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How Do Insurance Companies Make Money? - How Does It Work Operationally?

2017-01-04T11:30:00.000+08:00

How does it work operationally?

Insurance companies can be much more complex than it seems. I won't go into details, but I will try to give a sense of the variety of things to do:

Marketing and product development - we have to understand what our clients want and product design including "features" and guarantees (e.g., including dental health plan or not in limitation of the disease before the type of questionnaire that we ask clients to fill???), pricing, regulatory constraints, etc. and IT is, of course, for the system to support this product.

Distribution - how we bring our products to the clients? Agents, brokers, direct sales channels are all there, plus the development of smartphone applications and internet sales.

Customer service and claims that "the process of paper" including address change customer or telephone number, the call center for clients who have questions, people file to review and pay claims, etc.

Finance - not just the usual financial planning and management (for example, to pay the Bills), but also all financial analysis to invest money and generate profits, reserves calculation, and accounting, etc.

Risk, compliance, and regulations - this includes the investigation of false claims and anti-money laundering, above all the accounting control and risk management to ensure the company did not take too many risks.

The usual support function, IT, HR, etc.

Please note that you may be having some time difference between the premium received by the client, that quite small and some companies might prefer one to the other.

How Do Insurance Companies Make Money? - How does the business work (financially)?

2017-01-04T08:18:00.002+08:00

I will focus on two types of insurance. For the first type, we're basically talking about money management, which I would consider to no "real" insurance.

You can see that the insurance company receives money (premium) before it knows how much it will have to pay to anyone.

How does the business work (financially)?

Let's assume we're talking about a company that wrote the contract with annual guarantee-that is, the client pays a premium for protection against accidents that occurred during the 12 months ahead. To simplify the problem, I would assume the premium paid on 1-Jan-but you can keep the same principles of pro rata temporis for the fraction of a year.
We face two problems:

How soon will a claim for the contract is filled?

When will the payment be done? In the case of multiple payment, how much and how long?

This is where we introduce the concept of Claims Ratio-the ratio between the claimsactually pay more than the total premiums because of, at a particular time.
Insurance companies has historical data on the evolution of the Claims Ratio over time.

For example, of all contracts written in 1996, for total premiums received of €120 (vast majority in 1996 plus a few clients who only paid in 1997 after the company chased them):

€40 actually paid out in 1996 (33%)

€20 actually paid out in 1997 (50% cumulative)

€10 actually paid out in 1998 (58% cumulative)

€5 actually paid out in 1999 (63% cumulative)

€1 actually paid out in 2000 and 2001 -- nothing since (64% cumulative)

Thanks to a variety of statistical tools -- of which a simple average! -- insurance companies can figure out the best estimate for the sequence of pay-outs for the current year. It can also estimate the "ultimate" claims ratio for the current year. This is often called the Loss ratio.

Add overhead/claims management (for example, claims adjuster salaries + warmingheadquarters company) and the total pay-out will usually about 98%-generate a margin of 2% for the company.

It is also the main technique for determining product price/premium to be paid by the client. Actuary estimates possible loss, then adding the estimated cost management and distribution fee (Commission for brokers and agents), and a little margin. Statistical models help tailor a specific risk premium (possibility of having the damage, the amount of damage) of the client, of course.

On 31 December, the insurance companies set aside enough money to cover all anticipated losses (sometimes with a margin of prudence, i.e., setting aside more than the best estimation) into accounting reserves. The amount of this loss ratio which is expected to end multiplied by total premiums because (the end with a margin of prudence).
Then, year by year, the insurance company compare actual pay in hopes of original-customize accounting backup up or down as needed. If the actual losses were below expectations (usually, below the historical average), this creates profits. If not, it creates a loss.

As mentioned above, the margin of 2% to 5% would be typical.
Another important aspect is that the insurance company will not allow that money collected as premium beds at 0%-interest bank account. As mentioned above, some of the money will remain "in the coffers," less than one year, but a small percentagewill still be 5 + years.

So insurance companies invest this money in the financial markets-primarily in Government and corporate bonds. The entire expertise asset management obligations ensure that we are right "match" in the time-stream and out-money flow.

How investment income is shared between the client and the insurance company will depend on the product itself and local regulations. Most of the time, the investment income is taken into account to determine the price of the product-that is, a small discount vs "premium" pure "so that clients get several benefits. But it really can vary a lot.

Continue to how does it (Insurance Company) work operationally?

How Do Insurance Companies Make Money? - What does an insurance company sell?

2017-01-04T07:50:00.000+08:00

Someone who has been working 7+ years at an insurance company talks everything about anything we should know about the insurance company.

What does an insurance company sell?

Most of what is called "life insurance" is just another tax-efficient savings products. You put money into more-or-less at will - insurance companies manage it for you (for a fee) - You can take your money back whenever you want or on the date specified.This is the "insurance" in the sense that the company will guarantee the amount that you can take back (for example in the form of the annual increase at x%) and that the money will be available in the date, set in the contract.
Property and accident insurance (P & C) also health insurance, a promise to refund your money for the damages You suffered.
For example, the window of your car gets broken, you go to the repair shop, to have the window replaced, you pay for the "damage".

You file a claim with the insurance company sending a copy of the Bill, and they give you the money back. (They might pay the garage directly as well – a process that, would in fact be different.) Or damage is the value of improvements to your home that burned. This is the same case with health care, by the way: the insurance company pays the Bill for you. The amount paid by the insurance company may also include reduced or are they just paying a percentage of the total costs, etc. There are many variations, but the principle is the same.
Other parts of life insurance work like P & C, by the way, imagine you die tomorrow, that would be the "damage" to your spouse and children. So you can take the insurance contracts that will pay the specified amount (say, 500 000 Usd) to cover the risk of death or disability (or disease), etc.

Continue to How does the business work (financially)?

How to get a valid URL for a picture in Google Photos

2017-01-03T00:20:00.000+08:00

This article explains the problems with getting valid, SEO-friendly links to images that are in Google Photos - and shows a way of doing this using Google products.

Previously I've explained how to get a URL for a picture stored in Google Photos - and the difference between Photo's "shareable links" and real photo URLs.

The sort of link you get with this procedure looks like this:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhasSsvoyOSwVoUZZIa3kd-D0ZQ9XDKJ49giTNAjEp2lsLPteRaneI8loQHOj4w0X7prGgTn0sZFquvg3FBEoBPkVtJpw1CKJ_ZwoKN93xiO7CK5jf9t_DRhYZGMzHkrj3RMGEX8ZDnckaK/w1006-h566-no/

There are some issues with using URLs (aka web-addresses) obtained like this:

They aren't recognised as valid image file links by many online tools which ask for the URL for an image (eg phpBB, Blogger - and many others)

Sometimes they stop working
(I've not been able to track down exactly when, but there are reports around the internet from people who say that links like this work for a while and then stop).

They don't include the SEO-targeted keywords which you carefully used to name the photograph file before uploading it to Google Photos.
(Not everyone does this, and it's a lot harder for photos that were taken on your phone. But some people do it, and to them not having the keywords in the photo URL is a big deal.)

Luckily, there is a way around these problems, which gives you a web-address for a picture stored in Google Photos that ends with the same file extension which you uploaded to Photos (eg .jpg, .png .bmp), and which includes the keywords which you used in the file name.

How to get a valid URL / web-address for a picture in Google Photos, using Blogger

1 If you haven't done so already, then upload the photo to Google Photos, in whatever way you usually would (if you have your smartphone synched with your Google account, you may not even notice uploading it).

2 In Google Photos, find the photo and put it into an album.
(It doesn't matter which album you use - and you can delete the album again later, you just need the photo to be in an album for now, and you need to remember which album this is).

3 Using a desktop or laptop computer (ie not your phone), go to Blogger

If you've never used Blogger before, you may be asked to accept the terms and conditions. Just say "yes" to this (you are't actually going to use Blogger to publish anything).

If you don't already have a blog, the click the Create a blog link, and follow the steps to create one.
(You won't be publishing this blog, so it doesn't really matter what name you give it or what template you use - just pick anything that's available. )

Or if you do have one or more blogs, just pick one (any one is OK: you're not actually going to publish to it) and go into the Blogger Dashboard.

4 Click New Post

This opens up the post editor.

5 In the tool-bar at the top of the post editor window, click the Insert image icon.

6 Choose the From the Google Album Archive tab.
(Google have changed the name for this a couple of times since they introduced the feature - right now it says exactly what I've listed here - the name may vary, but you get the idea: choose your Google Albums).

7 Navigate to the album that you put the picture into, in step two. Open it, and find the picture, and select it.

8 Choose Ok.

9 Wait a moment while the image is placed into your blog-post, and automatically resized.

10 Click on the Edit HTML tab (currently at the top left side of the post-editor) to go into Edit HTML mode. You will see HTML code like this.

