Putting a badge for a Facebook Page into your Blog

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&amp;width=160&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;show_faces=false&amp;border_color=purple&amp;stream=true&amp;header=false&amp;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.

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Related Articles

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

Lining up the first post and the sidebar

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.

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Related Articles

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

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

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.

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Related Articles

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

Taking action when someone has copied your blog without permission

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.

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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.

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Related Articles

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

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'>
  <!-- only display title if it's non-empty -->
  <b:if cond='data:title != &quot;&quot;'>
    <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'>  <!-- only display title if it's non-empty -->
  <b:if cond='data:title != &quot;&quot;'>
    <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

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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

Making someone an author on your blog

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.

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Related Articles

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

How to find the URL for a picture in Google Photos

This article describes how to get the URL or internet address of a picture in Google Photos, and the difference between Google's shareable links and URLs.

Google Photos is a tool that help bloggers (and everyone else) to manage their picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here.

In Google Photos, there are two different types of web-address for a photo.

• One is the URL, and this can be used to refer to pictures from Blogger, or from other tools that want a link that just shows the photo, eg Twitter, Google Maps.  This is the traditional style of internet-address for a photo.

• The other is the shareable link.   This is what Google Photos provides from the Share function.   Shareable links can be used in Facebook, and other places where the photo that is being shared is displayed within a web-display, rather than just as a picture.   (Ref:  How to make and manage shareable links in Google Photos.)

Unfortunately shareable links cannot be used in many applications.  This is because they don't just show the picture.   Instead they load a display showing the picture-date, the name and picture of the person who is logged in to Google at the time, and any other pictures that you have included in the same shareable link.

If you want to use an image from Google Photos in a tool which cannot use shareable links, you need to find it's URL, instead.   At the moment, Google Photos doesn't have a way to get this - but luckily it's easy enough to find.

How to get the URL or web-address of a photo in Google Photos, using your computer

Log in to Google Photos

Navigate to the picture that you want to get the link for.  

Click on the picture, so you see it in full screen mode.

Right click on the body of the photo and choose the "copy link" command from the menu that pops up where you clicked.  

The exact wording of this command varies between browsers on operating system.   For example in Chrome / Windows 8, it is simply "Copy Image URL"

In Internet Explorer 11 / Windows 8, you need to choose Properties from the pop-up menu, and then copy the value from the URL-field in the window that opens

Job done! The URL for the photo which you were looking at is now in your computer's memory, and you can paste it (with ctrl/v or Edit > Paste) into any other place that wants it - for example Blogger's photo-insert wizard, or an email message or discussion forum or chat window.

The URL from your address bar doesn't work

You may be tempted to just copy and paste the URL from the address-bar in your browser. And this will work for you.

But if someone else (or you, when you are not logged in to the same Google account) tries to use it, they will get either:

• A 404 error (if you are logged in to a different Google account), or

• Invited to log in to your Google account - followed by a 404 error if the Google account you log in to is not the one that owns the picture.

How to get the URL or web-address of a photo in Google Photos, using your phone (Android or iOS)

Unfortunately I have not managed to find a way to get photogrpah URL (rather than the shareable link) from my smartphone as yet.

If you can suggest any ways to do this, please leave a comment below.

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Where to find more information

Introducing Google Photos:  how does it compare to Google Plus Photos and Picasa-web-albums

How to change the date of a picture in Google Photos

How to get the shareable link for one or more pictures in Google Photos

Putting pictures and text side-by-side in blog-posts

How to tell Google about problems with activity on your AdSense account

This article describes a way to tell Google about problems with activity on your AdSense account.

I noticed a link to an Invalid Clicks Contact form in a recent blog-post from Google.

You can find the form here.

Basically, this is a way to tell Google if you think that something has gone wrong with your AdSense account, for example if you are being click-bombed or similarly targeted by malicious people or activity.

This caught my attention because exactly that happened recently here on Blogger-hints-and-tops: from reading the AdSense help forums, it seems that bots (or something) were attacking Link Units, and suddenly lots of people were getting huge increases in both click-through rates and revenue-per-click. At the time, I followed the advice given there:

• Remove the Link Units, 
• Remove the site from the approved list 
• Post a "me too" message on the support forum thread, 
• Wait for Google to act against the bad guys. 

But it still felt wrong not to take a more active step to tell Google about the specific problem with my account..

