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This article is about putting a "tooltip" (text that is shown when you hover over) into something (eg text, a web-address or even a picture) in a Blogger post or gadget.

What are tooltips?

Tooltips are a feature found in many websites and modern computer based software:  when a viewer hovers their mouse over an item, a small piece of text is shown, generally formatted in a box which is highlighted in some way.

They can be used for all sorts of things, to provide definitions of technical or foreign-language words, additional information about particularly interesting concepts - or as an incentive or invitation to take an action  eg you could tool-tip "click here to enter" with a description of the prize or benefits of entering.)

You can see them in Blogger's Post Editor when you put your mouse over an item in the toolbar.

How to add a tool-tip in Blogger

Open the Post (etc) that you are working on.


Create the item that you want the tool-tip to be on (it may be text or a picture).


Select the item, and use the Link button on the toolbar to set up a link for it.  (Do this even if you don't want it to end up linked to anything - you can remove the link part alter on.)


Go into HTML mode (top right side of the editor toolbar), and find the HTML for the item.  
Hints:

• Use the find feature in your brower - it may be helpful to temporarily put some marker text, eg XXX, just before and after the item.

• If you want to put a tooltip into a text gadget - just put the text into an HTML gadget instead, and that way you will be able to work in HTML mode.

• The HTML for the item will have this sort of structure:
  

  <a href="Your Link" > Your item text ... </a>

  or it may be like this if your item is a picture:
  

  <img border="0" src="URL FOR YOUR PICTURE" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" />

  or even like this if it's a picture that's linked:
  

  <a href="Your Link" img border="0" src="URL FOR YOUR PICTURE" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" </a>

Add  title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" to the HTML, so it becomes something like:

<a href="Your Link" title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" > Your item text ... </a>

or, if the item is a picture:

<a href="Your Link" img border="0" src="URL FOR YOUR PICTURE" title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" </a>

If you don't want the item to be linked, remove the href="Your Link"
part of the statement, so the HTML becomes similar to:

<a title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" > Your item text ... </a>

or, if the item is a picture:

< img border="0" src="URL FOR YOUR PICTURE" title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" />

If you're working in the post-editor, return to Compose mode (top right of the Post Editor window), so that you aren't faced with HTML the next time you edit a post.

Formatting unlinked text that has tooltips.

If you put hover-text on words that aren't linked to anything, it's good to give them a different format so that readers know to mouse-over them to see the hover-text.    For example

When you visit Ireland, you will undoubtedly experience rain, ceol and great craic.

To do this:


1   Add this CSS rule to your blog's template  (See Adding a new CSS rule to your template if you need help with this):

.toolTippedText {
   border-bottom: 1px dotted red;
}

2   While editing your Post (etc) to add the hover-text, also add this class statement

class="toolTippedText" 

to every URL which has title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" added to it.  So the full statements become

<a href="Your Link" title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" class="toolTippedText"> Your item text ... </a>

or, if you don't want the text to actually be linked to anything:

<a title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" class="toolTippedText"> Your item text ... </a>

It probably doesn't make sense to add a font-decoration like this to tool-tipped images - though it can be done in exactly the same way.


If you don't like using red dots as the way to highlight text that has hover-text, there are other rules you can add to your template.  For example to get a solid underline in the same colour as the text font, use:

.toolTippedText {

 text-decoration:underline;

}

There is more information about some of the options for formatting a line in this article.

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Related Articles:

Adding a new CSS rule to your template.

Adding a horizontal line between blog-posts - including CSS line formatting options

Blogger have made it very simple to offer an email-subscription to your blog, with the "Follow by Email" gadget.  This article describes adding it to your blog, and how it works for your readers.

Previously, I've explained why RSS is important for your blog, and how to give your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner.

The Follow by Email gadget that Blogger provide makes this even easier:  you can add an email subscription option to your blog by following these steps:

How to add the Follow by Email Gadget

1. Log in to Blogger
   Use a Google account with admin rights to the blog, and which you want to use to get statistics about your email subscribers.
2. Go to the Design tab
3. Select Add a Gadget in the area where you want to put the email subscription option
4. Choose Follow by Email (it's current at the top of the list)
5. Enter the title that you want displayed on your blog (initially it's "Follow by email")
6. Press Save.

