Blogger-Hints-and-Tips:

How to edit your Blogger template

2012-02-01T18:05:00.000Z

This article is about how to edit Blogger templates, using either the old or new interfaces.

It supports many other articles on this site, which suggest specific template changes to solve particular problems.

Overview

Previously, I've looked at whether it's a good idea to edit your Blogger template or not.

For many people, editing the template is acceptable, because it is the only way to do what they want (remove the attribution, show a gadget on the homeppage only, add a Facebook like button to posts, etc).

In general, the process to follow is:

Open the template-editor
Make a back-up copy of the template, as it is now
Make the change
Check that it works, and if not, go back to the previous template.

The new Blogger interface has added a couple of extra "twitches" to these steps, though. Read on to learn more:

How to open Blogger's template editor:

Using pre-Sept-2011 Blogger, AKA the old UI / version of Blogger :

Go to the Design > Edit HTML tab

Using post-Sept-2011 Blogger, AKA the new UI / version of Blogger :

Go to the Design tab
Click Edit HTML
Click Proceed
Check that you can see the Save template button at the very bottom of the editing window.
If you are using a very small screen, you may not be able to. Try making the font smaller (ctrl/- in many browsers) - if this doesn't help, switch back to the old interface (or a larger computer screen) to make the changes.

How to make a backup copy of your current template:

It's tempting to skip this if you're only making a small change. I even skip it myself sometimes. And it's not needed if this is the first time you've ever customised your template - because you can recover from problems by just reinstalling the standard template.

But if you would be upset to lose any template changes you made earlier, or if the change you are making now is not minor, then I strongly recommend making a copy before you start, just in case. To do this:

Using pre-Sept-2011 Blogger, AKA the old UI / version of Blogger :

Click the Download full template link
After the download has finished, find the place where your computer puts downloaded files.
Find the file that was just created,
Rename it to something sensible
(eg MyBlog template backup before change 31 Jan 2012.xml)
Move the file to somewhere safe: usually somewhere on your computer is fine - or you make like to upload it to somewhere like Google Docs, to be absolutely certain that it won't get lost.

Using post-Sept-2011 Blogger, AKA the new UI / version of Blogger :

Tick the Expand Widgets box.
Wait a moment, while the editing window content is refreshed. (It's very quick, but not instant)
Select all the content in the editing window. (Hint Ctrl/a is the keyboard shortcut to do this in many systems)
Copy the content
Paste it to a text file (eg one made with Notepad, or similar text editor - or even to a Google Docs text file that you have open in another tab)
Save the text file to somewhere safe.

Initially I thought that not having a "download template" button was a bad thing. But I've found that it's actually easier - instead of messing around finding downloaded files, I just expand the template, copy, then save the details to somewhere handy: this makes me more, not less, likely to actually do the backup each time I edit the template!

How to make the change to your template:

Check whether the change you are making needs the Expand Widgets checkbox off or on, and put it to the right state.
(If the article telling you want to change doesn't mention it, then assume it should be off.)

Locate the code you need to change:
(hint: use your browser's find-function, eg Ctrl/f in Chrome and Firefox, to locate the code you're looking for - it's faster and more accurate than scanning manually)

Make the change (this article doesn't go into the principles of template design, there are plenty of other articles and websites about that: I'm assuming that you know what you need to do).

Click the Preview button:

If Blogger can make sense of the change you made, then a new window or tab opens, showing a view that looks like your blog's homepage. It's not a real copy of your blog (the links won't work, the spacing might not be quite the same, and it will have the word "Preview" diagonally in the top left corner).

Do a quick check that the screen looks right - for some changes you even be able to tell if the change has been successful just from this preview screen.

However: If the new window/tab shows an error message like

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure that all XML elements are closed properly. <br/> XML error message: The element type "div" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</div>".Error 500

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure that all XML elements are closed properly. <br/> XML error message: Element type "b:widget" must be followed by either attribute specifications, ">" or "/>".

then Blogger has not been able to understand the change you made. Sometimes the error message gives a clue about what's wrong, although it can be misleading. Check that you made the change correctly - fix any errors and click Preview again. If it still doesn't work, ask for help from the place that suggested the change you are making.

Once you are happy that the preview screen looks OK, click the Save or Save template button.

How to test your template change:

Some template changes can be checked very easily, sometimes from the preview screen.

But if your change isn't visible on the front screen, you must check it after you have applied it. What to verify depends on your template type, what the change was, and what other features (eg the page-gadget as a menu, the archive widget, ) your blog uses. You need to decide what to test, based on all of these.

At least, I alwways click on and check on these things when I've made a major template change:

the home page
the items in the menu bar
a label value
an archive widget entry
custom-search-engine results
comments

And if I'm being particularly reader-focussed, I'll also check these things in more than one browser: usually in the current version of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome.

Fixing Problems:

If you find that the template change has caused problems, then ou have have a choice to make:

Can you and your readers live with the problems on your blog for "a while", while you look for other solutions?

Or

Do you need to remove the change right now, so visitors can use your blog as it was while you solve the issues.

There is no right answer to this question: It's a personal decision, based on the blog, and your readers. But if you do need to remove the template change, here's how to do it:

Using pre-Sept-2011 Blogger, AKA the old UI / version of Blogger

Go to the Designer > Edit HTML windown
Click Upload file
Choose the file that you downloaded earlier
Click OK.

Using post-Sept-2011 Blogger, AKA the new UI / version of Blogger:

Open the file you made earlier, using a text-editor, and copy the contents
Go to the Design tab
Click Edit HTML
Click Proceed
Tick the Expland widgets checkbox
Paste the contents of the backup file that you made into the edit window
Click Save template.

It is best to restore your template before you have changed any gadgets. If you get a message about widgets being missing, then it means that the gadgets associated with your blog are not the ones referred to in the template. If this happens, you need to decide whether to deep or delete any "orphaned" ones, and may need to check their settings again.

Making complicated changes:

If you think that your template may need a lot of "surgery" while you work out how to make a specific change, then it may be a good idea to build a private test-blog to do the work in, and only copy the contents into your "real" blog template when you are certain that you've got it correct (or correct-enough).

Editing published posts in Blogger

2012-01-28T13:15:00.000Z

This article describes how to edit a post that has already been published in Blogger, using the new interface.

Where has the Edit Posts link gone?

Picture by RichTea
From Wikimedia Commons

Blogger's new user-interface (UI) was introduced in September 2011. ("Interface" is just a long word for the part of Blogger that you use to do things.)

The new look has organised things in a slightly different way to the older (ie pre-September 2011) version of Blogger, and some functions are a little harder to find.

The Edit Posts link has been replaced by a list showing you all posts, and Edit links under each post in this list. These are the tools you need to use to change a post once it's already been published, for example to fix spelling errors, or add new information.

How to change a post that is already published:

Log in to blogger at http://www.blogger.com, using the Google account that wrote the post, or one that is an administrator for the blog
If you made the blog, then you are automatically the administrator for it to start with - so just use your normal Blogger account.

You can now see the Blogger Dashboard. If you are using the new interface it looks like this:

The section in the middle lists all the blogs that your account has access to.
Most people reading this article will only have one blog - at the moment - but it's worth understanding how extra ones look.

Each blog has one line in this section. In the middle of the screen, beside the blog name, there are four icons (small pictures):

A pencil (for write a new post)
A stack of "papers" (for viewing your existing posts), which is right next to a drop-down arrow (for getting to the other blog -options)
A button labelled "View Blog" (no prizes for guessing what it does!)

Click on the stack of papers: this opens a list of all your posts.

In the list, hover your mouse over the title of the post you want to edit. The link will highlight (slightly) and you will see some links under the post-title. The links are

Edit
View
Share (this one only shows up if you've linked Google+ and the blog)
Delete.

Click Edit: this takes you to the post editor. Make the changes you want, Press the Update button at the top of the screen to save them. Job Done!

The quickedit pencil - a fast alternative

Depending on how your Post Template is set up, you may see a Quick Edit Pencil icon when you are reading a post. If it is turned on, it will be either below the post-title, or at the bottom of the post above or below the contents. Clicking this icon takes you directly to the post-editor.

You will only see the icon if it's turned on for your blog (in Layout > Blog Posts, edit), and if you are logged in to Blogger using an account that is allowed to change the posts.