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsFa6QkMSSeUloiuOAj1WcWoED9Qq2qwUsz0NEkAIlO_2UztYYStY3ylpayZjEFeZ80VJANIQZTB7b1bvqHQbZlFVZ4L_xI8Fj2X_3svUGK3RTqzJ9OfU6NH7tsBOju3DGXV7oUq5zdkk/s1600/tarmacadam-promenade-sunny-september-day.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsFa6QkMSSeUloiuOAj1WcWoED9Qq2qwUsz0NEkAIlO_2UztYYStY3ylpayZjEFeZ80VJANIQZTB7b1bvqHQbZlFVZ4L_xI8Fj2X_3svUGK3RTqzJ9OfU6NH7tsBOju3DGXV7oUq5zdkk/s320/tarmacadam-promenade-sunny-september-day.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>

Or like this, if you didn't give the image a better filename before uploading it:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieNclWtG4P4r8BdhFaDqIDJZCi5yOPUEX_hYx6MRDh4VYKydxUbHNj8-NoCdRsjd4LKGDDupYGubYGqXV9NMD_3xMsZXtB76xogCdc4nmas44fbFvMMvbE1J-byTErHxD3kShK998UtuU/s1600/DSC_3573.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieNclWtG4P4r8BdhFaDqIDJZCi5yOPUEX_hYx6MRDh4VYKydxUbHNj8-NoCdRsjd4LKGDDupYGubYGqXV9NMD_3xMsZXtB76xogCdc4nmas44fbFvMMvbE1J-byTErHxD3kShK998UtuU/s320/disc0137.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>

11 Find the part which starts src=" and ends with a closing quote-mark. This is the URL for the picture you chose. In the example above, it's the part in bold-red

12 Select and copy the text between the two quote marks after src= ie the equivalent to the piece of code shown in red.

Job done! A general-purpose, valid, well-formed, web-address for the picture you want is now in your computer's memory, and can be pasted into anyplace where you want to use it.

To get out of Blogger, click Close (near the top right of the screen), and agree to leave the page anyway even though it means you will lose your work.

Troubleshooting / Extra for experts

Finding the image code in your post

If there is other material in the post that you are using, then you may want to put some marker text before and after the photo while you are still in Compose mode, to make it easier to find the right part when you are in Edit HTML mode.

Getting a valid link to someone else's photo

You may want to find a valid URL for a photo that someone else has shared with you - but of course you cannot add this to one of your own albums. In this case, the solution is to download a copy of the photo which was shared, then upload it to your own Google Photos.

Using the blog you've made for other things

Maybe using Blogger like this has given you ideas about other things you can use it for: that's great, Blogger is an excellent tool for publishing material on the internet with a minimum of fuss - while also having enough features to let you do some sophisitcated things. And even just the post editor can be a handy HTML generator at times. You might like to read Getting Started with Blogger, for some tips about how to set up your Google account and very first blog.

Other challenges?

Do you have any questions around this approach, and how to solve problems with it? Please a message in the Comments box at the bottom of the page, and I'll see if I can find a solution.

How to get an URL for a picture stored in Google Photos - version 1

Using marker text to find things in your post's HTML code

Things to consider before starting to use Blogger

Using Blogger's post-editor as an HTML generator

Saving a post if Blogger's Publish button doesn't work

2016-12-31T21:16:00.000+08:00

This article is about how you can save a post even if Blogger's Publish button won't let you save your work.

Imagine you've been working on a Blogger post for several hours. It's finally ready: you've got the wording exactly right, everything is formatted with bold, italics and bullet-points, your pictures and links are all correct, etc.

But then your internet connection stops working. Or you click the Publish button - and get a message like "Post cannot be saved due to HTML errors". You can't work out how fix the problem, and you need to stop working on it now!

This may seem like a disaster - hours of work wasted.

But luckily there's a very easy way to save your work, and tools to help you diagnose problems.

Saving your work and recovering it later

How to save the post that you have written

Switch to Edit HTML mode (this is a tab at the top left corner of the editing window.

Select all the text in the window (Ctrl / A does this in most browsers)

Copy it.

Go to somewhere outside of Blogger that you can save text:
Perhaps a text-editor like Notepad, or a plain-text formatted email message. Even a word processor like MS Word can work, provided you remember to save your file as text. Or you may want to use a source code editor - see the section below about fixing code errors.

Paste in the contents that you copied earlier.

Save the file.

Switch to Compost mode (this is optional - I usually recommend it so that you don't get confused the next time you come back to Blogger and see the "funny codes")

Exit the Blogger post-editor by closing the window - say "ok" if the system asks if you really want to leave the page without saving.

Recovering your work later on

This is the reverse of what you did to save the work: open the text file, copy the contents, go to Edit HTML mode in Blogger and paste them in.

You should then be able to go in to Compose mode, and see the post as it was when you stopped working on it.

At this point, if the HTML is ok and you have fixed the issues with your internet connection, you can Publish your post.

Fixing problems with your HTML

If there are problems with the HTML, then you need to find them, and fix them. Usually, fixing them is easy, once you've found them - but the finding can be hard if you have a large and complicated post.

Sometimes Blogger will tell you what the problem with your HTML is, and show where it's happening by putting the "wrong" code into reverse text when you try to Publish it: this makes it easy to see if you scan through the HTML for the post.

However sometimes Blogger doesn't show you where the problem is - I've noticed this more often recently when using IE 9.0 on complex posts. Instead you get an error message like

Your HTML cannot be accepted: Closing tag has no matching opening tag: SPAN

or whatever the specific problem is, but none of your code is highlighted. This can make it hard to track down and fix the problem.

A low-tech way to find the problem is to paste the code from the saved file into Blogger's Edit HTML window in smaller sections, and Publish to work out if the problem is in the code that you just pasted: if everything in the first section of code can be published, but there is an error message for the next part, then you know what section the error is in.

A major disadvantage of this approach is that you need to publish the post many times, and the first time it will definitely not be "finished". this is OK if you use a pre-publication blog to prepare your posts, but if you don't do that, it can cause your RSS subscribers to form a bad impression of the quality of your posts.

A better option is to use a source-code editor like Notepad++ (free, Windows only) or XMLSpy (30 day free trial, far more complex code editor), which has tools to help you find and fix problems with your code.

Get your posts right before you publish them for all to see

What is RSS and why it matters for your blog

Getting the HTML to put a picture into your blog

Putting text and pictures alongside each other

Putting a badge for a Facebook Page into your Blog

2016-12-31T21:10:00.000+08:00

This article describes making a Facebook badge to promote your page, and putting it onto your blog.

What is a Facebook page

This article is about how to make a badge to promote a Facebook Page.

This is an example of the "follow me" approach to linking your blog and the social networks, although for Facebook pages your reader becomes a Fan rather than a Friend.

Many people are confused about when they should use each of the types of "thing" in Facebook, ie

Profiles - accounts for flesh-and-blood, living, breathing, individual people
Pages - for websites, brands, and organisations that don't want to approve all their Facebook members
Groups - for organisations that want to approve individual members who join (and in return, group-owners can send private messages to individual members.

The most common "thing" for blogs to have is a Page - and a Badge is the tool which Facebook provides to help you to promote a Page on your blog or other website.

How to make a badge to promote a Facebook Page

View all your Pages using the arrow drop-down at the very top right of Facebook's toobar.
(Facebook chance the place for actions like this from time to time - you may need to look around to find your pages.)

Copy the URL for the Page you want to promote
(One way is to right click on its name, and choose copy-link-location- or whatever phrase your browser uses. Another is to to go the page, and copy the URLfrom your address bar.)

Come back to this article and click here --- Facebook Social Plugins, to reach Facebook's tools.
(I used to have instructions to launch this from Facebook - but I cannot find any link to it from my Pages page any more.)

Choose Page Plugin / Web.

Scroll down the page, and set the options for your badge. The first one is critical - the others optional:

Facebook Page URL - this needs to be changed to the URL of your page (which you copied earlier)
If you have less than 25 Fans already, then your page's URL will be something like http://www.facebook.com/pages/Blogger-Hints-and-Tips/144194435594821 and you can get it by copying the link from the list of Pages for your account.
Once you have more than 25 fans, you can choose a page-url on the Edit Info > Username screen.

Tab - the tab on your page that is shown

Width - choose a value that suits the space on your template where you want to put the box.
Show faces, show header: choose options that suit your purpose and blog template
Show stream: this controls whether you show posting from the Page inside your blog

As you choose options, the preview at the bottom updates to show what the button will look like:

When you are happy with the selections, choose Get Code.

Currently, there are options for an iframe or Javascript SDK: I recommend using the iframe, unless you are comfortable with the two-part installation needed for the Javascripit, and you are sure that the visitors you want to target will have Javascripti enabled.

Copy the code provided

Install the code into your blog - there several options for installing the HTML, depending on where you want to put the badge or button.

Job Done! Your blog will now display a gadget that promotes the selected Facebook page - people can view and like your Page from within your blog.