This puts the gadget onto your blog.  But there are two more things that you should do:

• Check that your blog's RSS feed is enabled: it should be either "Full" or "Until Jump Break", not "None".  You need to do this because the Follow-by-email tool will only send out emails if your feed is turned on.   

• Subscribe to it yourself- by entering your own email. 
  This isn't absolutely essential - the tool works even if you're not signed up to it.   But it's a good idea to try to see your blog from the reader's perspective.  
  And some items in your posts (eg slideshows or PowerPoint presentations) may not work as expected in the emailed version - and you won't know about it unless you're getting the emails.

What your readers see:

On Your Blog:

The Follow by Email gadget looks like this:

The title was set when you were adding the gadget:  you can change it by editing the gadget in the usual way.

The background colour, button colour, title underline and font are based on the settings for your template:  you can only control them by editing the gadget colours in your template.

You cannot put text immediately before our after the place where people can enter an email address:   though you could put a text-gadget before or after the Follow-by-email gadget.

When they enter an email address:

When your visitor enters an email address and presses Submit, a new window opens:


This window:

• Welcomes them to Feedburner
• Acknowledges their Google account, if they are logged in at the time - remember, not all your visitors will be Google users
• Tells them about the feed that they are asking to subscribe to
• Warns them that a confirmation message will be sent to the email address they entered 
  "will receive a verification message once you submit this form" and that "FeedBurner activates your subscription to ... once you respond to this verification message"
• Asks them to solve a text-catpcha puzzle, to prove it's a real person (not a computer) setting up the subscription.

The colours, design and content of this window are totally controlled by Feedburner.  You can't influence them in any way.

After the anti-spam-test is successfully completed, a second screen opens.   This tells the reader that

Your request has been accepted! Please check your inbox for a verification message from “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions”, the service that delivers email subscriptions for <<your-blog-name>>. You will need to click a link listed in this message to activate your subscription. If you dont see a confirmation e-mail in a reasonable amount of time please check your bulk/spam folder.

Again, you have no control over the color, format or placement of this window, it is totally up to Feedburner.    You also don't control the message text, which many people are likely to ignore.

In their email in-box, today:

Your potential subscriber gets an email from Feedburner, usually within 2-10 minutes, asking them to click a link to complete the subscription process.

• If they click the link, they become a verified subscriber.

• If they don't click the link, then they stay on the subscribers list as unverified.

You can customize the "click the link to subscribe" message, using some fairly simply settings in Feedburner.  

In their email in-box, when you post:

On days when you have posted to your blog, every verified subscriber is sent one email message, with all your posts during the day.

The message may include the full post or just a summary, depending on what settings you have for your blog's RSS feed  (Settings > Site Feed > Blog Posts feed).

Feedburner provides a number of options for controling how this email looks, and when it is sent:  see the Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email branding tab in Feedburner for these.    (full article coming soon).

More information about the gadget:

This new gadget has been widely requested, and is an exciting addition to Blogger.  But there are some challenges with it, which are discussed in Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget.

What happens if you delete the widget

Even if the follow-by-email gadget is deleted from your blog (by accident or deliberately), the Feedburner subscription that it created, and the list of people who have subscribed, is still kept in Feedburner.

However to add the gadget to your blog again, you need to use Feedburner's gadget tool to make sure that you access the feed that you created when you added the gadget the first time around.

(Thanks to reader +Mary Bostow whose question got me thinking about this.)

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Related Articles:

Why RSS is important for your blog,

An alternative to "Follow-by-email":  giving your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner.

Customizing Feedburners verification message

Putting a Picasa slideshow into a blog-post

Showing a PowerPoint presentation in your blog, as a slideshow

This article explains how to stop label values from showing in the header or footer lines for each post in a blog that is made with Google's Blogger.


If you have used the Labels / Page-gadget approach to putting your blogposts into separate pages, then each of your posts will have one or more Labels attached to them.