Your readers will never see it.

Saving changes while you edit the post:

Because you are working on a post that is already published, the "autosave" feature will not work. So if you are going to make a lot of changes, you may want to copy the post to a private or test blog. There you can publish the post (ie save it properly) as often as you want, and no one will see the messy in-between-old-and-new stages.

When you are finished, click the Publish button (near the top-centre of the screen)

What your readers see

Until you click Publish, the post that your readers see is the same as it originally was - no matter what changes you have made in the post editor.

If there is a post that you urgently need to "take down", then click the Revert to draft button (at the top of the screen, next to publish). This makes the post unavailable until you next click publish: in the meantime, anyone who tries to see it using a link will see this message:

Page not found Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog YOUR BLOG TITLE does not exist.

Making changes to a post that you didn't write

Some people want to edit blog-posts that they were not the author of, and which they do not have administrator access to.

The short answer is that you are not able to do this - you need to ask the post-author or blog-administrator do it for you.

However if the blog-post has copyright material, there may be some actions you can take. And if you believe it breaks's Blogger's rules, you can report a terms of service violation.

Blogger-HAT Lite: quick updates about Blogger and related tools

2012-01-25T01:11:00.000Z

Introducing Blogger-HAT Lite - quick notes about changes in other products that are important for Blogger users to know about.

Today, I'm officially launching Blogger-HAT-Lite - a new blog where I share quick notes about changes in product other than blogger, which I think Bloggers may be interested in, or definitely need to know about.

All Blogger-hints-and-tips readers are invited to visit the site, subscribe by RSS or subscribe to by email.

More than just buzz ...

Blogger-HAT-Lite is not about repeating brigth-and-breezy announcements from other services.
Instead, it aims to:

Filter these, so that only ones with (possible) implications for Blogger users are reported
Suggest questions that need to be asked and issues that need research about the effect on Blogger integration
Link to information about related topics - especially ones that talk about consequences that the people making the original changes may not have thought about.

... but less than fully-researched articles

I started Blogger-Hints-and-Tips for my own notes about Blogger, especially problems that I couldn't find the answers to by googling.

It was also a test-bed for tools like Analytics that I wanted to use on my main blog, but needed to try elsewhere first. After installing it, I notice that other people were looking for the same answers - and when they googled, my notes were what they found.

I quickly found that the most interesting topics were about making Blogger "play nicely" with other products, rather than Blogger itself. At the same time, I aimed to spend 15 minutes/day answering questions in the Blogger Help Forum - to say thanks for all the help I received when I was getting started.

Typing the same answers over and over got tedious, and when I found something new later on that would have changed a previous answer, it wasn't feasible to find the earlier answers and update them. So I started writing articles about things that people were asking for help with, so I could just link to the article from the discussion.

So I started researching and writing longer articles with the background, solution and the wider consequences (what will you see? what do your readers see? what else do you need to think about?).

These articles can become out-dated due to changes the other product, that I might not notice. So I started reading the official announcements about Picasa, AdSense, Analytics, Gmail, Maps, etc - so that I knew what was changing, and could think about the effect on my own blogs, and Blogger-Hints-and-Tips.

Right now, I have 230 potential article topics, and 130-ish articles that need updating for the new Blogger interface - just as the recession has eased and I have a full-time day job. Simple math shows that I'm not going to be able to write articles that meet my research standards, in the time now have. And I keep seeing new things that I'd would love to explore but know I won't get around to.

So Blogger-HAT-LITE is:

A home for quick notes about these issues
A way to keep track of interesting things I see,and
A place to share interesting-but not-fully-researched updates with my readers.

What's covered:

Blogger users could use hundreds of other products in conjunction with theeir blogs. Any spammer could set up a feed-based site that searches other sites for the word "blogger" and reposts the results.

Instead, I've selected a group of products to monitor: ones that I use and recommend, and which I a know a lot of Blogger-users use. So far the list includes:

Picasa
Youtube
Gmail
AdSense
Analytics
AdWords
Google Custom Search Engines
Feedburner
Google Affiliate Network
Webmaster Tools (Webmaster Central)

And these (currently :-) non-Google products:

Chitika
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter
Amazon Associates

More will be added as I start using more products, or discover announcements-blogs for existing ones (eg Google Maps).

Are there any other tools you would like me to keep an eye on, so I can think about whether changes in them affect Blogger? Leave a comment below ...

Stay up to date:

You can visit the Blogger-HAT-Lite now (don't expect stunning graphics etc - this is a site for news, not design).

Or sign-up to read the Blogger-HAT-Lite RSS feed in a feed-reader , or get updates email.

The most-recent articles from Blogger-Hat-Lite are in a widget here on Blogger-Hints-and-Tips: it's currently in the sidebar just under the subscription options, but may around as I experiment with things.

For the moment, I'm not going to give it a separate social media presence: I'm planning to share both Blogger-hints-and-top and Blogger-HAT-Lite updates in the existing Facebook or Google+ pages and Twitter account. (This may change if enough people ask for it, though.)

Thanks for reading, I hope you find the new site useful.

The Page gadget: a menu bar for your blog, with links to just about anywhere

2012-01-21T00:51:00.000Z

This article shows how you can use the Pages gadget as a general purpose menu bar for your blog.

Evolution of the pages gadget

Based on a work by latvian (evolution)
[CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

When Blogger first introduced so-called "static" pages, I thought they had a lot of potential.

As I investigated, though, I came to the conclusion that they were more trouble than they were worth, so I recommended abandoning them and just using posts. Or at least abandoning the Pages gadget - even I sometimes use a Page for things that I don't want to send out in my RSS feed, eg custom-search-engine results.

But when the September-2011 version of Blogger was introduced, the Pages gadget got a new feature: now, it can include links to any website URL, not just your own pages.

This makes it a lot more versatile - even though the effect is just the same as adding a Link-list gadget and putting it into the right area of the blog-layout.

How to add general web-links to your Pages gadget.

Make sure you are using the new (ie Sept 2011) Blogger software.
(Get to it with the "switch to updated version" link if you're not - you can always go back later with the item in the gear-wheel menu, or the link on my sidebar)

Go to the Pages tab of your blog's dashboard.

Click the drop-down arrow beside New Page:

Select web-address

Enter the title that you want to show up on your menu bar (phrases with spaces are allowed, some special characters may not be).

Enter the URL which should be opened when someone clicks on the new menu-bar item (make sure the web-site address starts with http:/ )

Click Save

You can change the order of the items in your menu bar by picking them up using the "grab bar" to the left of the item name, and drag-and-dropping them up or down the list of menu-bar entries.

When your menu-bar items are in the right place, click Save Arrangement in the top right corner of the window.

What your readers see ...

Visitors to your blog will see a menu bar either at the top or the side depending on where you put your pages gadget.

Most readers will think that the items in your menu bar will take them to "pages" in your blog. Iif they hover over an item in the bar, they will see the web-address it is linked to, in the same way that their browser usually shows this (eg in Chrome, I see it in faint text at teh bottom left of the screen).

This will work well if the web-addresses you have added are within your own blog (eg search-labels, if you are using this approach to putting your posts into pages).

But it may be confusing if you've put in links to other websites, or invalid links (remember, there was no "test this link" option when you were adding the web-site URL to link to).

Currently I do not know any way to make pages-gadget links to external websites open in a new browser window. (If you know a way, the comments area is just below - please share!)

The Pages-gadget vs a Link-list

When the Pages-gadget was first introduced, they were just like regular linked-list: the magic was that Blogger introduced a new area in the templates where linked-lists are formatted differently.

This is still true to a great extent. But on blogs viewed with dynamic templates, the presence of a Pages gadget causes the layout to be a little different.

I haven't tested it thoroughly, but I suspect that the presence of a link-list gadget on the template (remember, you cannot currently add gadgets to dynamic template blogs) would not have the same effect.

This makes me suspect that Blogger may introduce some other enhancements based on the Pages gadget, so it may be worth using them instead of Link-list gadget in the future, so as to get the benefit of these changes when they eventually happen.

Letting other people write in your blog

2012-01-17T01:08:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

Team organisation vs Blogger tools

There are many ways to organise a team of bloggers.

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

And there are many more options in between.

