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

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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 c hanging th...

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 hav...

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...