Most Blogger templates are set up so that these label values are shown with the posts, too, in either just underneath the post-title or in the post-footer. And when a reader clicks one of these post-specific label values, they are shown a "post-listing format" blog page, which includes (the first part of) all posts which have that label.

However some people want to stop their blogs from displaying this these label values perhaps because:

• They want their blog to look more like a real website
• They are using some labels which are meaningful to them as administrators but not to readers (eg at the moment, I'm using a label "ZZZ - needs 2013 review" to identify posts that I need to check to make sure they're up to date.
• They just don't like having the label list shown for each post.

Note that you can select which Label values are shown in the Label gadget, but there is no way to do this in the label list shown for each post.

How to turn off the list of labels shown with each blog-post

Log in to the Blogger dashboard with an account that has administrative rights to the blog


Choose Layout from the options for the blog


Locate the Blog Post gadget in layout screen, and click the Edit link for it.


In the list of options that is shown, un-tick the Labels option


Save the changes, using the Save button (currently in the bottom left corner)


Click the Save Arrangement button for the layout (currently in the top right corner of the layout editor).



Job done! The next time anyone looks at your blog, the list of labels for each post should not be visible.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes, changes that are made in the Blog Post gadget don't appear to have been applied when people look at your blog. For example, the labels may still be shown for each post, even though the Labels check-box is turned off.

If this happens, the most likely cause is that your post template (ref: parts of a blogger blog) has become corrupt. The only ways I know to fix this are to either

• Change to a different template:
  This needs to be a total change, eg Simple to Picture Window, not just changing from one to another option within the same template.
• Resetting the blog-post gadget - described in detail here.

The disadvantage of of either of these approaches is that customizations you have made to your blog are lost - this can be easy to forget when your customizations include important-but-more-subtle things like ensuring your Analytics profile gets Adsense data or installing Facebook Open-Graph tags - or just plain annoying if you have put sharing buttons into individual posts, and have to re-instate these

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Related Articles:

What are the components of a Blogger blog

How to put posts into pages in blogger

Labels: a way to categorize Blogger posts

Posts and Pages - navigating while you are reading a blog

Making a blog look like a real website

This quick article shares an observation about the likelihood that Google's free Keywords Research Tool is being turned off.


Most SEO advice says that if SEO is important for your blog, then you should use a keyword research tool to find out the words and phrases that people are actually searching for, and then use these words (so-called "keywords") a lot, because they are most likely to get more visitors for your blog.

There are many tools that can be used to look for keywords, but Google's own keywords research tool is often recommended:  it's free, and no one knows more about key-words than Google does.

The tool is provided as part of the AdWords product (ref AdSense vs AdWords what's the difference).

Usually, you need to sign in to an AdWords account to use their tools.   An AdWords account may be based on your usual Google account, but because it can be used to buy advertising, Google ask you to put a small amount of money into it, so you can use it to pay for advertising campaigns immediately.    (They don't charge you immediately, they just want your account to have a positive balance, so it's able to be used.)

However their Search-based Keywords tool (announced back in 2009) and it's upgraded version, the Keywords-tool ( http://www.adwords.google.com/keywordtool or https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - both which currently re-direct to https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS ) have been available without logging in, provided you complete a simple captcha-text .

Today, though, I've noticed this announcement at the top of the page:

In the coming months, the external Keyword Tool will no longer be available. To get keyword ideas, sign in to your AdWords account and try Keyword Planner.

I cannot see any announcements about this in the AdWords blog.   But this actually has very little information about the keywords tool anyway, most of what is there dates from 2008/09, and they haven't used "keyword" as a label for their posts.  

Google aren't in the habit of putting up notices like that which are wrong, so my guess is that, sooner or later, this tool is going to be removed, and their only keywords-research option will be the Keyword Planner, which isn't free .

So maybe it's time to start finding a new favourite free keyword research tool.   Some reviews to get started with:

• Search Engine Land:  Three Free Keyword Research Tools
• 22 Free Keyword Research Tools

Or maybe bloggers should just forget about keyword research, and focus SEO-basics, and then on writing good quality, natural-language, unique content.