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

Have posts emailed to you

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

Pros

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

Cons

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

To make receiving posts by email less painful:

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

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

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

Have posts emailed to your blog

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

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

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

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Making it work:

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

Blogger Author rights:

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

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

Making it work:

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

Administrator rights

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

Pros:

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

Cons:

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

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

Mix-and-match

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

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

For example:

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

Your experiences?

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

How to put a gadget above your blog's header

2012-01-15T13:42:00.000Z

This article is about how to put an item (any type of gadget) above the Title section in a blog made with Google Blogger.

Overview

If your blog has a layout or designer template, then (almost?) all of Blogger's templates start out with a nav-bar at the top of the screen, followed by a Header section showing your blogs title & description, or a custom header image if you've uploaded one.

And even if you go into the place in the layout-designer where you can re-arrange the layout by drag-and-dropping items, you cannot drag any gadgets to above the header.

But this is easy to change, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your blog's layout template.

How to allow changes above your blog's header:

Follow these steps to make it possible for you (or any blog administrator) to add gadgets to the area about your blog's heading section:

1 Edit your blog's template
Old UI: Design > Edit HTML
New UI: Template > Edit HTML > Proceed

2 Download a full copy of your template, and put it somewhere safe (in case something goes wrong, and you need to restore from it).

3 Find this code in your template:

<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Header1' locked='true' title='YOUR BLOG TITLE(Header)' type='Header'/>

Hint: use your browser's search tool, (Edit>Find in Firefox, Ctrl/f in Chrome) to look for a key phrase like "id='Header1'

4 Change it to

<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='4' showaddelement='yes'>
<b:widget id='Header1' locked='true' title='YOUR BLOG TITLE(Header)' type='Header'/>

Notice that there are two changes made:

Setting maxwidgets to greater than 1, and
Setting showaddelement to Yes, instead of No

5 Click Preview, to check that your template is working:
This shows you a view of the screen, but you won't be able to click the items on the preview srcreen. It's a good idea to do this even for very simple changes, so that you know that they will save correctly.

6 Click Save to apply the changes to your blog's template.

7 Quickly test your blog, to make sure that nothing else was accidentally changed. At very least, you should click one of each "type" of link on the main page (eg one post title, one page tab, on search button)

What you will see:

After you make this change, the next time you edit your blog layout (New UI: Layout Old UI: Design > Page Elements), then you will find that you can add or drag-and-drop up to three gadgets to the Heading section of the blog, making a total of four.

You can add even more gadgets by changing the number for maxwidgets to something else.

Related Articles:

Disadvantages of editing your blog's layout template

How to set up an extra administrator for your blog

Types of Blogger template

Planning changes to your blog - in private

How the data in Blogger blogs is organised.

Giving someone else total control over your blog

2012-01-14T01:13:00.000Z

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

Blogs and Google Accounts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside Blogger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Items controlled outside Blogger

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

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

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

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

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

Calendars
???

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Alternative:

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

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

How to add a gadget to a blog with a dynamic-view template

2012-01-08T23:44:00.002Z

This article is about how to add widgets (also known as gadgets) to blogs that have dynamic templates.

The bad news:

Beer glasses can have widgets too!

Previously I've described dynamic templates, and how you can turn them on, and also off, on your blog.

Lots (and lots and lots) of people like the look of these dynamic views, and are asking how to put widgets (blog-roll, adsense, about me, etc) onto their blogs after switching to a dynamic template.

The short answer is: you can't - yet.

The full story:

Google told us in late October 2011 that they're working on making this possible. They haven't said when they expect to have this available. If we're really lucky it will be "one day very soon" (and boy will I have a red face if they announce how to do it tomorrow!)

fyim I suspect that it's not an easy thing to do, because dynamic template blogs are basically a totally different way of displaying your blog, using your RSS feed and (now) CSS rules, rather than reading all the design details from the blog itself. Providing this, along with the level of design control that people with Designer and Layout templates are used to, might be quite technically challenging.

I've written this article because I got sick of explaining "no not yet" in the help forum: I really want to give people there the full story, but finding the link to that October announcement every time was a pain. Now I can just link to this.

But hopefully I'll be able to totally re-write it, very soon :-) Giving negative answers isn't nearly as satisfying as explaining how to do things.

In the meantime:

The October announcement did show how you can customize the colors of your dynamic-template blog.

Southern Speakers has been publishing lots of how-to information about how you can format dynamic blog elements by adding CSS rules - his most recent post is about how to remove static page titles.

And if you want, you can just switch back to using your most-recent template, and wait for the improved version of dynamic templates to arrive.

Or you could do cunning things, like put AdSense ads into your posts instead.

It's annual performance review time - how did Blogger-HAT do in 2011?

2012-01-04T23:02:00.000Z

This article is an review of Blogger Hint and Tips's performance in 2011, and includes a some statistics, and plans for 2012.

2011, the year in review

Most jobs have an annual performance review. Done well, this is a chance to look back at what you've acheived, what worked and what didn't, what you have learned, what you need to learn, and what you want to achieve next year.

So it makes sense for a blog to have an annual review too. Here's mine.

Thanks to BloggerSentral, whose 2011 Statistics post inspired me to write this.

The numbers

The tools don't tell me what the subscriber numbers were in 2010, but at the end of December 2011, Blogger-HAT had

419 Feedburner subscribers, of whom,
103 are email subscribers (79 active, 24 pending verification).
259 followers in Google Friend Connect
58 Facebook fans
55 Followers in Twitter
7 people who had added BloggerHAT's Google+ page to a circle
199 posts: you're reading the 200th right now. This could would have been higher, but I deleted some particularly useless ones during the year - see Achievements.

Traffic:

The number of visits per month per month:

Conclusion: traffic grew pretty steadily through the year:

Top traffic sources:

Source:
#Visits
%Total

Google / organic (ie search results) 79351 57%

Google.com / referral (ie Help Forum) 41092 29%

Direct 12606 9%

Google.XXX (search from various countries own Google sites) 3096 2%

Blogger.com / referral 827 1%

Feedburner / feed 718 1%

Search / organic 397 0%

Google translation 280 0%

Email 191 0%

Facebook.com 154 0%

Swagbucks.com / referral 100 0%

Ask / organic 87 0%

Aol / organic 76 0%

Feedburner / email 67 0%

Too-clever-by-half.blogspot.com / referral 58 0%

Yahoo / organic (ie search results) 58 0%

Conclusions:

This blog is very dependent on Google, and gets almost no "Binhoo" traffic (ie from other search engines) - I'd be worried, except that it's reasonable that most Blogger users will use Google to search.
Almost third traffic comes from questions I answer on Blogger-help-form: this is worth doing.
BHAT is starting to get links from a range of other sites: this is probably something to work on.

The most popular posts were no surprise - you can see them in the widget on the sidebar.

The bounce-rate is quite high, though (between 55 and 70%) - and it's been increasing steadily. This is probably something to work on, it may be related to the number of articles that need updating for the Sept-2011 interface change.

Screen resolution
People keep saying that this matters, and that we need to design for smaller screens. And personally I've been using a Netbook a lot recently, because it's just so portable. But it doesn't look like Blogger-HAT visitors are working like that:

Screen Width (px) % of total visits

Less than 320 wide 0.33%

300 - 767 wide 0.76%

768 - 1023 wide 1.56%

1024 - 1151 wide 15.62%

1152 - 1278 wide 1.86%

1280 + wide 79.88%

Grand Total 100.00%

Conclusion:
Mobile may be "hot" - but small screen aren't being used when people want information about how to use Blogger. Personally, I'm picking that most of my 80% of visitors using wide screens do have small screen devices - they just use them for different things.

Achievements:

The big success of the year was a re-write over every single post: during 2011, every post in Blogger-HAT was reviewed: the format was standardised, and the contents reviewed. For many articles, this meant a complete re-write, or splitting one post into 3 or 4 smaller topics. This process started in late April, and finally finished on 31 December with a total re-write of Combining a forwarding-address and mail2Post, so you know who posted what.

This is also the year when I started to take social media seriously: Blogger-HAT's activity there is still small (I'd rather focus time on researching new content), but growing.

Plans for 2012:

I'm just about to launch Blogger-HAT-Lite where I can share quick but unresearched notes about announcements form other products that may affect Blogger users.