What your visitors will see

People who visit your blog through a web-browser will see a Facebook area, including a Like button and whatever other options you have chosen.

This can be quite a powerful tool: you can easily use two or three different combinations on different parts of your blog: one that has no border, no faces and no header but does show a Stream can effectively look like a "live" feed from your Facebook page to your blog, while another one with different options can show off the size of your fan-base.

Be aware that the Like button shown in this button gives people the option to Like your Page in facebook - not your blog directly, and not the current post that they are reading. If you want them to be able to Like your blog or blog-posts, you need to provide this option separately (and many of your visitors are likely to be confused by the different).

As always, people who read your blog via a feed reader (Bloglines, Google Reader, etc), or by email subscription (eg having used follow-by-email) may not see the Facebook item, depending on where is places and what options their email program has.

Customizing the code

You can change the characteristics of the box without having to generate the code from Facebook again. For example you can later the width and/or height - just remember to do it in both of the places required if you are using the iframe option:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fpages%2FBlogger-Hints-and-Tips%2F144194435594821&width=160&colorscheme=light&show_faces=false&border_color=purple&stream=true&header=false&height=395" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:160px; height:395px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

fyi, I could have just quoted this code, and said to use it on your blog. But I don't usually do this when I'm describing how to link Blogger and any third party product, because it's likely that Facebook (or whoever) will change their code in the future: it's always safest to get the most up-to-date copy of the code from the source-site when you need it.

The facebook page where you get the code from also has more information about controls you can set in the code, too. Check it out for more information.

Do you need to own the page you want to promote?

No - not any more.

At one stage, the first step in these instructions was to

"Log into Facebook with a profile (ie personal account) that has administrator rights for the page you want to promote."

But that's no longer necessary. You can promote any Facebook page that you want to, on your blog.

But be aware that if you show the page-feed on your blog, and you don't own the page, then you have no control over what is shown. It's possible that a feed from someone else's Page will show material which breaks Blogger's terms and conditions - or which you simply don't want on your blog. For this reason along, I'd recommend only promoting your own, or closely trusted, pages on your blog.

Putting HTML from a third-party into your blog

How the data in Blogger blogs is organised

Linking Blogs and Websites

Tools for linking Blogger and the Social Networking sites

Putting a Facebook "share this" button on your blog

Copyright, Blogs and Bloggers

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for bloggers

How to rename picture files in Picasa-desktop

2016-12-31T20:00:00.000+08:00

This article is about re-naming files from within Picasa-desktop, to provide SEO benefits for your blog.

Picasa's desktop software is a good tool for organizing and editing photos on your local computer. And it is still available for you to use, even though Picasa-web-albums has been replaced by Google Albums + Google Album Archive.

For pictures that are important in your blog, I still recommend preparing them in a tool like Picasa-desktop and then uploading the finished versions to Google Photos before putting them into a post, because:

The desktop tool has better editing tools (cropping, zooming, auto adjustment, adding watermarks) and Picasa-web-albums does.

It lets you control the size of the uploaded file

It's easier to ensure sure that you still have full-size files on my local machine for printing etc, as well as smaller, more optimized, copies to use on web-pages.

Picasa-desktop folders have a very nice relationship with files and directories with the Windows file system:

Each Picasa folder = one directory on your computer
Each Picasa photo = one file on your computer.

And this means that you can set various properties (eg file name) from either inside Picasa or from Windows.

Ways to associate keywords with photos in Picasa-desktop

Picasa-desktop has two tools for adding keywords to photographs:

You can enter a caption for each photo. This is basically some text, which is stored "inside" the photo, in a hidden-field that is only visible when you are using a software tool that displays the captions. (In technical terms, the caption is stored inside the IPTC/XMP Description field inside the JPEG etc file that you have.)

You can enter one or more tags for each photo - again, text (individual words or phrases) that is stored in the IPTC/XMP Keyword field.

Unfortunately captions and tags aren't shown when you put a photo in your blog.

This means that the captions and tags are possibly not used by Google in understanding what the photo is about: I've never heard any SEO experts recommending that the IPTC/XMP fields should be keyword optimized. For some bloggers this won't be an issue - but it is if SEO is important for you blog.

Another approach is to put the keyword(s) into the file-name, because file-name is one of the factors that Google looks at when it is indexing images. And this has a nice spin-off for you as well - it means that they keywords are available to any file-search tools that you use on your computer, not just to specialised ones that work with images.

For a long time, I believed that to change the name of a file, I had to go out to my Windows files (using Windows Explorer or similar, and rename them there) - and then wait for Picasa to catch up with the change that I'd made in the file system. But one day I accidentally hit the F2 key, and found that it opens up a very useful dialog box indeed.

How to Change the name of a file in Picasa desktop

Navigate to the picture that you want to change the file-name for, using the Picasa-desktop software.

Press the F2 key. This opens a Rename Files window.

Type in a new name for the file, for example concrete-pig-outside-butcher-shop-in-ireland

Click the option buttons if you want to include today's date or the file-resolution in the name (I don't usually do this, because I organise my photos into folders according to the date they were taken)

Click Rename to save the change

Job done! The file has a new name in your computer's file system, and is still loaded in your Picasa database.

How to change the name of a file in Google Album Archive or Google Photos

Currently there is no way to change the name of a file after it is uploaded it to either Google Album Archive or Google Photos: .

One option is to download the photo, rename the file on your desktop, and re-upload it. But if you change the name in this way, you also need to change the link to the file in every place that it has already been used. That said, if you only use your photos in one place each, then making a new copy with a different name, uploading it and changing all the existing links can be a good way to deal with copyright theives who have hot-linked directly to your photos.

How to choose "good" names for your picture files

Early SEO advice was to use:

Lowercase letters only (some computers don't like uppercase)
Only hyphens between words (not spaces, underscores, etc)
Regular characters only (no á é etc)

Today, I'm not sure if it matters so much. In most cases, it's probably more important to use rich, descriptive key words that describe all the aspects of the photo, than to worry about how they're laid out. But I do tend to follow the advice anyway - just in case.

How to show your photos in a slideshow from Picasa

Does SEO matter for your blog?

How to put a picture into your blog.

Understanding Picasa-desktop vs Picasa-web-albums

Taking action when someone has copied your blog without permission

How To Do Businesses Use The Internet

2016-12-22T04:34:00.000+08:00

How to do business using the internet

Internet users are increasing every day, start young, adult and old quarter of any daily use the internet to search for information and the latest news News wanted to know.

It showed that not just in the real world people just browse and looking for an information in the virtual world (the internet) is also not correct, can it? Similarly, by finding the money, in the real world people work to others to generate money to meet daily needs, as well as in the virtual world, we can make money from it.

Then how to make money from the internet? do work the same as in the real world, if in the real world we work/open services for real people (appear/be seen to exist in the original) than in cyberspace (internet) we work/open services for virtual people (not visible/not visible to its original form), this is referred to as an Online Business.

Doing business online can be in various ways, can be services, workers, and other people who do business online. The following are some of the online business that can make money from the internet without capital.

A business that can make money from the internet

1. Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is made up of two words, namely the internet and marketing (marketing) so internet marketing is marketing products online via the internet. here in terms of marketing is not selling only but also include promotion, branding, build relationships with customers online.

2. Affiliate Marketing

How affiliate marketing work is almost the same with internet marketing, namely market the product. Layout of the difference is a matter of revenue, he obtained an internet marketing will earn money every time they market a product although not sold at all while an affiliate marketing will earn money every time a product is sold, market sure this job is more difficult compared to internet marketing but the result is more wow.
Why did I say wow? Yes because usually, an affiliate earn commissions up to 10% of the price of the products sold. Imagine if a car that cost it hundreds of millions? What is the upside, hehe

3. Blogger

Bloggers are someone who writes something on the internet, by becoming a blogger both businesses above can be done easily. Because by becoming a blogger you can do product marketing on your blog or website. In addition, there are much more ways to earn money from blogs such as selling blog template, create a blog, SEO optimization service blog and others. The thing that makes my hobby blogging up to this point.

4. Fill out surveys

Fill out surveys is the easiest to do to earn money from the internet because we are only assigned to fill a survey available to earn money. A survey on content may be themed variety of things depending on the provider of a survey, the average paid survey contains questions about products that are crowded or widely used in certain areas.

This 3 best web for survey

Paid Surveys - MySurvey - Online Surveys for Making Money

Paid Surveys at Home

The best paid online survey websites - Save the Student

5. Youtuber

Youtuber is a business name of my own bouquet, hehe. Pernakah you guys Watch youtube videos!do you guys ever thought what's the person who uploaded the video interesting there? Yes, the answer is to make money, Kalo gak ya not going to linger long may they spent the time to upload your video of the old large to watch other people.

This The 15 most popular YouTubers in the world

Addendum:
Things to remember in online business is an online business do not make it as a source of income, however, we do not know with whom to work and earn money from anyone! If they do not pay anymore how? all online business scam for sure in the end if they suffer losses. so make an online business as a side job, if income can still be Yes okay if there still is no income from the main work to meet the needs of a day today.