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Related Articles

AdSense vs AdWords what's the difference

 Five reasons why SEO is irrelevant for your blog

Getting started with SEO for Blogger users

This article describes options for making link to a blog's old URL automatically point to the blog's new URL after a custom domain change.



If you have a blog made with Blogger which has a custom domain, then it's easy enough to switch this blog to use a different domain. Doing this moves both the content (posts and pages) and template (layout, structure, colour-scheme).

Often when people make this type of change, they want to set up re-directs so that if anyone clicks an external link to the old custom domain, they are re-directed to the same content on the new domain.
For example, www.old-domain.com/current-Page.html should redirect to www.new-domain.com/current-page.html.)

With many other website building tools, the .htaccess file for the site lets you set up re-directs like this. But things are little different when you use Blogger.

Your Blogspot address VS your custom domain

Your blog always has a blogspot addresss - let's call it: www.yourBlog.blogspot.com

When you publish to a custom domain, Blogger automatically handles the re-direction from www.yourBlog.blogspot.com to www.yourCustomdomain.com for you. This works at all levels, so the home page and every individual post/page are all redirected correctly.

To move your blog from from www.yourCustomDomain.com to www.newCustomDomain.com, you simply tell Blogger to

1. Stop publishing your blog to www.oldCustomDomain.com and then to
2. Start publishing it to www.newCustomDomain.com

(See Switching your blog to a different custom domain for more information about this.)

Once you have done this (and afer a little bit of transition time), Blogger handles the re-direction from www.yourBlog.blogspot.com to www.newCustomdomain.com for you - as before, this works at all levels, so the home page and every individual post/page are redirected correctly.

One point that many people mis-understand, is that after you have done this, there is no connection between Blogger and your old custom domain. You have various options (listed below) for what to do with www.oldCustomDomain.com - and you aren't limited to the features that Blogger offers. The only limits are based on what your domain registrar allows, and what tools you can (learn to) use.

Options for re-directing your old custom domain

Option 1: Registrar re-direction

Once you have stopped publishing your blog to www.yourCustomDomain.com, Blogger has no connection with it at all.

How you manage re-directions from it is totally up to the tools provided by the domain registrar. The simplest approach is to set up a "301 redirect" on the domain, which simply sends all traffic to it to another domain of your choice.

The method for setting this up depends on the tools used by your domain registrar - search their help files for terms like "301 redirect" to find out what is possible with tools.

See Using a custom domain for something other than your blog for advice about accessing your domain registrar account for the domain.

Advantages

• This is the easiest approach, and doesn't require you to make a website of any type.
• Visitors are automatically re-directed.

Disadvantages

• Depending on how the registrar's tools work, visitors may be automatically redirected to your new home page, not the the post that they specifically followed a link to.

Option 2: Another website tool

If you know how to use another website development tool that does provide access to the .htaccess file for the site, then you could make a "site" that just contains page-and-post level redirections for all your existing posts and pages.

Advantages

• This approach sends people to the exact content that they followed a link to.

Disadvantages

• It could be tedious setting this up for every post and page, if you have a lot of them at the time when you change domains.
• You need to choose and learn a very different type of website building tool to do this.

Option 3: use Blogger to make a site-level re-direction message

Make a totally new blog (eg    www.myBlogHasMoved.blogspot.com),

Publish it to your old custom domain

Give it one post that says

"www.oldCustomDomain.com has moved to www.newCustomDomain.com please update your links"

Use the Settings > Search preferences > Errors and redirections > Custom Redirect Custom Page Not Found  option to explain that your blog has moved, and send any traffic to that one post.

Advantages

• This is a simple approach, using tools that you already know.
• It will work forever (because blogspot domains don't expire).

Disadvantages

• Visitors will not be automatically redirected: the best you can do is show a link which goes to a selected post or page in your blog, which the visitor needs to click to go to the blog.
• The re-direction link is only to one specific page, not to the exact content that was linked to iniitially.  This is quite different from what many people want to achieve - blogger simply does not have that functionality.

A non-option: Blogger's custom redirect tool

Blogger has a function under Settings > Search preferences > Errors and redirections > Custom Redirects  that lets you set up custom redirects for individual pages.