Updating existing articles to include "new blogger interface" info is a big priority. Anything tagged YY - needs Sept11 review still needs to be done. Right now, that's 149 articles.

I think that customizing mobile and dynamic templates will be a hot topic in 2012 - although very niche-specific. I'd love to investigate this, but not sure if I'll get time to work on it. But I noticed recently that Southern Speakers has been doing a good number of posts about how to modify dynamic template blogs using CSS, so maybe I won't bother.

Lastly, I've started another blog that involves cataloging music and song books on a very specific topic. Blogger is a fantastic base for sharing this material, especially the "detailed song information" behind it. But I'm building the content for a detailed database, and maybe I'll be looking for a tool that lets visitors request structured database queries (not just searches) and then shows result sets inside posts. Any hints on options for this are welcome.

What do you think?

At the end of most annual reviews, the boss looks over his/her glasses and says "Overall, I'm ranking your performance as <whatever>" for the year".

I'm a bit short of bosses in this "job" - but would love to hear how Blogger-HAT could do a better job in 2012. You know where to find the comments-box, just under the page-links section, so please let me hear your thoughts.

Related Articles:

Combining a forwarding-address and mail2Post, so you know who posted what. (2011's last edited post)

Removing the attribution gadget from your blog (this year's most popular post, by far).

Adding a Facebook Like, Send or Share button (in 2nd place)

Setting up Google Analytics on your blog (if you want to get your own statistics)

Finding out how many email subscribers you have

Turning the RSS feed off or on again

2011-12-30T12:40:00.000Z

By default, public Blogger sites offer an RSS feed. But there may be times when you need to turn it off, either for good or temporarily.

RSS and Blogger

Previously I've explained what RSS is and why it's important for bloggers.

But there may be times when you want to turn off your RSS feed, either because you don't want to offer one at all, or because you want to make some posts, or changes to existing posts that are not notified to your RSS subscribers.

Or you may need to turn it back on again - for example, if you want to use a dynamic template, to offer a subscribe-by-email option, or to enable automatic posting to Google +.

How turn off a blog's RSS feed:

In post-Sept 2011 Blogger (aka the new interface):

Go to the Settings > Other tab.

Under "Site Feed", use the drop-down to change Allow Blog Feed to "None".
(This is the only option that totally turns your feed off: the others, including Custom, leave some aspects of the feed on.)

In pre-Sept 2011 Blogger (aka the old interface):

Go to the Settings > Site Feed tab.

Beside Allow Blog Feeds, use the drop-down to change the value to "None".
(This is the only option that totally turns your feed off: the others, including Custom, leave some aspects of the feed on.)

How turn on your RSS feed:

This is just the same as turning the feed off (see above), except that your need to choose one of these options instead:

Full - the whole post is shown in your feed
Until Jump Break - only the part of the post before the jump break is sent to your feed
Short - only the first 120 (ish) letters, or less if the jump break comes first, are sent to your feed.

Also, the new interface has a Custom option, and the old interface has an Advanced Mode. If you use these , you can individually set the value for post feed, comments feed (all comments), and comments-feed-per-post.

Private blogs
Blogs that are not public do not offer RSS feeds, because they cannot be secured. So if your blog is private, then it does not matter what setting you choose, your blog will not offer an RSS feed.

mail2Post: Using email to update your blog

2011-12-29T18:10:00.000Z

Blogger's mail2Post tool lets authors make blog-posts, without using the Blogger software. All you need to do is set it up, and write posts using your regular email tools.

Mail2Post and Blogger.

The mail2Post feature, sometimes known as Post-to-profile, is a way of putting content on your blog without using the full Blogger software for writing the post.

It's not quite as good as using Blogger itself - there are a few features missing - but it is good enough in many situations.

How to set up mail2Post

Log in to Blogger with the Google account that you want to have mail2Post rights to your blog: this account needs to already be set up as an author for the the blog.

Go to

The Settings tab - if you are logged on with an author account, or
The Settings > Mobile & Email tab if you are using an administrator account
(The tab is called Settings > Email & Mobile in the old Blogger interface.)

Beside Posting using email (or Email Posting Address in the old Blogger interface), there is a place where you can enter some "secretWords", to make up an email address that you can use to post to your blog.

Enter some suitable words: make sure it's not too easy to guess (your surname would not be a good choice!), so that spammers cannot get into it:

Choose either to publish emailed updates as soon as they arrive, or to save email as drafts so that you, or another administrator, can review them before posting.

Note down the full email address, ie NAME.your-secret-words@blogger.com (you will need this later - and unfortunately because of the way it's displayed, it is not easy to copy-and-paste the value).

Press Save (old interface) or Save Settings (new interface).

Using the mail2Post address:

Once mail2Post is set up, anyone who sends an email message to the email address you copied can post to your blog, with what ever restrictions you set.

You might put message on your blog saying

"send contributions to YOURNAME.YOURSECRETWORDS@blogger.com"

But be aware that this could generate a lot of spam. And in the worse case, the spam could get your blog deleted for breaking Blogger's terms and conditions.

Alternatively, you might just tell the address to selected people - or perhaps even just use it yourself.

How is a Post constructed from an email message:

When a message is sent to your mail2Post address:

The subject-line of your email message becomes the Post-title
The body of the email message becomes the body of the post
I think: If you automatically publish emailed posts, then the post date-and-time is the moment at which Blogger's servers received the incoming email message - expressed in Blogger's default time zone (PST OR PDT, I think).
No labels are applied to the post
The post-author is the profile name of the blog-author who set up the mail2Post address.

Pictures and Videos
People have reported various results when they include images and videos inside messages sent via mail2Post. Personally, I have tested:

An attached picture - posted ok, the image is show before all the text from the body of the email message
An attached video file (4meg) - posted ok with the video appearing to be above the text from the email message
An in-line photo - worked perfectly, the picture is placed in the post in the same position (relative to the text) that it was in the original email.

I suspect that the results depend on they type of picture, the email client you are using, and the message format settings. My testing was with Mozilla Thunderbird, which has a particular way of thinking about "attachments", slightly different from other email systems that I have used (eg Microsoft Outlook).

Probably the only way to discover how photos are handled when you use your email to send them is to set up a test-blog and experiment with different options.

What your readers see:

People who read your blog in a web-browser see mail2Post entries just like any other posts. If your blog displays the poster's name, then mail2Post entries have the name of the blog-author who set up the mail2Post address.

As mentioned before, the positioning of pictures and videos may not always be as good: attached pictures, in particular, may be shown as the very stop of the post.

Apart from that, there is nothing to show visitors that the post was created using email - in either the post or in the blog's RSS feed.

Setting up a new Administrator for your blog

2011-12-26T13:45:00.002Z

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

What is a blog administrator

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

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

How to give someone administrator rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As before, ways of doing this include

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

Other things to consider

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making someone an author on your blog

2011-12-10T00:53:00.001Z

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

Google, Blog-Authors and Blogger

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

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

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

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

How to make someone a blog author

Send them an invitaton:

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

Go to Settings > Permissions > Add Authors

Enter the email address of the person you want to invite

Click Invite

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

Go to Settings > Basic > Permissions

Beside Blog Authors, click + Add Authors

Enter the email address of the person you want to invite

Click Ok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What you will see:

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks,
The Blogger Team

What your new author will see:

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

An author can:

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

An author cannot:

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

Troubleshooting

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

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

Make sure the emails arrive:

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

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

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

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

More things to think about:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next:

Giving someone administrator access to your blog.

Linking a picture in your post to a website

2011-11-29T16:46:00.001Z

This article shows how to change a picture in your blog, so that when it is clicked, it opens another blog post, or even a totally different website.

Clicking pictures in your posts

Previously I've described how to put a picture into a blog post.

By default, when a picture in your post is clicked, the file that is used to load the picture is opened, in a new window and at its original size. This can encourage readers to steal photos that don't belong to them, so I've also described how to stop pictures in your blog from being "clickable".

But sometimes you may want to set a picture up so that clicking it opens up a different post, or even a whole different website.

How to change where a picture is linked to:

Add the picture into your post in the usual way.

Note where in the post your picture is - you may want to put some temporary marker-text (text that doesn't appear anywhere else, eg ZZZ) just before or after it, so make it easier to find.

