL or internet address of a picture in Google Photos, and the difference between Google's shareable links and URLs.

Google Photos is a tool that help bloggers (and everyone else) to manage their picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums. You can read more about it here.

In Google Photos, there are two different types of web-address for a photo.

One is the URL, and this can be used to refer to pictures from Blogger, or from other tools that want a link that just shows the photo, eg Twitter, Google Maps. This is the traditional style of internet-address for a photo.

The other is the shareable link. This is what Google Photos provides from the Share function. Shareable links can be used in Facebook, and other places where the photo that is being shared is displayed within a web-display, rather than just as a picture. (Ref: How to make and manage shareable links in Google Photos.)

Unfortunately shareable links cannot be used in many applications. This is because they don't just show the picture. Instead they load a display showing the picture-date, the name and picture of the person who is logged in to Google at the time, and any other pictures that you have included in the same shareable link.

If you want to use an image from Google Photos in a tool which cannot use shareable links, you need to find it's URL, instead. At the moment, Google Photos doesn't have a way to get this - but luckily it's easy enough to find.

How to get the URL or web-address of a photo in Google Photos, using your computer

Log in to Google Photos

Navigate to the picture that you want to get the link for.

Click on the picture, so you see it in full screen mode.

Right click on the body of the photo and choose the "copy link" command from the menu that pops up where you clicked.

The exact wording of this command varies between browsers on operating system. For example in Chrome / Windows 8, it is simply "Copy Image URL"

In Internet Explorer 11 / Windows 8, you need to choose Properties from the pop-up menu, and then copy the value from the URL-field in the window that opens

Job done! The URL for the photo which you were looking at is now in your computer's memory, and you can paste it (with ctrl/v or Edit > Paste) into any other place that wants it - for example Blogger's photo-insert wizard, or an email message or discussion forum or chat window.

The URL from your address bar doesn't work

You may be tempted to just copy and paste the URL from the address-bar in your browser. And this will work for you.

But if someone else (or you, when you are not logged in to the same Google account) tries to use it, they will get either:

A 404 error (if you are logged in to a different Google account), or

Invited to log in to your Google account - followed by a 404 error if the Google account you log in to is not the one that owns the picture.

How to get the URL or web-address of a photo in Google Photos, using your phone (Android or iOS)

Unfortunately I have not managed to find a way to get photogrpah URL (rather than the shareable link) from my smartphone as yet.

If you can suggest any ways to do this, please leave a comment below.

Where to find more information

Introducing Google Photos: how does it compare to Google Plus Photos and Picasa-web-albums

How to change the date of a picture in Google Photos

How to get the shareable link for one or more pictures in Google Photos

Putting pictures and text side-by-side in blog-posts

Article , Google Photos , Pictures

How to find the URL for a picture in Google Photos

Featureso Monday, 20 July 2015

How to share pictures from Google Photos, using shareable-links

Featureso Saturday, 18 July 2015

Article , Google Photos , Pictures

Edit

This article describes how to get a link to one ore more photos from your Google Photos collection, using the Shareable Link controls. It also explains how to delete shareable links that you have made in the past

Google Photos is a tool for managing picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums. You can read more about it here.

Shareable Links are a new type of linking introduced in Google Photos, which let you easily share one or more pictures at the same time. You can email them, or use them in tools like Facebook.

When someone opens a shareable link, they see a display with the date, the name and picture of the person who is logged in to Google at the time, and all the pictures that are included in the same shareable link.

If you want to use an image from Google Photos in a tool which cannot use shareable links, you need to find the URL for the photo, instead.

How to get the shareable link for one photo in Google Photos

Log in to Google Photos

Navigate to the picture that you want to get the link for.

Click on the picture, so you see it in full screen mode.

Hover your mouse towards the top-right of the screen, and you will see some control show up: these are quite small, and are white (so may be harder to see against some backgrounds).

One of the controls is the Share icon: it looks like a side-ways triangle with one bar missing. Click it.

In the Share pop-up that opens, click "Get shareable link"

Wait while Photos generates a link.

When it is finished, copy the link text.
(Ctrl/c on the keyboard is the easiest way to do this, since the text is automatically selected).

Job done! The display address for the photo which you were looking at is in your computer's memory, and you can paste it (with ctrl/v or Edit > Paste) into any other place that wants it (eg Facebook, in an email message, or something that will accept an address which displays the photo inside a "wrapper" of some sort. s photo-insert wizard, or an email message or discussion forum or chat window).