So the information about all I can tell, if you have any questions or just want to suggested/related article content complements please write it in the comments field. All this and thanks:)

avhudz.blogspot.com :
How to do business using the internet

Centering gadgets in Blogger

2016-11-01T08:06:00.000+08:00

This article is about centering gadgets from 3rd parties that you install onto your blog.

Previously, I've described how to put HTML code from a 3rd party into your blog.

When code like this is put into a gadget, one common question is "how do I center it?"

There are (at least) three options for doing this, ie for putting a gadget into the middle (horizontally) of the area it is located in. These are described below.

Option 1: Centre all the gadgets in your blog

To center-align every single gadget in your blog, just, add a CSS rule to your blog. The rule to add is:

.widget {
text-align: center;
}

This will centre the contents and title of every gadget on your blog.

Option 2: Only center-align the specific gadget

To only centre-align one gadget, which is made from HTML/Javascript code, you can just put the gadget-code from the 3rd party (eg PayPal, Amazon, etc) inside a centering statement, like this:

<div style="text-align: center;">

PUT THE CODE FROM THE 3RD PARTY HERE

</div>

Install the code into your blog the way you would usually install this 3rd party code.

This will centre-align the contents (not title) of the specific gadget that you add.

Note the American spelling of the word "center" - and don't forget to put the closing </div> statement at the end.

There may be some gadgets where it would be possible to add the centring statement to the gadget code itself, rather than putting it outside. I don't recommend this (unless you're so comfortable with HTML and CSS that you don't need to be reading this article), because it introduces a risk that you will interfere with some other aspect, or that you will lose the centering if you ever need to refresh the code.

Option 3 - Make a new style rule just for the gadget

If you only want to centre one (or several) gadgets - not all of them - then it's best to define a new style that is to be used on specific gadgets: put this new style into your template, and then apply it to the gadgets like this.

<div class="YourNewSytle">

PUT THE CODE FROM THE 3RD PARTY HERE

</div>

This approach will only centre the gadget contents - not any header that you give to it.

There are lots of options that you could put into the new style rule, but at a minimum it needs to have

.YourNewStyle
{
text-align: center;
}

Notice that there is a "." (ie a full-stop) before the name of your new style.

Also, it's best not to use a number as the style-name (eg "2nd-gadgetStyle"), because this doesn't work with some browsers.

Putting HTML code from a 3rd party into your blog

Adding a new CSS style into your template

Centering the header in your blog

Putting a gadget above your blog's header

Removing the attribution gadget from Designer-template blogs

Lining up the first post and the sidebar

2016-10-18T04:43:00.000+08:00

In some Blogger templates, there is a big gap between the bottom of the header and the start of the first post, and this means that the posts and the sidebar are not aligned. This article explains how to adjust the gap, and so remove that problem.

In the templates that Blogger provides, as well as all third-party templates, the amount of space between elements on the screen is not accidental: designers put a lot of effort into working out what spacing will look good, and then finding ways to put CSS code into the template so that the spacing they want is shown in any browser software that Blogger supports.

But there are times when you may want to change this spacing, and this is easy to do, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your template, and if you can work out exactly which part of the template code to change.

The pre-Header gap

A pet-hate of mine is the blank space above the first post, which looks strange unless you put something else in to the space. In this example, I've got an AdSense link-unit in the area highlighted in red, just to fill in the empty area:

How to change the gap above the post header

1 Edit your template - don't forget to take a backup.

2 Find this code

h3.post-title, .comments h4 {
font: $(post.title.font);
margin: .75em 0 0;
}

The exact numbers used in your template may be different: the key thing is to find the CSS command that is putting a margin above the post header. In the template that I took this example from (Simple), it's the "0.75em" - which puts 75% of the space of a the post-header characters as a blank space above the header.

3 Change the first margin value: how much to change it by depends on your template, but in some cases I've used 0 successfully.

In CSS, when a margin statement has three numbers beside it, they refer to the

top,
left-and-right,
bottom

margins respectively. So if you want to do something else to the post-header, eg indent it, this is the place to make changes

4 Click Preview to see what the blog will look like - keep doing this until you get the right setting.

5 When you are happy with the spacing, click Save Template to apply the changes to your blog. (Or Clear Edits if you cannot get it right and need to stop trying).

Note: If you make a big change to your template like this, it would be a good idea to check out out in at least one version of the other browsers that your readers use - at the moment, this usually means Internet Explorer 8, Firefox and Chrome. But it may depend on your niche - a tool like Google Analytics will give you some statistics about what browsers, and screen sizes, your visitors have.

Also, it is possible to make this change by just installing a new CSS rule for h3.post-title into your blog - because the latest one found is always the one used, and because the template designer's Add CSS function puts the rules you add after the othr rules. I don't recommend it here, though, because working with the original rule makes it easier to see the effect of making changes to any of the values in the area.

Other affected spacing

If you have more than one post per page, then this change will also reduce the amount of space between the bottom of one post and the header of the next one. Depending on your template, you want want to add a little more space into the margin statement in the bottom of the post-footer, eg

.post-footer {
margin: 20px -2px 20;
padding: 5px 10px;
}

If you display comments in your blog, you also need to check the impact on comments, because the original command applied to h4 items in comments as well.

If you are making a lot of changes, you may want to make a test blog, and plan your changes in private before applying them to your main blog.

Setting up Google Analytics to get statistics about for your visitors

Adding a new CSS rule to your blog's template

Advantanges and disadvantages of editing your template.

How to edit your blogger template

Who did your blogger template come from - the quick way of finding out

Making a test-blog for template changes

Planning changes to your blog in private

Getting the HTML code to put a picture into your blog's sidebar, header or footer

2016-10-07T06:30:00.000+08:00

You can use the Post Editor to get the HTML code that you need to put a picture into your sidebar (or header or footer, or anywhere else a gadget can go).

The Picture gadget is the normal tool for adding a picture to your blog's sidebar.

But sometimes you want more control over the picture size or behaviour. Eg, you may want to have two pictures very close to each other and guarantee that they're the same size.

To do this, you need to get the HTML code for the picture, and then put it into your blog as an HTML-gadget. Fortunately, Blogger's Post-editor make it very easy to do this without writing the code yourself.

Using the Post Editor to generate the HTML for a picture

1 Start a new Post (NB you're not ever going to publish this: it's just a work-area)

2 Don't enter any text: just use the Picture icon on the toolbar to add a picture. Blogger will prompt you to upload the picture, or to choose it from a Google-album-archive or to enter its URL: add the picture the way that you usually would.

3 Switch to the HTML tab (top left of the editing window).

This show you the HTML code for displaying the picture, as it is set to display in the Post (depending on the picture-settings you've chosen, it may be centered or right/left aligned, and the size may vary).

4 Copy the HTML.

5 Switch back to Compose, so that you don't get confused the next time you edit a post.

6 Return to the list of posts: you may be asked if you want to leave the page without saving - the answer is Yes. Or you may have a new draft-status post, which you can delete.

Job Done! You now have some HTML code in your memory which you can paste into an HTML/Javascript gadget, or anywhere else that you may need it - even into another post that you are editing in a separate window, or into a totally different tool.

Stopping pictures on your blog from being "clickable"

Inserting a Picture into a blog Post.

Putting 3rd party HTML into your blog

Center-align the gadgets on your blog

Hosting pictures outside of Google / Picasa

Inserting a picture into your blog as a gadget

Showing your oldest blog-post first - and the rest in reverse order.

2016-10-02T05:10:00.000+08:00

Blogger does not have an option to display your posts in reverse order - so that the oldest post is first, and the most recent post is last. But this article describes displaying your posts in this way by manipulating their post dates. And it links to an article about some other possible options.

Overview

Previously I've discussed the options for giving your blog a home page. One option is to organise the post-date for each of your posts, so that you control the order posts are displayed in.

This is easy enough to do, although there are a couple of risks that you need to be aware of as discussed below.

Blogger Posts and the Post-date

Each Post in your blog has a date-time value, which is called its "post-date". Normally , this is set to the date/time when you publish the post for the first time. But you can change the post date for any post, and you can do this either when you post it first or later on.

The post-date is important because it controls the order that posts are shown in:

The post that appears first when a reader visits your blog is the one with the most-recent Post-date.

If you have more than one post-per-screen, then the next-most-recent post is on the screen underneath the first one. And then the second-next-most-recent, etc.

When a reader is looking at any post, and they click Newer-Posts or Older-Posts, the post-date is used to decide what posts to show on the next screen.

This means that you can make your posts appear in the order than you wrote them (ie first post first, second post second, etc) by changing the Post-date so that:

your first post has the most-recent post-date,
your second post has the next-most-recent-date,
your third post has the third-most-recent poste date
etc

An alternative approach is to just make one post always appear first, and let the other posts appear in the order that you posted them.

