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

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 ...

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...

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...