How to get the shareable link for more than one picture

You can share several (or lots) of photos with someone by just giving them one web-address, which opens up a screen with all the photos.

To do this:

Click the small selection icon (tick) at the top left hand side of each picture that you want to include.
(Once a photo is selected, the icon shows as blue, and there is a border around the picture).

Hover your mouse towards the top-right of the screen, and you will see some control show up: these are quite small, and are white (so may be harder to see against some backgrounds).

Click the Share control icon: it is the one that the arrow is pointing to in the picture just above this.

Continue in the same way as for getting a shareable link to an individual photo (ie the section above)

What does the Delete link do

You may have noticed that there is a delete function on the Shareable link screen.

If you click it, then you are given the chance to delete any existing links to the currently selected group of photos.

This doesn't seem to make any sense at the time when you are first making the link.

But it also works later on: if you have the same photos selected and choose to get the shareable link again, you will get the same link - and you may delete it instead.

This does not delete the photos themselves, just the previous link to the currently-selected group of photos. If anyone (or anything, eg Facebook) tries to use that link again, they will get an error message instead.

Another way to delete links is from the left-side menu in Photos: Choosing More > Shared links shows you al list of all shareable links you have ever made, and then for each one you can either copy the link or delete it.

Where to find more information

Introduction to Google Photos

How to put a picture into a post in Blogger

Article , Google Photos , Pictures

How to share pictures from Google Photos, using shareable-links

Featureso Saturday, 18 July 2015

How to tell Google about problems with activity on your AdSense account

Featureso Tuesday, 7 July 2015

Adsense , Article

Edit

This article describes a way to tell Google about problems with activity on your AdSense account.

I noticed a link to an Invalid Clicks Contact form in a recent blog-post from Google.

You can find the form here.

Basically, this is a way to tell Google if you think that something has gone wrong with your AdSense account, for example if you are being click-bombed or similarly targeted by malicious people or activity.

This caught my attention because exactly that happened recently here on Blogger-hints-and-tops: from reading the AdSense help forums, it seems that bots (or something) were attacking Link Units, and suddenly lots of people were getting huge increases in both click-through rates and revenue-per-click. At the time, I followed the advice given there:

Remove the Link Units,
Remove the site from the approved list
Post a "me too" message on the support forum thread,
Wait for Google to act against the bad guys.

But it still felt wrong not to take a more active step to tell Google about the specific problem with my account..

What does the form do

The Invalid Clicks report form has fields that let you give

Your name, email address and AdSense publisher ID
The URL where ad code appears
Topic (select one of: reporting unusual activity, or predicting a significant change in account activity)
A paragraph describing what led you to believe that the click activity was invalid

"Data from your site, mobile app and/or YouTube channel traffic logs or reports that indicate suspicious IP addresses, referrers or requests which could explain invalid activity."

Note that you only have 1000 characters for the description - but I'm sure that links to documents in your Google Drive (set to be avaialble to anyone with the link, of course) would be very acceptable.

They do say "Please note that we may not respond to your message unless we find a significant issue with your account." - and I would not be in the least surprised to not hear anything back.

Mention expected traffic increases, too

Sometimes, you may know that your blog is likely to get a a large traffic increase. For example, you may publish a controversial post, or release a resource which is extensively publicised via social media or your email list.

You can also use this form to tell Google AdSense about this, and that you expect a sudden increase in page impressions and revenue.

There are no guarantees, of course, but this may help them to distinguish between genuine and invalid sudden changesincreases, in cases where these are manually reviewed.

When not to use the form

Google know that even the most careful publisher will occasionally click on an ad themselves, especially on sites which are about personal hobbies or interests.

My guess is that we should not waste time reporting these invidiual clicks. They are very easy for Google to identify and disqualify - and doing to would make it a lot harder form them to identify real problems vs noise from issues reported via the form.

Where to get more information

How to approve a site to show AdSense ads from your account

AdSense help forum

Stop your AdSense from showing types of ads that aren't allowed on Blogger

Adsense , Article

How to tell Google about problems with activity on your AdSense account

Featureso Tuesday, 7 July 2015

Using a custom domain for something other than your Blogger blog

Featureso Sunday, 5 July 2015

Article , Custom Domains

Edit

This article is about how you can use a custom domain that was purchased through Google / Blogger for something other than a Blogger blog.

Blogger makes it very easy for you to buy a "custom" domain name (ie URL) for your blog. Instead of being www.fred-fish.blogspot.com, you can easily be www.fred-fish.com - which is more appealing for all sorts of reasons.