How to make your posts appear in reverse order, using dates

1 Give your first Post a post-date (eg today), AND remember that date.

2 Give all other posts (even ones that you write next week, or next year) a post-date that is earlier than the post-date you picked in Step 1.

If you want your posts is strictly reverse order, you need to give each one a date that is earlier than any existing post. This is quite easy: just look at the list of posts in Posting > Edit Posts and scroll to the bottom of the list to see the oldest date used so far.

3 Turn off the post-date display on your posts (since the post-date won't make sense, because you're manipulating the dates).

To do this, go to the Layout tab.
Choose Blog-posts (edit).
Un-tick the date under "Post Page Options".

4 Remember to make the same date change for every post you write from now on.

Also, if it might be relevant for your readers to know when you wrote a post, make sure that you always manually put the date into each post.

Risks of this approach

If you follow this approach, you will give a far-in-the-past date to pages that you never want to appear first. There is a risk that Google might convert the data behind older posts at some time. If your post-dates get too far into the past, then it's possible that they might not cope well this. This could be for reasons that seem logical, or because of things that are totally to do with the internal workings of Blogger's database, and make no sense to you at all.

Also, be aware that Google might choose to force the post-date to appear on posts at some time in the future. At the moment, they don't: it's your choice. But you cannot guarantee that they won't change their minds about this, one day. (Personally I think they probably won't, and I've built a couple of "real" websites that make use of the technique described here. Just remember it's not guaranteed.)

An Alternative Approach

Adam of Too-Clever-by-Half has suggested a totally different way to display your posts in reverse order. I haven't used it, but think that it has a lot of potential in some situations, provided you are comfortable using Yahoo pipes and RSS feeds to display things on your blog.

He has also recently shared another approach he found, which uses a script to manipulate elements within Blogger, and so is more robust than his first approach.

Changing the post date for any post

Giving your blog a home page

Using a gadget instead of a post as your home page

Stopping certain pages from ever appearing on the home page

Blogs, Blogger and blogger, Posts, Pages and Screens - understanding how blogger works.

mail2Post: How to update your blog by email, instead of using Blogger

2016-09-05T07:19:00.000+08:00

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 > Email tab if you are using an administrator account

Beside Posting using email, 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).

Click Save Settings.

Job Done! Your blog is now set up so that posts can be created by being emailed to it, instead of requiring someone to use the Blogger software to write each post.

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 Blogger Post made 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.

Giving someone write access (ie author permissions) to your blog

Setting up a blog administrator

Understanding Google accounts

Setting up a test-blog to try things out in private

RSS, and why it matters for your blog

How to put a gadget above your blog's header

2016-08-22T05:34:00.000+08:00

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

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 in the usual way

2 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 the template-editor search tool, 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

Job Done: after you have successfully saved this change, then the next time you edit your blog layout (Dashboard > Layout ), 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.

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

How to edit your Blogger template

How to use Picasa-web-albums without being re-directed - August 2016 update

2016-08-17T23:30:00.000+08:00

This article explains what has happened to Picasa-web-albums, why it is now re-directing to Google Album Archive, and what you can do about it.

Back in July 2013, I described how many people who started Picasa-web-albums were being immediately re-directed to Google+ photos and what they could to to return to using PWA again without being re-directed.

Quite a few things have changed in the last three years - and especially in the last six months or so. In particular, Google have:

Changed their strategy around Google+
Released Google Photos and retired Google+ Photos
Changed the Picasa-web-albums re-direct to go to Google Photos instead of Google+ Photos
Stopped supporting Picasa (announcement)
Stopped supporting Picasa-web-albums (announcement)
Released a new tool called Google Album Archive, which gives you access to photos, photo-albums and data about photos that you created in Blogger (and other Google tools) - which isn't available in Google Photos.
Changed the re-direct on Picasa-web-albums, so that it goes to Google Album Archive instead of to Google Photos.

That is why you see this:

Instead of this:

when you go to www.picasaweb.google.com.

How to stop Picasa-web-albums from re-directing to Google Album Archive

Bad news: As Google's Album Archive product is turned on around the world, and specifically once it is turned on for your, there is no way to to use Picasa-web-albums, without being sent to Google Album Archive.

Our only option is to use to Google Photos directly, or to work with pictures only through Blogger's post-editor.

Is there a problem with using Google Album Archive and Google Photos instead of Picasa-web-albums?

There are posts on help-forums etc from people who are unhappy about this change: Picasa-web-albums and Picasa-desktop had a number of features which Google have simply decided not to provide in Google Photos. These features include:

Making slideshows and putting them into blog-posts or websites.
Embedding Picasa Web albums and photos in blog-posts or websites.
Linking to photos, albums, and Public Galleries which an URL that contains your usename
Photo tags, tagging people, likes, +1's, and Picasa Web comments.
Making slideshows.
Following people based soley on their photo collection
Viewing public galleries.

People who used those features didn't want to lose them, and they certainly see a problem with the changes. Personally, I think that things are a little more nuanced.

There is one particular missing feature (not listed above that I'm annoyed to have lost - but I've found a work around, and will be writing a post showing how to use it as soon as I've finished this one.
There is a lot of detail behind what you can and cannot do in Album Archive - and why certain actions are and aren't available. This isn't always consistent with the documentation - eg the documentation says that we can delete photos in Album Archive, but I've got at least one album / photo with no delete icon showing. Other people have reported that they had albums which aren't showing up in their Album Archive. Some are unhappy because they cannot create new albums, only work with ones that they've already made.

But for all that, I haven't yet found a total show-stopper issue that stops me from using the Google tools to work with images for my blogs. Have you?

Using Picasa-web-albums without being re-directed to Google Photos.

What was Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums - a basic introduction

Options for showing photos in Blogger

How to set up Page-level AdSense ads in your blog

2016-05-02T08:33:00.000+08:00

This article describes Page-level ads, a new type of AdSense advertisement which Google has recently introduced. It includes how to set up these ads if you use Blogger, and some troubleshooting information about them.

It also describes how to fix an error in the code which is supplied, which causes a message like "Attribute name "async" associated with an element type "script" must be followed by the ' = ' character".

What are Page Level AdSense ads

Google has recently introduced a new type of Adsense ad-units, which may be shown to people who visit a website using a mobile device (eg smartphone of tablet),

There are two types of Page-level ads:

Vignette ads: When a visitor on your site clicks on a link to another page on you site, a vignette ad may be loaded as a full-page overlay which the user needs to close before they see the page which they navigated to.

Overlay ads: these are smaller ads which show at the top or bottom of your screen, and which "stick" to the edge, so they seem to stay in place as the user scrolls up and down your site. The visit may click on them in the usual way.

For Blogger users, these ads are only currently available if you have a full AdSense account: if you only have a hosted AdSense account, then you cannot get the code to install them. But if you do have a full AdSense account (either because you have a custom domain, or because you signed up for AdSense before the "host AdSense account" option was introduced), they are attractive because they don't count towards the count of advertisement-units which you are allowed to display on each page.

They also only work if you have a mobile template switched on for your blog, so that visitors who use a mobile device see mobile-optimised screen.

How to install AdSense Page Level ads in Blogger

Log in to your AdSense account.

Go to the My Ads tab

Turn on one or both of Overlay or Vignette ads options.
(By default, they are both turned Off. Click on the empty box beside the "0" to turn an option to on: in these controls, 0 means "off" and 1 means "on".)

Click the < > Get Code button.

Copy the code that is generated.

Switch to Blogger, and edit your template in the usual way.

Find the text <head> (including the brackets).

On the very next line after <head>, paste in your code.

Optional - but highly recommended - add comments to clearly show what this code is for. I usually use

and then the code goes in here ...

Preview the template, and make sure it's working.
(See Troubleshooting section below if you get a message about Attribute name "async" associated with an element type "script" or similar.

Save the template.

Job done! This is all you need to do to enable page-levels ads for your blog: you do not need to install gadgets to say where these ads go, because Google handles this for you.

How to see what page-level ads look like in your blog

Visit your blog using a smartphone or tablet.

Add the text #googleads at the end of the website address, so it changes from something like:

http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/?m=1

to something like:

http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/?m=1#googleads

After this, when you click on a link to move a different page in your blog, a Vignette style ad will display - these are whole-page ads, which include a "close ad" button, like this:

Troubleshooting

Extra "src" text in the ad-code

Right now, there is a problem with the code that AdSense are providing. I don't know if this is because Blogger doesn't understand a feature that AdSense is using, or if it's a genuine bug. But if you see a message like this when you try to preview the template:

Could not load template preview: Error parsing XML, line 21, column 15: Attribute name "async" associated with an element type "script" must be followed by the ' = ' character.

then there's a very simple change that you have to make.

All you have to do is delete the "src" immediately after the word async.