Look at the HTML behind your post

Pre-Sept-2011-Blogger: Click Edit HTML in the top-right of the editor window
Post-Sept-2011-Blogger: Click HTML in the top-left of the editor window

Find the code for your picture (Hint - use the find-feature in your browser, eg Ctrl/f in Chrome to look for the marker-text if you used some). It will look something like this:

<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="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JerdsSlWcVo/S033qYWLWGI/AAAAAAAAMVc/tkoGx2454hA/s400/Your-picture-file-name.gif" /> </a>

Notice the part in bold, ie the href="CONTENTS"

Replace this with the URL that you would like your readers to go to when they click on the picture.
For example, if you want them to be taken to Google to do a search, the code would look like:

<a href="www.google.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JerdsSlWcVo/S033qYWLWGI/AAAAAAAAMVc/tkoGx2454hA/s400/Your-picture-file-name.gif" /> </a>

By default, clicking the picture will take your visitor to the link you give in the same window. But if you would like it to open in a new window, add target="_blank" to the code too, like this:

<a href="THE URL TO GO TO" target="_blank" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_JerdsSlWcVo/S033qYWLWGI/AAAAAAAAMVc/tkoGx2454hA/s400/Your-picture-file-name.gif" /> </a>

Go back to Compose mode (so you don't get confused next time you edit a post)

Remove the marker text, if you used any.

Some more things to think about:

Will your readers realise that they should click the picture? Unless it says "click me", some of them won't - and if they're used to Blogger, they may just expect to see a larger version of your photo. So it might be a good idea to add a caption, or even some instructions in your blog to tell them to click the picture.

Also while you're editing the code, you might also like to add some alt-text to your picture link too, to make your blog more friendly for readers who use screen-reading tools, and for search engines / SEO.

What you will see:

At some times in the past, when you added a link a picture and then hovered over the picture in the post editor, your would see a double-row of in-post editing options:

one row had the usual options for editing pictures (which lets you set the picture size, alignment and caption)
one row had the usual options for editing links (with options to go-to, change and remove the link.

Today, as I'm writing this post using the new-interface editor, I can only see one row of options in hyperlinked pictures - so I need to edit the HTML again if I want to change or remove the link.

But it's quite possible that this is a mistake and that you can see the two rows of options in the old-interface editor, and that it will be added back to the new one too. Fingers crossed.

What your readers will see:

When you readers look at a picture that you have linked to somewhere, it will seem just the same as any other picture.

For example, the picture to the right of this paragraph looks just like the one one at the top of the article. But when someone clicks on it ...

Go on, click this one yourself, to see what happens!

(Acknowledgement: public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)

Changing the tracking ID for an Amazon Associates widget

2011-11-13T11:03:00.000Z

You can change the tracking ID for an Amazon associates widget, even after the widget is created and in use on your site.

Tracking Amazon widget performance

Widgets (aka gadgets) from Amazon Associates can be used to display certain content from Amazon on your blog / website. Some of them are fixed format, while others (eg the MP3 widget) let you select a range of items from Amazon's stock to display.

In two of my blogsites, I use Amazon MP3 widgets to include snippets of songs that my readers might be interested in, without breaking any copyright laws.

If Amazon sells more than one version of a song, then I put in quite a bit of time choosing which specific version to include, so that a variety of styles are shown - this makes it more likely that my readers will see something that they like.

Because there are two sites, I set up two tracking-ids within my Amazon Associates account, one for each site, and use these to know how many of my Amazon visitors have come from each site. This will let me analyse the performance of each site as they grow.

Problem: assigning the tracking ID

When you create a new widget on Amazon, the tracking ID that is assigned to the widget is the one that is selected when you start the widget-creation process. There is no way to change the tracking ID part way through the process.

Changing it on the left sidebar resets the widget-creation process back to the beginning, so you have to start again. This isn't much of a problem if you're just getting the Amazon code for a simple gadget with no selection or maybe a context sensitive one. But it's extremely frustrating if you've spent 15 mintues carefully choosing exactly which versions to a song to include.

Editing the tracking ID after the widget is created:

Recently I discovered that it is possible to change the tracking-id, and other features too, after the widget has been created. To do this:

1 Log in to Amazon (either .com, or whichever one you are working with) and go into the Associates section

2 Choose Widgets from the top menu. This changes the contents of the left-sidebar to show items relating to widgets.

3 Choose My Widgets. This opens a screen where you can change of the details of the widget, including the name and the tracking ID - and has a button that you can use to Edit the widget contents, and one where you can get the the code for the widget.

4 Choose the item(s) that you want to update, change them

5 Save the change.

There is no need to change the code that is on your blog or website: the tracking ID, name, etc are stored in Amazon, not in the code.

What you and your readers see:

The tracking ID has no effect of what your reader see - unless they're beign particularly eagle-eyed when they look at the URL that is generated when they click on the widget.

But it means that when someone visits Amazon, as a result of clicking on the play or buy buttons, the visit and the credit for any qualifiying purchased that they make are given to you using the tracking-ID that you chose.

Finding the Web Property ID & tracking code for an existing Google Analytics profile

2011-10-15T16:01:00.000+01:00

This article shows how to find the Google Analytics Web Property ID for a website that you have previously set up in Analytics.

Google Analytics and websites

Previously, I've explained how to set up Google Analytics for blogs made in Blogger, and shortly I'll be releasing another article about how Analytics is affected by the recently introduced dynamic templates and mobile blogger templates.

But if you have already set up Analytics on for your site, then you may need to find your Analytics Web-property-ID and/or tracking code..

Analytics: New vs old interfaces.
Like Blogger, Analytics has a new interface coming. You get to their with the "new version" link, in more-or-less the same place as Blogger's "switch to new interface" link. However the new-look Analytics still has the word Beta (meaning "still being tested" in its logo), so for now these instructions apply to "old Analytics". I'll update them when the time seems right.

How to find your Web Property ID

1 Log in to Analytics, using the Google account that owns the Analytics profile that you want to get the ID for.

2 Choose the Analytics Settings tab
Currently the link for this is in the orange stripe at the top left, just under the Analytics logo.

3 Find the entry in the list for the Analytics profile that you need the profile for:

Each profile has two rows: the top one lists the URL of the site and profile ID, while the 2nd one has the name you have given the profile, view report-link, some statistics, and links to edit or delete the profile.

Only 10 profiles are listed on the screen, so if you have set up more profiles than that, you may need to use the "next page" links at the bottom right of the screen.if you have set up Analytics for a few different sites, you may need to

The web-property-id is shown beside URL address of the website that the profile is for, like this:

How to get your Analytics tracking code

Follow the steps above for finding your web profile ID.

Click the Edit link in the row for the profile you are interested in.

This takes you to the Profile Status screen.

Click the Check Status link near the top-right side of the profile display.

This opens the Profile Settings screen, which you can copy and paste your code from.

(This screen also has an Advanced tab, which covers options that are not relevant to the vast majority of Blogger users, so will not be covered here.)

If you use AdSense as well:

If you use Analytics to track your AdSense performance as well, then you may also need to get the code to enable to this. To find this code

Go back to the Profile Status screen (listed above)

Click the Edit link (in the grey bar, just underneath the Status link)

This opens the Edit Profile Information screen, where you can edit various characterisitcs. Your AdSense code, which should be put just before or after the other Analytics code, is shown at the bottom of the screen.

Next:
If you haven't used Analytics on your blog previously, see setting up Google Analytics for your blog for advice about where to put your code in Blogger.

If your blog is made in Wordpress, then I understand that you cannot install the HTML directly, you will need to locate a suitable 3rd party plugin that you can add your code and or web-property to.

Not showing any posts on your blog's home page

2011-10-12T23:44:00.000+01:00

You can set your blog up so that no posts are shown on the main screen - provided you have used some of the other "home page" aproaches to give readers other ways of getting to your content.

A blog with no posts is like a pub with no beer?

Previously I've explained how to only show one post on the main page - and this explanation looked at the types of screen that your non-dynamic-template blog can have (main, label, archive, post, and page).

But some people who want to give their blog a home page want to go further than that, and not show any posts on the main screen at all. (Remember, the main screen is where people who navigate to your blog, rather than to posts within it, go.)