What does the form do

The Invalid Clicks report form has fields that let you give

• Your name, email address and AdSense publisher ID
• The URL where ad code appears
• Topic (select one of: reporting unusual activity, or predicting a significant change in account activity)
• A paragraph describing what led you to believe that the click activity was invalid

"Data from your site, mobile app and/or YouTube channel traffic logs or reports that indicate suspicious IP addresses, referrers or requests which could explain invalid activity." 

 Note that you only have 1000 characters for the description - but I'm sure that links to documents in your Google Drive (set to be avaialble to anyone with the link, of course) would be very acceptable.

They do say "Please note that we may not respond to your message unless we find a significant issue with your account." - and I would not be in the least surprised to not hear anything back.

Mention expected traffic increases, too

Sometimes, you may know that your blog is likely to get a a large traffic increase. For example, you may publish a controversial post, or release a resource which is extensively publicised via social media or your email list.

You can also use this form to tell Google AdSense about this, and that you expect a sudden increase in page impressions and revenue.

There are no guarantees, of course, but this may help them to distinguish between genuine and invalid sudden changesincreases, in cases where these are manually reviewed.

When not to use the form

Google know that even the most careful publisher will occasionally click on an ad themselves, especially on sites which are about personal hobbies or interests.

My guess is that we should not waste time reporting these invidiual clicks. They are very easy for Google to identify and disqualify - and doing to would make it a lot harder form them to identify real problems vs noise from issues reported via the form.

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Where to get more information

How to approve a site to show AdSense ads from your account

AdSense help forum

Stop your AdSense from showing types of ads that aren't allowed on Blogger

Using a custom domain for something other than your Blogger blog

This article is about how you can use a custom domain that was purchased through Google / Blogger for something other than a Blogger blog.

Blogger makes it very easy for you to buy a "custom" domain name (ie URL) for your blog.   Instead of being www.fred-fish.blogspot.com, you can easily be www.fred-fish.com - which is more appealing for all sorts of reasons.

Blogger tells you which domain registrar they're going to use and lets you change to the other one if you want to.  Apart from this, Google hides most of the "technical" domain registration details from you:  you are invited to set up a domain administrator account (in Google Apps), but even this is optional.  

But there may come a time when you want to use your domain for more than just a blog:  eg, Fred may want to use www.fred-fish.com to sell fishing trips or as the public gateway to a massive database of fishing achievements, neither of which are functions that Blogger (easily) provides.

To use a Google-Blogger purchased domain for something other than a Blogspot blig, you need to:

• Move your blog away from the domain
  (you might move it use a subdomain or virtual host off the domain later on - but the first step is just to free up the domain for other use.
• Change the domain-name-server settings for the domain to point to the right place for the "something else" that you want to use it for.

Even though you purchased the domain using Blogger, your access to it is through the Google Apps control panel: from there you get the login details for the domain registrar (currently either goDaddy or eNom that Google used to buy the domain).

How to re-use your domain

Unlink the domain from your blog:

1  Log in to Blogger with the account that owns the domain.

2  From the Dashboard, choose   Settings > Basic > Publishing and click the cross on the right of the Edit link beside your blog name.

This changes your blog back to www.YOUR-BLOG-NAME.blogspot.com, and removes the DNS records that pointed your blog to your custom-URL.

It may take a few hours (I've heard 72) for these changes to apply to computers all around the world, so people who go to your custom domain may still get re-directed to your blog for a day or two.

Also, Google (and other search engines) will still have indexed links to your blog contents at your custom domain.  These will gradually be replaced when

• you put new content at your custom domain and 
• it gets indexed by the search engines and 
• the new content-indexing replaces data in the cached Google results in various computers around the world.

This can take some weeks, though, so your blog may miss out one some search traffic, and people who search for your new site may see odd results in their search list.

Next - link the domain to what you want it to show

3  Find, or create, the domain administrator login details for your domain:

I've previously described how to set up the domain administrator for your domain.

• If you haven't done this already, you need to find the relevant email and set up the account now.   
• If you have done it, you need to remember the administrator login and password that you created.
• If you cannot remember the administrator details, then go to  https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME/ForgotAdminAccountInfo - put in the right value for your domain name, without www.  or http:// at the start.    Enter the captcha details, and if you have set up an administrator account the details will be emailed to your backup secondary address. 
• If you never created an administrator account and cannot find the email to do it now, use this help-process.  Choose:
  - I never created an administrator account, then
  - I signed up at Google.com/a and purchased a domain name at the same time
  
  You can only use the help-process after you have un-linked your blog from the domain (ie steps 1-2 above plus left time for the change to be applied to Google's servers - somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours seems to work).  If you try to use it while your blog is still using the domain, you end up being directed back to Blogger.