Blogger tells you which domain registrar they're going to use and lets you change to the other one if you want to. Apart from this, Google hides most of the "technical" domain registration details from you: you are invited to set up a domain administrator account (in Google Apps), but even this is optional.

But there may come a time when you want to use your domain for more than just a blog: eg, Fred may want to use www.fred-fish.com to sell fishing trips or as the public gateway to a massive database of fishing achievements, neither of which are functions that Blogger (easily) provides.

To use a Google-Blogger purchased domain for something other than a Blogspot blig, you need to:

Move your blog away from the domain
(you might move it use a subdomain or virtual host off the domain later on - but the first step is just to free up the domain for other use.
Change the domain-name-server settings for the domain to point to the right place for the "something else" that you want to use it for.

Even though you purchased the domain using Blogger, your access to it is through the Google Apps control panel: from there you get the login details for the domain registrar (currently either goDaddy or eNom that Google used to buy the domain).

How to re-use your domain

Unlink the domain from your blog:

1 Log in to Blogger with the account that owns the domain.

2 From the Dashboard, choose Settings > Basic > Publishing and click the cross on the right of the Edit link beside your blog name.

This changes your blog back to www.YOUR-BLOG-NAME.blogspot.com, and removes the DNS records that pointed your blog to your custom-URL.

It may take a few hours (I've heard 72) for these changes to apply to computers all around the world, so people who go to your custom domain may still get re-directed to your blog for a day or two.

Also, Google (and other search engines) will still have indexed links to your blog contents at your custom domain. These will gradually be replaced when

you put new content at your custom domain and
it gets indexed by the search engines and
the new content-indexing replaces data in the cached Google results in various computers around the world.

This can take some weeks, though, so your blog may miss out one some search traffic, and people who search for your new site may see odd results in their search list.

Next - link the domain to what you want it to show

3 Find, or create, the domain administrator login details for your domain:

I've previously described how to set up the domain administrator for your domain.

If you haven't done this already, you need to find the relevant email and set up the account now.
If you have done it, you need to remember the administrator login and password that you created.
If you cannot remember the administrator details, then go to https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME/ForgotAdminAccountInfo - put in the right value for your domain name, without www. or http:// at the start. Enter the captcha details, and if you have set up an administrator account the details will be emailed to your backup secondary address.
If you never created an administrator account and cannot find the email to do it now, use this help-process. Choose:
- I never created an administrator account, then
- I signed up at Google.com/a and purchased a domain name at the same time

You can only use the help-process after you have un-linked your blog from the domain (ie steps 1-2 above plus left time for the change to be applied to Google's servers - somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours seems to work). If you try to use it while your blog is still using the domain, you end up being directed back to Blogger.

Note: if none of these processes help you get control of your domain administrator, check the resources in this article from Nitecruzr about the topic.

4 Go to https://www.google.com/a/YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME/

5 Log in with the admin account and password from Step 3.

6 Go to the Domain Settings tab

7 Go to the Domain Names sub-tab

8 Choose the Advanced DNS settings link.

This opens a screen that shows you how to get into the DNS console for your domain. It typically has

Your domain-registrar sign-in name and password,
Your domain-registrar customer service PIN - in case you need to contact the registrar's customer services,
Contact details for the domain registrar's customer service department
A link that you can use to get to the to DNS console

9 Log in to the DNS Console, using the details from step 9.

10 Follow the directions there to make the domain changes.

The steps required depend totally on what you are using the domain for: for help with this, contact the the technical support forum (or whatever) for the product that's being used to build the new contents of your domain.

If you need more help, check out the Google Apps help forum.

Where to find more information

Automatically renewing your custom domain

Transferring ownership of your blog to another Google account

Blogger and other Google products - an overview

Recovering control of your custom domain (external link)

Article , Custom Domains

Using a custom domain for something other than your Blogger blog

Featureso Sunday, 5 July 2015

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Related Articles:

How to get the URL or web-address of a photo in Google Photos, using your computer

The URL from your address bar doesn't work

How to get the URL or web-address of a photo in Google Photos, using your phone (Android or iOS)

Where to find more information

How to get the shareable link for one photo in Google Photos

How to get the shareable link for more than one picture

What does the Delete link do

Where to find more information

What does the form do

Mention expected traffic increases, too

When not to use the form

Where to get more information

How to re-use your domain

Unlink the domain from your blog:

Next - link the domain to what you want it to show

Where to find more information