This sounds like a strange thing to do - after all, blogs are about posts.

But actually it's fine, provided you use some other tools to let readers move around the blog. I've made a 150+ page blog this way, and it works very nicely because I have organised the information and used of "key" pages (lists of bus-routes, suburbs, shopping centres, etc) with tables that link to many other posts.

How to show no (ie zero, 0) posts on the main screen?

Some people want to do this, as part of the process of giving their blog a home page. Again, it's not possible (at the moment, anyway) using Dynamic templates, but can be done with others:

In Blogger-2011:

Choose the Options drop down from the main menu,
Choose the Settings > Posts and Comments panel from the left sidebar.
Enter zero (0) into the Show at most field
Click Save Settings in the top right hand corner of the screen.

In the pre Sept-2011 Blogger:
In this interface, you can change posts-per-page on the Settings > Formatting screen to 0, and it works nicely.

Unfortunately the Design > Page Elements > edit Blog Posts screen doesn't accept 0 as a valid value, so if you later need to change something on it, you need to:

Change it to 1 on the edit Blog Posts screen
Make the other changes you need to make on that screen
Save the changes
Use Settings > Formatting to change posts-per-screen back to 0,
Save again.

Doing this means that there is a slight period (maybe a minute or two, depending on how fast you are) when your blog will show a post on the main screen. But this is a problem that most people can live with.

What your readers see:
Unless you take steps to avoid it, your readers will see a grey box saying "0 Posts" when they look at your blog's main URL. Some of the things you can do to avoid this include hiding the "showing posts with label XXX" message, and creating a gadget that only shows on the "home" page.

Making every post appear on a separate page

2011-10-12T23:13:00.000+01:00

You can set your blog up so that only one post is shown at a time - provided you don't use a Dynamic template, and you don't use Label or Archive pages.

One Post per Page?

One options that confuses some people is how to set up their blog up so that only one post shows up on each "page" or screen of their blog, and there is a complete break between the posts.

This is fairly easy to set up, you just need to understand a little about the types of screens that Blogger uses to display your posts, and how they can be manipulated and used - or importantly not used.

Most people refer to the screens that their blog as "pages". However I try not to use that word, because the Pages feature in Blogger is quite different. See "The Difference between pages and posts" for more about this.

The types of screen in your blog:

If your blog has a Designer or Layout template (ref What templates does my blog have) then Blogger offers these major "views" of it:

The main screen
The posts-by-label screen, which shows all the posts (or the most recent however-many posts) that have a label that you or the visitor selects
The posts-by-archive screen, which shows all the posts (or the most recent however-many posts) made in a time-period that your visitor selects
The pages screen, which shows only one page at a time
The post screen, which shows only one selected post at a time.

Visitors see the post screen when they navigate to the URL of an individual post. In Blogger-HAT, for example, most visitors are from a search engine or a referral from the Help Forum. These people always follow a link to a specific post, so they see the post-screen showing only that post.

You cannot control how many posts are shown on the label or archive view - that is simply not how these screens work.

Similarly, you don't have full control how many posts are shown on the main screen: you can make a suggestion (up to 500), but Blogger's auto-pagination rules decide how many post are actually shown, and how many are behind the "older posts"link.

But, you can set your blog up so that only a single post is ever shown on the main screen. And if you do that, you may want to

not use the Labels gadget (which shows the posts-by-label screen)
not use the archive gadget (which shows the posts-by-archive screen)

because these screens always show more than one post-per-screen.

How to show one post at a time on the main screen:

In Blogger-2011:

Choose the Options drop down from the main menu,
Choose the Settings > Posts and Comments panel from the left sidebar.
Enter one (1) into the Show at most field
Click Save Settings in the top right hand corner of the screen.

In pre-2011 Blogger:

Either Go to Settings > Formatting, and set Show at most X posts on the main page to 1
OR
Go to Design > Page Elements > edit Blog Posts, and set Maximum posts per page to 1

Click Save Settings in the bottom left corner of the screen.

(Yes, these commands both talk about "page", but they mean "the main screen".)

Using Excel to make the HTML for the "body" of a table

2011-10-08T00:34:00.001+01:00

This article is about how Excel's text functions can be used to make the HTML statements to put inside the body section of a table. It's written with Blogger users in mind, but applies to anyone who needs to create a large HTML table. Two Excel example files are provided, one using CSS and one not, which have some formatting included.

HTML table code

Previously I've described tables in your blog: why you might want to use them, and some options for making a table,

These include using a HTML-code-generator to get the "skeleton" of the table. With this approach, the hardest part is putting the table content (ie the words, numbers and pictures) into the correct place in the HTML, so that it appears in right cell in the table.

This is easy enough for a small table. But if you want to make a table with more data (eg I recently posted a book-index with 100 rows by 5 columns), it can be a little tedious. Even if you prepare your posts in private (which lets you save frequently without worrying about auto-save), it can still be very hard to make sure that you put the right contents in the right cell. And because Blogger's post editor doesn't handle tables well, it can sometimes do unexpected things to them,.

But there are some alternatives.

Tools for creating the "body" section of HTML table statements

I'm sure that lots of people have written custom applications that take a text file and turn it into HTML. (Though when i googled, the first SERPs included a program for Win 3.1 / 95, which most people gave up on a long time ago!).

Many programs like Excel, Word, etc now have an option to save as HTML - so you could just use look at the file they make with a text editior (eg Notepad), and take the relevant bits. That said, they usually include a lot of extra code, eg for fonts, layouts etc, so you may get more than you bargain for.

Commercial web development packages, eg Dreamweaver, may have table editing tools - however many people cannot justify the cost of buying and learning them for smaller jobs.

Another option is to use Excel to manage your table of data, and use it's text-string manipulation functions to turn it into valid HTML code. This isn't as hard as it sounds, especially if someone else does the initial formulas for you.

Excel Templates for making HTML:

First version - cell level formatting - no CSS

Second version, with CSS styles

The first template was made before I understood CSS: it uses text-functions to put formatting code into every single table cell - though you can just leave things blank if you don't want them formatted. It may be best to use if you don't understand CSS.

The second template uses CSS styles to format the table. This means you can change the formatting of all the tables in your website just by changing the CSS rules, ie you don't have to edit each individual table. The Excel file lists the CSS styles you need to define, and the names (eg keyTableOdd for odd numbered rows) show what each style is used for.

Version 2: the formula area is green,
the input area is yellow, and the output area is orange

To use these templates:

1 Download the template

2 Check the formatting settings in the template. Set up CSS styles in your website if you are using the 2nd version.

3 Create table header and footer statements yourself, or by using an HTML table generator.

4 Adjust the Excel template, so that

the number of rows and columns in the data area is what you need,
the formulas in the output area are right for your chosen rows and columns

The section below explains the types of formulas used: you can model new forumlas (for new columns) on the current ones, and new rows can be made by copying the formulas from an existing row.

5 Put the data for your table into the data area in the spreadsheet

6 Copy the text from the output area, paste it into a text editior (eg Notepad)

7 Use the text editor's Find/Replace function to change all cases of three apostrophes in a row (ie ''') into double quotes.

8 Copy the changed text from your text editor into the "body" section of your table statement.

This sounds like a lot of work but I've found that even if a table is 50 rows long, using a HTML-generators-spreadsheet is a lot more efficient than trying to type the values into it row-by-row.

Understanding the Excel templates

I'm assuming that you understand a little about how Excel stores data in cells, and refers to those cells by their Row/Column combination, eg "E5" - if not, check out an Excel tutorial before reading on

Also, you need to understand the ideas of copying formulas between rows, and the use of relative co-ordinates in them to make sure that each new row or column picks up the right values. Again, an Excel tutorial would be a good idea if you're not familiar with copying formulas.

As well as these general ideas, there are here are two Excel concepts that are the basis of these templates:

1 Text concatenation functions

Excel has a wide range of functions that are used to glue strings together, or to pull them apart. Important ones used in these templates are:

= "whatever" puts a text-string with the characters whatever into the cell
= a1 & b1 combines the text strings in cells a1 and b1 (b1 goes immediately after a1)
= "This is A1: " & a1 & ". This is B1: " & B1 &"."

The third function combined the two first ones. It makes a text string like "This is A1: AahOne. This is B1: BeeOne."