Note:   if none of these processes help you get control of your domain administrator, check the resources in this article from Nitecruzr about the topic.

4  Go to https://www.google.com/a/YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME/

5  Log in with the admin account and password from Step 3.

6  Go to the Domain Settings tab

7  Go to the Domain Names sub-tab

8  Choose the Advanced DNS settings link.

This opens a screen that shows you how to get into the DNS console for your domain.   It typically has

• Your domain-registrar sign-in name and password,  
• Your domain-registrar customer service PIN - in case you need to contact the registrar's customer services, 
• Contact details for the domain registrar's customer service department  
• A link that you can use to get to the to DNS console

9  Log in to the DNS Console, using the details from step 9.

10  Follow the directions there to make the domain changes.

The steps required depend totally on what you are using the domain for:  for help with this, contact the the technical support forum (or whatever) for the product that's being used to build the new contents of your domain.


If you need more help, check out the Google Apps help forum.

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Where to find more information

Automatically renewing your custom domain

Transferring ownership of your blog to another Google account

Blogger and other Google products - an overview

Recovering control of your custom domain (external link)

Blogger and Google Photos - what's changed, and what hasn't (yet)

This article gives a brief introduction to Google Photos, and how it relates to both Blogger and Google+ Photos.

Google's recent announcement of Google Photos opens the door for Blogger to make some improvements to how it works with pictures.

Why? Well Google+Photos simply wasn't a way forward.   Too many Blogger users chose not to "upgrade" their Google accounts to Google+ accounts, so it wasn't possible for Blogger to force Google+ features on everyone. And that was even after they removed the rule about one G+ account per person, and allowed Google+ Pages to be turned into stand alone accounts with their own passwords.

However Google Photos is basically Google+ Photos, without the need to have a "plus" account, and with some other nice features, like

• Free picture and video storage (any number of pictures, provided they aren't "too big"), 
• Image recognition and search
• Sorting pictures by date, but giving options for you to group them into albums

Read more about these Google Photos options here.  

This means it will be possible for Google to replace Picasa-web-albums features with Google Photos features at some time in the future, even if they're not ready to do this yet.

What's changed - and what hasn't (yet)?

So far, I haven't noticed any changes to the photo-upload or image-choice features in Blogger.

There's still an upload option, there's still a tab to choose photos from Picasa and one for your phone - and I don't know what the criteria for showing photos in the latter tab is, but it's certainly not listing all the photos I've taken from my phone.

I am expecting they will change to become more Google-Photos-esque, sooner or later.

But for now, though, not that much has changed.

Your Google account still only has one collection of pictures.

Your pictures may be photographs you have taken or other image files that you have created and uploaded (eg like the thumbnail picture that I constructed for this post).

As well as the various mobile phone applications (official ones for iOS and Android, unofficial ones from various other companies), there is now one more (to make six) pieces of desktop software or websites from Google that you can use to manage (aspects of) your picture collection:

• Google Photos: https://photos.google.com (website)
• Google Photos app: https://photos.google.com/apps - and choose Desktop Uploader  (program)
• Google+ Photos: https://plus.google.com/photos/    (website)
• Picasa Web Albums: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1   (website)
• Google Drive https://drive.google.com - and choose My Drive from the left-side tab
• Picasa Desktop - get it from https://picasa.google.com

Note:   Even though you only have one photo collection, each tool may need to build it's own "index" (or whatever it calls it) to work with your photos.  Making all your photos (especially the historic ones) available in each tool might take a while to do: For example, not all my photos are visible on Drive yet: when I scroll to the bottom of the display I get a message saying "Stay tuned, your older photos are coming soon" - and looking at what is displayed, it's only photos that I have posted from my current smartphone (not the old one) to one particular blog.

And the tools don't all do the same things. In particular, there are features like albums and slideshows are still best done from Picasa (more info here: http://picasageeks.com/2015/05/google-photos-announcementthis-is-big/) - and  Picasa Desktop's photo editing tools are still vastly better.

Example of a photo editing effect which is possible in Picasa Desktop, but not in Google Photos

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Where to find more information

Google's official announcement

Google support article:  Using Google Drive to manage your photos

LifeHacker's summary of the features in Google Photos

Picasa-web-albums vs Picasa-desktop, what's the difference

Turning a Google+ Page into a stand-alone Google account

Picasageek's detailed description of Picasa vs Google Photos features