So your code changes from like this:

<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({
google_ad_client: "ca-pub-DONT-USE-MY-NUMBER-GET-YOUR-OWN-PUBLISHER-ID",
enable_page_level_ads: true
});
</script>

to like this:

<script async ="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
<script>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({
google_ad_client: "ca-pub-DONT-USE-MY-NUMBER-GET-YOUR-OWN-PUBLISHER-ID",
enable_page_level_ads: true
});
</script>

Different Page Level settings for different websites

If you are using Adsense across several different websites, then you may want to enable one of vignette or overlay ads on some sites, and a different option on others.

Currently, there is no way to do this: you must choose one combination of:

No Page Level ads
Overlay ads only, no Vignette ads
No Overlay ads, but do show Vignette ads
Allowing Google to choose Overlay and/or Vignette ads

Stop Vignette ads being attached to some links

By default, any link to another page in your blog may have a Vignette ad attached to it. However there may be some links which you specifically don't want this to happen to - for example if the user really needs to remember what was on the current page once the get to the next one.

You can prevent any Vignette ads being displayed when a user clicks a link by adding a tag to the link.

The tag to add is:

data-google-vignette=”false”

and you need to switch to Edit HTML (top left of the post-editor window) to add it.

This is an example link to another page on this blog which is prevented from having a Vignette ad, and this is the HTML code I've used to achieve this.

<a data-google-vignette=”false” href="http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2010/02/stop-malicious-use-of-your-adsense.html">an example link</a>

More help

Google have provided more information about Page level ads here.

Setting up a mobile template for your blog

Editing your Blogger template

Hosted AdSesne accounts for Blogger users

Taking action when someone has copied your blog without permission

2016-02-15T09:06:00.000+08:00

This article is about the steps you can take when someone has made an unauthorized copy of something that is published on your blog.

Finding out that your blog has been copied

Previously, I've described how copyright applies to blogs in very general terms, and the steps you can take to apply copyright protection to your blog.

Even if you follow these these steps, if you put material onto the internet it is quite likely that someone will copy it.

This maybe done out of naivety, or as a deliberate attempt to rip you off, or as part of an organised spam-blogging ("splogging") operation.

There are several way you might find out that someone has copied your work:

You, or your friends, notice it
Maybe you or one of you readers searched for a certain phrase and you found your content elsewhere. Or maybe you found a link to an identical post on a help-forum or discussion board. If you use a lot of in-post linking (ie you link to another article in your content), and notice you are getting a lot of visits from somewhere unusual, then you might visit that site and find your post copied word-for-word, including the unchanged links.

Google's spam bots notice it:
If you get an email or a notice saying that your blog has been identified as potential spam, then one of the possibilities is that a real spammer has chosen your content.

If you found out that someone has copied you work because Google's spam-bots detected the problem, then you simply need to follow the instructions in the email that Google sent you, or consult the Blogger Help Forums. In short, you will be advised about a four step process that you need to follow. This is tedious, but the nice part is that Google is dealing with the copy-cat for you, and (if you're not a spammer) you'll get your blog back.

If you find out some other way, then you need to decide what do to about the problem (if indeed you believe is is a problem). This is closely linked to what you want to achieve - this could be any of:

Do nothing - if you don't mind being copied, and you're willing to risk being incorrectly identified as a spammer
Getting the copied work taken down
Leaving the copy in place, with your name or URL added beside it
Being paid compensation
Receiving a public apology

and I'm sure there are other possible remedies, too.

Once you know what you want to achieve, you can plan what steps you need to take, based on the notes in the next section.

Reality check: There is nothing wrong with being ambitious and wanting to receive $10M compensation. But unless you can afford really good lawyers, it might be a good idea to have a backup plan which involves a realistic goal too, eg having your name added to the copyright materials, or having them taken down.

Steps for resolving copyright problems

Start the easy way

Unless you're certain that the copying was deliberate and malicious, the first step is most cases is to send a nice email to the person who made the copy, telling them that it's yours and what you want done about it. (You might need to just leave a comment on their blog, if no email address is provided.)

Report them to their internet service provider

The obvious first step if politeness doesn't work is to complain to their web-host:

If they use Blogger (ie their URL is WHATEVER.blogspot.com, or they have a custom domain but the source-code on their site looks like Blogger code),
then you should contact Google through this page: http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html
Google have a very thorough process for dealing with claims of content stealing - and if the other site that you say has stolen your work is also published in Blogger, they can look at the dates in their database to see who actually published it first.
Make sure that you read all the details of Blogger's policies before you submit a complaint: they don't like malicious complaints, and you could be fined quite heavily if you claim that you own something which you don't really own.

If the person who has copied your work isn't using Blogger, you may need to do some detective work with whois (use Google-search it to find a whois service for the domain you're looking for) to see who the host is, and what process this host uses to resolve copy-right complaints.
This could be particularly difficult to do if they're not located in the same country that you are (so their laws will be different), or if they use a different language.

If the person who has copied your work has put it into YouTube, you can use information and tools on YouTube's opyright page.

Complain to other services

If the other party's web-service-provider can't or won't help, then you could try reporting them to other services that the use.

For instance many websites are also on Facebook: if the contents includes your material, or links to a website that's distributing your copyright material, you may be able to use Facebook's intellectual property violation reporting process. (I haven't tried it myself, but have been told that this can be particularly effective.)

If they show advertising on their site, then complaining to either the advertisers, or to the company that organises the advertising programme, may be effective. AdSense is quite sensitive to not having it's ads shown along with copyright violations, and provides a policy violation reporting form that you can let them know about the problem.

Charge them

Some people have had success from sending the offender a bill for use of your work. This takes a bit of thought: if they pay the invoice, then legally you may have licensed them to use your work for far less than it is worth. On the other hand, if the amount that you ask them for is ridiculously high, they will probably just laugh and ignore you.

Threaten legal action

This can be fun: write a very formal-sounding letter demanding that they cease-and-desist from using your work (name it very specifically) by a certain date, and advising that failure to do so may incur penalties including but not limited to commencement of legal proceedings for in which you will be looking for legal expenses as well as damaged incurred.

If you would actually be willing to sue the person (see the section below), then consult a lawyer, and get them to send the letter. But if there's no chance that you actually will sue (and most bloggers simply don't have the time, resources or levels of proof to do so), just make the letter sound good. If necessary, get a friend who can write pompous-sounding letters to draft it for you. Send it by regular mail - emails are too easily ignored - and make it look official.

Finding the address to send a letter to can be a challenge - one option is to scour your copy-cat's work, and see if you can find their company or personal details on LinkedIn (most are smart enough to hide themselves on Facebook). And if you can, then complaining to their boss may be an option, too, depending on your niche and whether their action might be harming their company's reputation.

Legal action

If all else fails, another option is to sue the person or organisation that copied your work. If you or the copy-cat are in the USA, then the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides an approach for this. But if you and they are in different countries, then different laws and processes may apply. But no matter where you are, two things are likely:

You will need to hire a lawyer - so it may be expensive and take a lot of time, and

You may need to prove that you really did create the work, and when it was made.

The second point is where copyright registration services come in to play: they provide evidence that you really had created the work as at a certain date. Unfortunately this is one of the ironies of copyright: listing your material with a copyright service does nothing to stop anyone using it. But if you don't list it shortly after it's created, you probably won't have any evidence if you ever get to the point of wanting to sue (or even formally complain about) someone who has copied your work.

There are some other issues with copyright services too:

It can be difficult to list a blog, which by its nature has different material being loaded very frequently.
You won't necessarily know which services(s) to register with - because you don't know where someone who copies your work is located, so you won't know what services a court in your country will accept evidence from.

So, while I'm not advising you to avoid the registration services altogether, it's important carefully to choose when and how to use them.

Peer pressure / Name-and-shame

If the legal approach doesn't work, or would be too expensive, then another option is to use social pressure to convince your copy-cat that they need to stop copying your work etc. This can take a range of formats - eg, if a local small business has copied your photograph and isn't willing to compensate you, you might get all your friends to contact the business and threaten not to buy there again. Or you might start a Facebook campaign, or put a video on YouTube telling your side of a story. Whatever you do, make sure you that you:

Really know what you want to achieve: fame, a pay-off to stop the campaign etc
Consider the risks (ie what could go wrong) and whether they're worth it
Don't break the law yourself (it's not worth it, especially if you're the small guy), and
Think strategically about what you might do, and how this could affect the relationships in your area or niche: some people are just too much trouble to have an enemies.

DISCLAIMER

This article contains general advice about the copyright issues faced by people who use Blogger. It cannot cover every possible case or specific legal systems.

If you need legal advice about a particular situation, consult a lawyer, ideally one who is familiar with copyright law in your country.

I do not, under any circumstances, suggest using illegal approaches - threats of violence, sabotage, etc.

Copyright, Blogs and Bloggers, an Introduction

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

Putting 3rd party HTML (eg a Creative Commons licence) into your Blog

Removing the Attribution Gadget from your Blog

Displaying a gadget only on the home page - or only on a specific page

2016-02-10T17:44:00.000+08:00

This article is about how to set up a gadget / widget in Blogger so that it is only visible on the first place that a reader sees when they visit your blog (often called the "home page"). It is one of a series of articles about controlling what goes on the homepage of your blogspot blog.