Notice that it is a bit fiddly: there are spaces inside the text-strings, and a full-stop at the end, so that the output looks sensible. To make it easier to read, I've put the conent that's inside double quotes (ie " ") on a pink background.

Once you understand this type of formula, though, it's not a big jump to formulas like these which combine HTML commands and values from the cells in the spreadsheet.

="<tr class='''"&A21&"'''>"
=" <td class='''keytableID'''>"&B21&"</td>"
=" <td> " & C21 & "</td> "
=" </tr>"
=E21&F21&G21&H21

This uses a step-by-step formula creation, which makes the parts of the final statement, then glues them all together in the last formula..

2 Putting an Excel special character in the output:

HTML needs to have double-quote characters around things that should be shown as text - for example

<a href="A-FILE-URL">Anchor-text</a>

However in Excel, the double-quote is used to show the beginning and end of text strings.

At first sight, this may put people off using Excel, But there is a very simple way around this is to:

Use another (set of) characters that don't appear in the table instead, and
Before you use the the generated code, use a text-editor to change them to the required special characters.

Other options:

There are lots of other ways to make the table-contents HTML code.

Using MS Access would probably be eaiser (but lots of people don't have it).
Using Google Docs - spreadsheets is free, but I haven't tried out the string functions yet.

What other options can you suggest?

Removing dynamic templates from your blog

2011-09-28T21:29:00.001+01:00

Dynamic templates can be removed from your blog - but be careful if you want to keep any gadets etc that were on your blog before it went dynamic.

Overview:

Previously, I've described the initial version of dynamic templates for blogger, and the second release.

This 2nd version is a lot better integrated with the rest of Blogger, but it has some consequences for many other parts of the system.

In particular, if you want to go back to using a design or layout template there is a real risk of losing all your previous gadgets if you aren't careful how your remove the dynamic template.

Dynamic view template = no Design option in the dashboard drop down

One effect of choosing a Dynamic template for your blog is that the Design option is not on the main-menu drop down in the dashboard in the new, the post-Sept-11 Blogger interface.

Instead, there is just Template, which takes you straight to the Template designer: this happens because, unlike layout or designer templates, you have no control over the layout of a blog with dynamic template, and cannot edit the HTML behind it.

If you want to have this level of control, including being responsible for the consequences of editing your template, then you need to remove the dynamic template, and switch back to a regular one.

How to remove a dynamic template from your blog:

When you have chosen a dynamic template, there is an option in the Design screen to " Revert to previous template".

If you click this link, your blog template goes back to how it was before you applied the designer template, including all gadgets and layout customisations.

BUT

If you choose "revert to previous template", and then pick a different designer or layout template before saving, then you will lose all gadgets and customisations that are not on the "standard" version of the new template.

The moral of the story: always back up before making major changes to your blog. (And even then I'm not 100% convinced you will be able to restore your gadgets to exactly how they were.)

NB Any posts you have made in the meantime are kept - it is simply the template that is changed here, not the blog contents.

Disabling dynamic views for your blog:

In new-interface-Blogger, I cannot see any way to turn Dynamic views off.

In pre-Sept-11-Blogger, there is still an option to turn Dynamic views off, under Settings > Formatting.

This is still relevant, because people can see your blog using dynamic views, even if you haven't chosen a dynamic template, by using www.YourURL.blogspot.com/view (although this may not work for blogs with custom URLs)

Dynamic templates: turning them on in your blog

2011-09-28T21:16:00.000+01:00

This article is about the 2nd version of dynamic templates that Blogger have released: what they are, how to add them to your blog, and what restrictions they have.

Announcing Dynamic Templates, part II

In March 2011, Blogger announced Dynamic Views, and I posted describing them, and telling you how to give your readers the ability to see your blog in dynamic views.

Today, they've announced them again (without acknowledging the previous announcement!). This time with a few differences:

There are seven templates (instead of five)
Some templates allow for blogs that don't have great photos in every post
You can set your blog up so that visitors automatically see it using one of the dynamic-view templates: it's just another option in the template designer (see Setting up your Blog to use a Dynamic Template, below).
Most (all?) templates include some gadgets: search, RSS feed link, link to Blogger, and regular sized +1, Tweet and Like buttons (instead of the anorexic ones in regular designer templates at the moment)

There are still restrictions: blogs must be public, with RSS site feeds enabled.

And there are still lots of things missing: for example, blog-owners have no control over gadgets or layout, fonts or color scheme (even though the announcement says this is coming, I cannot find where to access it).

You cannot add gadgets to a blog with a dynamic template. So you cannot install Google Analytics, or AdSense or any other sort of advertising. That said, this help article does say that Blogger will continue to support AdSense for blogs that already have it, so the work around may be to use a regular designer template, put in some ads, and then switch to a dynamic template.

Setting up your Blog to use a Dynamic Template

To make a dynamic view the default option for your blog:

1) Check that it is public,

2) Check that the RSS site feeds is switched to full or jump-break

2) Choose Design > Template Designer (pre-Sept-11 interface), or Template from the dashboard drop-down (post-Sept-11 Blogger)

3) Choose Dynamic from the list of options (if it's not in the list, then post probably your blog doesn't meet one of the conditions above.

4) From the row underneath, choose which of the options (ie dynamic template types) you would like as a default.

Next:

Removing a dynamic template from your blog - be careful, don't lose your gadgets!

Blogger / Amazon integration is finished - what are our options now?

2011-09-23T18:57:00.000+01:00

This article is an update about the interation between Blogger and Amazon, and what options Blogger users have instead.

Blogger and Amazon working together ...

Boats at Amazon River. Novo Airao, Amazonas, Brazil.
By José Luiz FilhoOwn work copyright left. Multi-license GFDL an
Creative Commons CC-BY-SA (2.5., 2.0 and 1.0)

In December 2009, Blogger announced integration with Amazon (which was actually only integration with Amazon.com).

At the time, there were hints that this was only the first of many new money-making options and programmes for Bloggers.

These features were added to Blogger to support the integration:

Ability to sign up for Amazon.com on the Monetize tab
Existing Amazon.com users link their Blogger and Amazon account on the Monetize tab
A tick-box on the Monetize tab that let "amazon-integrated" bloggers turn on the Amazon-product-preview without having to install the code
Amazon Product Finder (APF) - a gadget that bloggers could use in the the Post Editor, to make a link to a product from Amazon.com without leaving the Post Editor screen
A range of gadgets from Amazon were added to the list in Add a Gadget

... but not any more?

For months, there have been complaints in Blogger-help-forum that existing Amazon.com associates couldn't link their Blogger and Amazon.com Amazon.com accounts on the Monetize tab any more: the function just returned an error, or appeared to work, but didn't actually storing the connection.

Now, with the release of Blogger's new interface, the Monetize tab has been renamed Earnings. There's no mention of Amazon on it, and no sign of the Amazon Product Finder (APF) in the Post-editor. And there are reports in Blogger-help-forum that people who had APF turned on in "old blogger" find that it's gone in the new interface - and is broken even if they switch back to the old interface.

On the Amazon.com site their official Amazon-Associates blog is now made with TypePad. I know that I recently saw instructions about putting things (widgets?) into Blogger, that that these commented that blogger has a new look. However the instruction were still based on the old interface. And today, I can't find them at all.

There has been nothing said (that I've seen anyway) by either company. But I think it's safe to assume that the Blogger / Amazon integration has been abandoned.

Why Did This Happen:

My guess is that there are two big issues.

Firstly, Amazon.com is a lot more than just a bookseller: Google and Amazon are competitors in some areas (eg document storage), so there's bound to be some friction, even though they managed to agree a compromise in 2009. And possibly that compromise wasn't profitable enough for either of them.

Second, and possibly more importantly, there is an internationalisation issue.

Blogger is a multi-lingual, multi-country platform: different languages and cultures are catered for within the same platform and subject to the same terms and conditions. Blogger users all live with the same rules, that are based on American law (eg the 13-year age limit, which is most probably based on America Children's Online Privacy Protection Act).

