"HOW" - "HOW TO" - "HOW DO"

This Quick-Tip is about using the Creative Kit, which has been giving me grief recently when I tried to use it from Picasa-web-albums. Sept 2013 update:   Creative Kit has now been totally discontinued.   Use either Picasa-web-albums or the Google+ photo editor instead. For ages, I've occasionally used the photo-editor in Picasa-web-albums (the online version of Picasa ) to edit photos that I've already uploaded, and want to change without changing the URL.   This editor was originally Picnik - until Google sold that product and replaced it with Creative Kit a while ago. This has sometimes been slow, which was annoying, but I put up with it because it was just so useful. But recently it stopped working totally:  it would load, the progress-bar would get about half-way along the screen, and then hang, with a message: We noticed Picnik is loading slowly. It’s possible waiting may solve this issue. If you’re still having trouble: [t1]   Click for Assistance» Wait...

This Quick-Tip is about an issue that some people have had with their "naked" custom domain not re-directing to the www-at-the-start version, and how to fix it using a feature in your Google Apps account. Since Blogger released their initial fix to the custom-domain mapping problem of mid-September 2012, some people have found that it's not possible to set up the custom domain so that my-domain.xxx works as well as www.my-domain.xxx does. There is an option for this in Blogger's Settings > Publishing area.  But last night, when I set up a "subdomain" style entry for news.my-domain.xxx and directed my latest-updates blog from my-domain.blogspot.com to news.my-domain.com, found that this didn't work. (Obviously I didn't use my-domain.com - but the principle applies.) However today I found an approach that does seem to fix this: 1   Log in to the Google Apps domain administration account (the same one you used to set up the 2nd CNAME record - if y...

This Quick-Tip is about the products that Google is dropping, or making changes to, from October 2012. Google's latest announcement about retiring products came out yesterday (Saturday).   Seems odd that they're calling it "spring cleaning", since it's autumn / fall in most of the countries where major Google products are based. So what's on the list that will affect Blogger-users? AdSense for Feeds is being switched off - this has never been much of an earner for me, but I guess it could be significant for some people who have very large subscriber audiences.   There's one line that worries me a little "" Publishers can continue to use FeedBurner URLs powered by Google, so they won’t need to redirect subscribers to different URLs."  - it's saying "no change to Feedburner ", but I wonder why they feel the need to say this. Storage limits in Picasa and Google Drive "will be consolidated over the next few months" - w...

This Quick-Tip is about how to see the posts you made in Google Groups - in particular in the Blogger Product Forum. I used to be quite active in the previous Blogger Help Forum.   But since they switched to the new Google Groups based Blogger Product Forum , I've been less enthusiastic: The design doesn't work as well on the netbook that I use a lot of the time It wasn't easy to look up questions that I'd answered previously to see whether the answer was helpful.    The old system used to tell me that there were new posts in topics that I'd posted in, so it was very easy to go back and either give more help (kind of "after sales service") or hear from people who I'd been able to help (good motivation for helping other people.). Today I noticed that a feature which is almost as good has been introduced to Google Groups. The l eft-hand navigation area now has an entry for "My Discussions".   Choosing it shows all posts with author:me.  This is...

This Quick-Tip is about accessing your own YouTube videos, using Google's Takeout / Data-liberation service. If you upload a video using the Blogger Post Editor's video icon, then it's stored in Google Videos - which is now retired except for the part that hosts vids uploaded thru Blogger.   (This was where they were being put  the last time I checked, which was a few months ago) Many people dislike this, and prefer to upload their vids to YouTube first, and then link to the YouTube video from Blogger.  This gives Better control over the size of the video you display in your blog / website Video management tools (sorely lacking in Google Videos).  Statistics about viewers The chance to earn money separately from your blog if your video becomes popular Access to many more YoutTube features. This is similar to the recommendation to upload pictures to Picasa independently of the post-editor, and putting them into your posts via the URL - it just gives you more control....

This Quick-Tip describes the alerts that Webmaster Tools are now offering for changes in search popularity of particular pages. Google Webmaster Tools have added to their alerts features. Basically, this means that they try to notice the changes "that could be most interesting for you", and send the website owner a message when they spot something. You can view these messages in the Webmaster tools site, or by signing up inside Wesmaster Tools to have alerts forwarded to your email. The newest(*) alert they added is for Search Queries.   ref:    http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ie/2012/08/search-queries-alerts-in-webmaster-tools.html This features shows "impressions and clicks for your top pages over time." They say "For most sites, these numbers follow regular patterns, so when sudden spikes or drops occur, it can make sense to look into what caused them. Some changes are due to differing demand for your content, other times they may be due to technical...

This Quick-Tip shares an interesting observation about the trends in search-volumes - and is a reminder to think about what your blog is like for readers who use mobile devices. Today I noticed an interesting post from on-line marketing firm Blind Five Year Old, who've been tracking comScore search-engine ratings for seven years. comScore's ratings are all about relative market share of the search-engines. But BFYO has used them to  look at overall search engine volumes  and has noticed that August 2012 was the first time that US desktop search volume declined year-on-year This means that there were less desktop searches (in the USA) in August 12 than there were in August 11 . Year-on-year comparisons are often better than monthly ones because they can cancel out the effects of seasonal patterns (holidays, starting school, major events, etc) Now this doesn't mean that people have stopped doing more searching than before. Most likely it means that they've started to ...