Front Page Bob
By Paginator (Own work)
[CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

There are a number of reasons why you might want to put a gadget only the screen that shows when a visitor first navigates to your blog's home page.

You may want to show a welcome message, or a topic-index page, or to give a view of your recent tweets or some other RSS feed.

No matter what the reason, the process is very similar:

How to make a gadget only appear on the first page

Note: in Blogger, the words "gadget", "widget", and even "page-element" all mean the same thing. I generally use "gadget", because the Page Elements tab currently says "Add a Gadget". But they're absolutely the same.

1 Add the gadget

Do this in the usual way.

2 Place the gadget

Drag-and-drop the gadget to the place where you want it. It may be over or under your blog-posts gadget, or in a totally different place.

A popular place for a gadget that is going to look like a "home page" would be in the Body section, just above the Blog Posts gadget, where "Test Gadget" is in this example:

3 Find the Gadget-ID in the usual way.

4 Find the code for your gadget:

Edit your template.

Click in the search box inside the template editor, and look for the widget name that you noted in step 3. Once you've found it, notice what comes after it. In this example, it's the line for Blog1:

<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Text1' locked='false' title='Test gadget' type='Text'/>
<b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'/>

Use the expansion triangle at the left side of the template editor to expand this section of the code. After you do, it will look like:

<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Text1' locked='false' title='Test gadget' type='Text'>
<b:includable id='main'>

<b:if cond='data:title != ""'>
<h2 class='title'><data:title/></h2>
</b:if>
<div class='widget-content'>
<data:content/>
</div>
<b:include name='quickedit'/>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>
<b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'>

5 Add conditional formatting

You need to put conditional formatting code around the code for the gadget - makings sure that it doesn't go around the code for anything else! (which is why you noted what comes afterwards in step 4)

And to avoid leaving blank space where the gadget would have gone, you need to update a "hide" instruction to apply it to the gadget-id you noted in step 3.

The code to use is this - except put the gadget-id instead of the XXX.

<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl == data:blog.homepageUrl'>

THE red CODE FOR YOUR GADGET GOES IN HERE

<b:else/>

<style type='text/css'>
#XXXX {display:none;}/*remove blank space that the gadget leaves*/
</style>
</b:if>

The example above looks like this, when the code has been added:

<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Text1' locked='false' title='Test gadget' type='Text'>
<b:includable id='main'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl == data:blog.homepageUrl'> 
<b:if cond='data:title != ""'>
<h2 class='title'><data:title/></h2>
</b:if>
<div class='widget-content'>
<data:content/>
</div>

<b:include name='quickedit'/>

<b:else/>

<style type='text/css'>
#Text1 {display:none;}/*remove blank space that the gadget leaves*/
</style>

</b:if>

</b:includable>
</b:widget>
<b:widget id='Blog1' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'>

6 Check that it's worked

Preview your blog before you save the changes: check that the the widget is visible.

Save the template changes, and look at your blog. Check that

The widget is on the first page
The widget is not seen when you look at an older page (eg one from your archive)
The other elements of your blog (other widgets, blog post titles, dates and contents) are all as you expect them - on the first screen, and on other screens too.

If anything is wrong with how your blog is working, go back to the template editor (Layout > Edit HTML), and upload from the copy of your template that you made at the beginning of step 1. This will let you blog work properly, while you figure out what went wrong.

How to display a gadget only on a specific post or page

Follow exactly the same approach as above.

But instead of

<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl == data:blog.homepageUrl'>

Make the conditional statement based on something else.

This can be a different condition, or a specific page URL. For example to display a gadget only on a specific page, use this code, and put the address of the page instead of POST-URL:

<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl == "POST-URL"'>>

Note: for the address of the page, if your blog does not have a custom domain, then be careful to use the "blogspot.com" version of the address, not one with a country-level name (eg the blogspot.in or blogspot.co.uk version)

To display a gadget on every page except a specifc one, replace the double equals signs (==) with the HTML code for not, which is an exclamation mark followed by an equal sign (!=). For example:

<b:if cond='data:blog.canonicalUrl != data:blog.homepageUrl'>

Blogger have now provided an expanded list of conditional statements - you can find information about it:

The support forum articles about tags https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/46995?hl=en
and about expressions: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/6214580?hl=en
Blogger Buzz about some more extensions: http://buzz.blogger.com/2015/05/adding-new-expressions-to-blogger.html
Another Blogger Buzz post - even more extensions: http://buzz.blogger.com/2015/06/even-more-expansions-to-blogger.html

Where to get more information

Controlling what goes on the homepage

Adding a gadget / widget / page-element to your blog

Editing your blogger template

Putting a slideshow from Picasa onto your blog

Getting the HTML code to put a picture into your blog

Making a gadget that looks like a posthttp://buzz.blogger.com/2015/06/even-more-expansions-to-blogger.html

How to use your own icons in Google My Maps

2016-01-27T00:00:00.000+08:00

This article shows how to use your own icons to label places in maps that you make with the My Maps' feature in Google Maps.

My Maps is a tool provided by Google Maps that lets you make a map showing a specific collection of places.

Why is this helpful? Well, you can search for a collection of places in regular Google Maps, and share the maps you can see - but if you do this, other people will see different places that are marked on the version of the maps that Google shows them, not the same as the places that are marked for you. To guarantee what set of places other people see, you need to make a map in My Maps, and then you can share this specific map.

My Maps provides a standard set of icons that can be used for labelling places - and these days it's a pretty impressive standard set. But it still doesn't include numbers, letters or other labels - and the icons provided may not be styled the way you would like.

Luckily Google have provided a way for you to use any icon to label points on a map you make.

How to use your own custom icon in a My Maps map

Make your map, and add the place(s) you would like to attach a custom icon to.

In the bar on the left hand side, hover your mouse over a place-marker which you want to assign a specific icon to.

The line for that item will highlight slightly, and a small colour / paint-tipping icon appear will to the right of the place description, like this:

Click on the paint-tipping / colour icon

This opens a small hover-window, where you can choose the colour or icon shape.

Click the button at the bottom labelled More Icons.

On the pop-up that opens, you are able to select an icon from one of the categories available (currently Business, Crisis, Facilities and services, Points of interest, Recreational Activities, Transport, and Weather). Don't select any of these.

Instead, at the bottom of the screen, enter in the URL (ie website address) of a file that you want to use as a marker. (.jpg .png .bmp, and .gif files can all be used).

Click Add Icon.

This adds the picture that you linked to the list of items available under Custom Icons, and selects it.

Click Ok to apply this icon to the point-marker that is being edited.

Job done! Your map now has a marker that is made from your own image.

Things to be aware of / Troubleshooting

You need to load the image file to a file-host which handles picture files yourself: there is no option to load a file directly from the More Icons tab.

The image file needs to stay, unchanged, in the place where you linked to - and that place has to be available to anyone who might look at the map: if you are sharing the map with "anyone in the world" then the markers need to be available like that, too.

The image file should be small to speed up loading time: images in the set of markers I use are approx 2k each.

Markers will be displayed in the same small size as Google's markers, ie 32x32 pixels: there's no point using a large, detailed photograph if it will shrunk down to so tiny that the details can't be seen.

You must provide the actual URL of the picture you want to use as a marker, not the Google Photos shareable link. (Because the latter includes more than just the photo).

I don't know any way to bulk-load many custom icons into a My Maps map at the same time. (There was a way to do this in the old Google Custom Maps, but this doesn't work in My Maps.) Or to make one icon available to many / all your your My Maps at once. If you have a solution for this, please leave a comment below.

If you your icon background to be transparent, then you need to create it in RGB colour mode: Icons with a transparent background created in Indexed colour mode don't work.

File hosts: places used to store pictures used in Blogger

Hosting pictures outside of Google Photos / Picasa Web Albums

How to get shareable links to Google Photos

Making someone an author on your blog

2016-01-26T08:52:00.000+08:00

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 an author on your blog

Send them an invitation:

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 different 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?

What next?

Giving someone administrator access to your blog.

Understanding Google accounts

Putting AdSense ads into your posts

How to put posts into your blog's pages

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts matters for your blog

Your blog and the so-called-social networks: Facebook, Twitter, eg al

Putting pictures onto your blog

Advertising and your blog, some things to consider

Turning the RSS feed off or on again

2016-01-20T08:07:00.000+08:00

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.)

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 and RSS
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.

Understanding RSS - why it's imporant for bloggers who want to grow an audience

What are dynamic templates

Linking your blog and the social networks

Follow-by-email gadget: an easy way to offer email subscriptions

Private blogs aren't as secure as you might think

Putting files into Blogger's root directory

2016-01-20T08:01:00.000+08:00

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog.