Amazon, on the other hand, have different platforms for different countries (even amazon.ca for Canada, vs amazon.com for the USA+rest of the world). This is understandable, because countries have vastly different laws about on-line selling and taxes, so Amazon's rules need to be quite different in different places. Even in the European Union, we see regular updates to the terms and conditions that basically amount to the addition of new countries/languages - Amazon.es (for Spain) was the latest one - and these come with small rule-tweaks too. These big differences mean that integration with a multi-national product like Blogger is not easy: there would be lots of on-going issues with making the sites work well together.

My guess is that these two factors combined have killed off the integration.

What can bloggers do instead

You can still sign yourself up for Amazon.com (or Amazon.co.uk, or .ca or whatever-other country), and make the links to products and Amazon-widgets yourself. Personally, I think this better anyway, because it gives you control ove the look and feel (colours, backgrounds, tracking-IDs) used on the ads, and choices about where to install the HTML on your blog.

There is no alternative for the Amazon Product Finder gadget - except opening Amazon in a different tab, and making the links there as you need them. It's little bit more work - but only just.

There are still Amazon.com gadgets in the Add a Gadget list (from Layout in the new interface, Design > Page Elements in the old one) - you can find them under the features tab.

For now at least, it looks like Blogger's monetize tab is limited to AdSense , and it is a money-making option that you can sign up for from within Blogger. (Even though there are a few vital extra steps that you should take, even though Blogger hasn't told you about them, like blocking certain ad-categories, and stopping malicious use of your AdSense ID).

And there are, of course, many other advertisting programmes and affiliate programmes that you can consider if AdSense doesn't work for your blog.

Customizing the look and feel of your Amazon associate advertisements

2011-09-22T16:07:00.000+01:00

If you are an Amazon Associates publisher, then you have a great deal of control over the color schemes used in your ads, and some control over the other elements. This article describes the options that are open to you: it's writen for Blogger users, but the info applies to all Amazon affiliates.

Easy links between Blogger and Amazon?

Between 2009-2011, Blogger and Amazon were integrated, and there were tools that made it very easy to put Amazon ads into blog posts. However the integration is gone from the most recent version of Blogger - and besides, many publishers would prefer to customize the colour and style of ads on their site.

Amazon gives some control over these features - you simply need to log into their site, and set up the options that you want.

Making Amazon product ads that match your colour scheme.

Log in to whichever Amazon you're using.

Remember, there are different Amazons to use for different readers.
For Amazon.com, log on at: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

From the row of tabs at the top of the screen, choose Links and Banners / Product links

Click the "Add Product Links Now" option

Search for the product you want to link to

From the list of products shown, click "Get link" - it's the button on the right side of the screen

In the window that opens, you can edit the link properties.

Choose the type of link that you want:

Image and text (show a small picture of the product, a description and perhaps the price)
Text only (shows whatever text you choose, only)
Image only (shows a picture of the product - clicking the picture takes your reader to Amazon)
Add to widget (these will be covered in another article)

The specific options that you can choose are different for each type of link - changing color is very popular for image-and-text links. You may just want to choose a values from Amazon's colour-picker: use the "ok" button at the bottom to apply your colour choice.

Or you may want to get the exacty value from your blog, by going into Blogger's colour selection tools, choosing the item whose colour you want to use and coping the hex code (without the #) .and pasting it into the Amazon colour picker wind.

For image and text links, you can also choose whether to open links in a new window, picture size (limited to larger or smaller), and whether to show the item price or not.

Once you have finished copy the HTML from the "Get HTML Code For This Product Link" box at the bottom of the screen.

Put the HTML into your blog the same way you would add any other 3rd party HTML.

Some examples of customized links:

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

How to cut, copy and paste in Blogger's post editor

2011-09-15T23:28:00.000+01:00

Blogger's post editor doesn't have buttons for cut, copy and paste. Google Chrome doesn't have them in a top menu bar either. Fortunately there are still (at least) three ways to move text around.

To my regular readers:You may think I've gone crazy, doing such a "simple" post. But I just answered a question about just this in the Blogger-help-forum. When I tried googling the question no answers came up in the first page. And I'm in a mood to write something simple to help newbie-bloggers (we were all new, once). Humour me, I'll be back with a more complex topic soon. Mary

What can you do in the Post Editor

The Post Editor is the tool that you use in Blogger to edit your posts and pages.

It has buttons for many of the things you would do in a word-processor and many other programs, such as:

un-do/re-do,
choose the font, font size and highlighting (bold, italic, underline, strikethru)
choose the text and background colour
turn some text into a link
insert a picture or video
make the text left, centre or right aligned
numbered and bullet pointed lists
indenting a quote
check the spelling.

It also has a couple of Blogger (or perhaps Google)-specific functions:

adding a jump-break
removing all the formatting from a piece of text

But there is one set of very common functions that are missing: Cut, Copy and Paste. Fortunately there are a number of other ways to cut / copy / paste - you just need to know where to find them.

Option 1: Use the browser menu

To see the post editor, you must first be using a web-browser (eg Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc) to connect to Blogger.

Most of the these browsers have an edit menu in the top left corner where it "should" be, and this menu has CCP. So you can

Select the text you want to work with, or put the cursor into the place you want to copy to, and
Choose cut, copy or paste from the browser menu.

Exceptions: Google Chrome and IE9

In some newer browsers, instead of a menu bar, the toolbar has moved to the top right hand corner of the screen, just under the close-window button. It's shown with a wrench in Chrome and a gear wheel in Internet Explorer, like this.

If you left-click on the wrench, you are shown a menu that has many of the options that are in "normal" browser windows, includng the edit options of cut, copy and paste (in small buttons).

There are also useful option like to view the source code of the page - these are under the Tools item in the wrench-menu.

(There may be other exceptions too, I'm not familiar with browser software on Apple or Linux computers these days.)

Option 2: Right-click

Select the text you want to work with, or put the cursor into the place you want to copy to
Right-click on it using your mouse or keypad button.
Choose the function you want from the small menu that opens in the middle of the screen (called a context menu). (The options that are there will depend on your browser software - but even Chrome has cut, copy & paste)

Option 3: Keyboard shortcuts

Select the text you want to work with, or put the cursor into the place you want to copy to
Press the keyboard short-cut for the function you want.

Some of the most common keyboard shortcut, and ones that definitely work in Blogger are:

ctrl / x - cut
ctrl / c - copy
ctrl / v - paste

ctrl / a - select all
ctrl / z - unto
ctrl / y - re-do

ctrl / b - bold
ctrl / i - italic
ctrl / u - underline

To do these, hold down the control key (it's sometimes labelled "ctrl") and press the letter-key will you are still holding ctrl.
To me, these are the quickest way to work, even though they take some learning to start with.

Options in Blogger's post-editor: where to find them

2011-09-10T12:48:00.000+01:00

This article explains where to find the options for each post or page, in both the updated and older Blogger.

Where to find Post Options / Options:

Each individual post in Blogger has options that can set for it, including

The date it was (or is to be) published,
How to handle HTML in the post
Whether to allow comments
Label(s) that are applied to it

These values for these are set in the Post Settings-Options / Post Options area:

In post-Sept-11 Blogger (the "new" interface)
The Post Settings bar is on the right hand side of the screen: Click on Post Settings (unless it's already open), and under that there are separate sections for

Options (it has a gear-wheel beside it),
Location,
Published on
Labels

This shows the current values.for the post: after you have changed them, you can press the Done button to hide that section again.

In pre-Sept-11 Blogger (the "old" interface)
Post Options is at the bottom of the post-editor screen, like this:.

Source:	#Visits	%Total
Google / organic (ie search results)	79351	57%
Google.com / referral (ie Help Forum)	41092	29%
Direct	12606	9%
Google.XXX (search from various countries own Google sites)	3096	2%
Blogger.com / referral	827	1%
Feedburner / feed	718	1%
Search / organic	397	0%
Google translation	280	0%
Email	191	0%
Facebook.com	154	0%
Swagbucks.com / referral	100	0%
Ask / organic	87	0%
Aol / organic	76	0%
Feedburner / email	67	0%
Too-clever-by-half.blogspot.com / referral	58	0%
Yahoo / organic (ie search results)	58	0%

Screen Width (px)	% of total visits
Less than 320 wide	0.33%
300 - 767 wide	0.76%
768 - 1023 wide	1.56%
1024 - 1151 wide	15.62%
1152 - 1278 wide	1.86%
1280 + wide	79.88%
Grand Total	100.00%