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

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='he...

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 Pho...

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 sc...

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...