Turnips (Brassica rapa) 
from Wikimedia commons 
Originally posted to Flickr 
by thebittenword.com.   
Licensed under the terms of 
the cc-by-2.0.

If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory. They may even tell you to use an FTP tool to do this.

Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger.

Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking you to change the website code itself.

How to add a file to your blog's root directory

The short answer for Blogger users is "sorry, you cannot do this".

The long answer is still no: "there is no way to do this, but see the rest of this article for an explanation of why, and some suggested work-arounds."

Why not? Every other website tool lets me do this.

Posts: Blogger's tool for managing
the content on our blogs

If you're clever, and have lots of time, you can make a website just using a text-editor like notpad, a graphics programme, and ftp software that lets you put the files into the right places on computer that's connected to the internet.

Tools like Dreamweaver take away a lot of the time-consuming work, and some of the need for cleverness. But you still need to know a lot about the internet to do things in a way that makes a good website.

Content management systems make this easier still: they let a technically-minded person do the nuts-and-bolts work to make the website, and give authors / artists / editors / content-creators simpler-to-use tools that let them put "stuff" (ie content) into the website, without needing to worry about the details of how it works.

Blogger is a (very simple) website content-management system, it creates our web-pages for us based on data that we put into certain places. Administrators can set up and change templates, other people, eg authors simply make posts.

When we use Blogger, the main way that we change the data in our web-pages is using the Blogger software.

Some items inside posts or gadgets can be changed using other software, eg Google Docs, provided they were were set up using that other software in the first place. But - key point - there is nothing in the way that Blogger is put together that means we need to access the base directory. So they don't let us do so. And I doubt that this this will change anytime soon.

What to do instead

The options for getting around this restriction depend on how the file that you need to put into your root directory is intended to be used.

Installing code

If you have code to install into your blog, and a file to go with it, then you just need to

Host the file somewhere else (maybe in your Picasa-web-album for the blog, if it's a picture)
Change the code to point to the full path of where you have hosted the file, instead of the relative path used in the code

For example, here is the code for a button linking to my blog, with the picture in the root directory:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="//Logo.png" width="100" /></a></div>

To change this to use a specific location, I just add a file-path and the file-name of the picture wherever it is hosted.

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8QqsGxqQGJlTmUUKhmmXH6se0KWUKSo5-ibjPvjE_MZKzwtP2XP_zt6e3CdtmjLawBCOTd4A9CZgeySHalTtpUplZusyznAh7cYGm9PLA6EhOEffOsP6IpGmMArABMsRsbidKWoCnocq2/s320/Logo.png" width="100" /></a></div>

TIP: blogger's editor sometimes gets links mixed up, so it's important to start the filepath with "http://"

Verifying ownership

If someone wants to use a file's position to check that you control a website, then they will have code on their own website that looks for the file in your root directory.

You cannot change this code. And you cannot place the fie.

So you need to ask them for an alternative way to verify, that is suitable for people without root directory access.

If they don't have any alternatives, try lobbying for this on their product support forum: by not having alterantives, they are ensuring that Blogger users, among others, cannot use their service.

If the official answer is still "no", then you could also ask in other on-line forums if anyone has found any other work-arounds.

What other reasons have you found for installing files to your root directory?
What work-arounds have worked for you?

An afterthought: what isn't recommended

I've recently seen someone suggest in a help forum that people with custom domains can put files into their blog's root directory by FTP'ing the files into place.

This may be true, if the service that you are purchasing from your domain registrar includes file-hosting. But file hosting(*)

Isn't necessary for a custom domain used in Blogger (since Google hosts our files for us), and
Isn't available as part of the services when you buy a custom-domain through Blogger.

So it's not a general solution for most Blogger users, though it may work for some.

Initially I was a little sceptical of the idea: Blogger doesn't expect to see any files in our root directory, so I was concerned that it might do strange things if it found them there. But on reflection, I think there is probably a low risk of this happening, since the file-location is outside Blogger's control.

(*) To avoid any confusion, file hosting and DNS hosting are not the same thing. If you buy a custom domain for your blog from a registrar without going through Google/Blogger, then you do need to pay for DNS hosting, but do not need to buy file-hosting.

File hosts - places to store files used in your blog.

Picasa-web-albums: a quick introduction

How Blogger data is organised

Setting up a new administrator for your blog

Options for letting other people write in your blog

How to remove the numbers in blogger post URL's

2015-11-25T04:51:00.000+08:00

This article looks at the numbers that are in web-page addresses created by Blogger, what they mean and how you can influence them.

When you first publish a post, Blogger assigns a permanent web-address (aka an URL or a permalink) to the post. I've previously explained how you can control the words used in this hyperlink.

A common question from people who are researching SEO for their blog is "how do I get rid of the numbers in the post-URL?".

Unfortunately the answer is not as straighforward as most people hope for.

Numbers near the start of Blogger URLS

As described in setting the content of your post's permalink, the URL given to posts published in Blogger shows the year and month of the original publication date for the post. I think this is because Blogger was originally set up as an on-line diary, with a lot of the features organised around the post-date.

Today, there are ways of giving your blog a home page, showing your posts in pages, and changing the order of the posts, which let your blog be a lot more than a date-ordered web-log.

Some blogging software (eg Wordpress) lets you choose the structure of the URLs which are used, eg leaving the date out totally, or puting it after the words.

However Blogger does not currently have any way to remove the date-part of the post URLs. And I could be wrong, but my best guess is that this will not change anytime soon.

So what options are available to remove the year and month numbers?

If you just don't want people to know the correct month and year of the post, then you can change the date before you publish the post for the the first time. Maybe make it something non-sensical (eg 1/1/1990). (However do remember that your RSS feed will show the actual date of publication, not the assigned date).

If you have some content where any month-and-year are particularly irrelevant, put it into a Page instead of a Post - because Page URLs don't contain a date. But remember that you need to give users a way to get to these Pages, and that remember that they are not sent out in your RSS feed, so subscribers won't see the content.

The third - and least attractive - option: is to accept that this is how Blogger works and that you need to live with it or switch to another blogging tool.

Numbers near the end of Blogger URLS

Blogger puts digits at the end of post-URLs in order to make sure that each post ever published has a unique address.

Notice that I said "ever published": if you publish a post, then delete it, and then publish a second post with the same year, month and either title or customized-URL-words, then the second post's URL will have some digits put on the end, to stop it being the same as the first one.

Once a post is published, you cannot remove the digits and keep the same words and month/year. The only way to avoid them is to make sure that your post-URLs are unique. So if you publish a post and notice that it has digits on the end of the URL, one option is to delete that post, and replace it with one which has a different publication date or customized-URL-words(don't forget to copy the post contents before you delete it!) Or you could just set it back to draft status, and then publish it again with different and this time unique customized-URL-words.

For example, if you publish and find that you get

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-07/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes01.html

you may want to delete the post, and republish the content in a post with a different date like

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-06/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes.html

Does it really matter?

Personally I'm not convinced that having numbers in Blogger URL's is a problem.

If the content is so weak, and poorly linked to by other sites and social media that the presence of numbers in the URL is affecting visitor numbers, then it seems to me that there are more important things for you to be worrying about.

On the other hand, if your blog is already popular and well-optimized, and you're looking to get the last possible bit of SEO benefit - you'd be better off using your time to write even more good quanlity, unique, content so that your exisiting subscribers visit more often, instead of fussing over something that you cannot control.

Or am I mistaken?

Setting the custom-URL for a blog post

Giving your blog a home page

Putting Blogger posts into pages

How to set the date for a post

The difference between Posts and Pages

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Removing a post from your blog

Copy the contents between blog posts - and keep all the formatting.

Using Labels to categorize your Blogger Posts

2015-11-03T07:08:00.000+08:00

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

Why categorise your Posts

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

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

And it helps you to find posts yourself.

Blogger's tools for working with categories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to add Labels to your blog

Step 1: Label your Posts

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

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

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

Step 2: Add the labels gadget

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

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

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

Step 3: Add Labels navigation

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

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

What your visitors see

A List of Posts:

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

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

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

A summary message:

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

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

What Labels aren't - but appear to be

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

Making multi-level categories

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

For example you might use labels like these

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

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

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

Posts, Pages and Navigation

Setting what goes on the Home Page

Editing your blog's template: advantages and disadvantages

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

How to set the URL for Blogger posts

2015-10-18T23:42:00.000+08:00

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

URLs and Blog Posts

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

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

In this URL:

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

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

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

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

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

1 Edit the post in the usual way.

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

3 Click on Links to show the options in it.

4 Click the custom URL radio button

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

6 Click Done.

7 Finish the post, and Publish it.

Restrictions

The only characters you can use are:

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

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

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

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

Why should you bother? What words should you use?

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

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

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

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

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

Changing the post-title after publication

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

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

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

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

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

Changing the custom-URL words after publication

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

However you can now:

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

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

How to change the date for a post

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

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

Linking your blog and the social networks

Moving material from one blog post to another

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

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