However this isn't suitable when you change your custom-domain totally, because it only supports re-direction within the same blog, not to an external URL.

(And anyway, if you have a significant number of posts, it would not be practical.)

Other options?

Have you found any other ways around this? Or any good tool for setting up .htaccess redirects on a domain that you used to use for a blog?  Share your experience in the comments area below.

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Related Articles:

Using a custom domain for something other than your blog

Linking your blog and your website.

How to make a real website using Blogger

Switching your blog to a different custom domain

SEO Basics for Bloggers

This article is an introduction to Google's Maps Engine Lite, which is a tool for creating custom maps.

What is Google Maps Engine Lite

In late March 2013, Google announced a beta (ie late-stage test) of Maps Engine Lite - and now it is available from the main Google Maps interface, without the word "beta" in sight.

This is a web application to let you "Create powerful custom maps", and it has more features than the current  "My Maps" custom-map editor in Google Maps, which I've used until now to put certain maps into one of my blogs.

You can access it at: https://mapsengine.google.com/

Once you have signed in to a Google account, you can either view/edit an existing map that you have make with Maps Engine Lite or which has been shared with you in MEL, or create a new one.

How to create a custom map using Maps Engine Lite

Click on the New Map button from the front screen, or the New map link from the manage-files folder (top left side of the screen).

Use the arrow beside Base Map to choose the style that you want applied: this covers both what is shown, and the colour scheme. At the moment the options are:

• Map (ie ordinary - like regular Google maps)
• Satellite
• Terrain
• Light Political
• Mono City
• Simple Atlas
• Light Landmass
• Dark Landmass
• Whitewater

Add places to the map by:

Drawing them - You add things to the map with the Placemark and line or shape-drawing tools.  These are similar to those for Google Custom Maps, though they're now separate into two items.

or

Importing them - from either CSV/Excel files or you existing Google Custom Maps - see http://support.google.com/mapsengine/?p=lite_addplaces for details about what is possible.



You can separate the map into multiple layers, and you have access to Google Maps regular search feature: search-results are placed on non-permanent "search" layer, and you can select a result, right click on it and Save it to the map you are currently editing.


While editing the map, you have these options

• Style - lets you choose whether to show individual markers, or a sequence of letters/colours
• Table - Edit the list of placemarkers and lines - giving each a name or description
• Labels - lets you choose whether to show marker labels on the map or not - and whether to use the name or description field.

Sharing maps you have made

The map can be shared using the green Share button in the top right corner, via gmail, G+, Facebook, Twitter or anything else which lets you use a link like this:

Putting Custom Maps on your website or blog

In Maps Engine Lite, the "embed on my website" option is available under the Save icon (currently at the top left, with options New map, Open and  Embed).  

However it only works if you have first clicked the green Share button, and set the map-visibility to Public (ie not just "anyone with the link").

This gives you a simple iframe statement like this:

<iframe height="480" src="http://mapsengine.google.com/map/view?mid=zV9FBQ3J7L1o.kzRGlAso0tmU" width="640"></iframe>

You can easily change the size via the height and width options, but there is no zoom level option - and I assume that the centre of the displayed map is represented in the coding  (this doesn't always work so well for Custom Maps - I usually recommend that people use the customization option).

And once you have the code, you can put it into your blog in the same way you would add any other 3rd party HTML.   The code above gives a map like this:


Notice that the map itself tells you that it was made with Maps Engine, and that it says it is for non-commercial use:   commercial users can buy access to a far more powerful version of the Maps Engine.

Advantages and disadvantages of Maps Engine Lite

So far I've only done a quick test, but initial impressions are:

Advantages:

Richer interface than custom maps - you can do more things.

Layers are a particularly good addition - it would be great if individual layers could be turned on/off from embedded version of the map.

Alternative colour scheme - will make it easier to create maps that are more suitable for certain circumstances, eg with a faded background.

Sequential markers - I don't have to use my own set of custom markers any more.

Uses the same base data as regular Google Maps - so the Follow Your World service can be used to get you updates about changes to the image-data.

Disadvantages:

No access to Google Streetview while you are editing the map.

Currently if you choose sequential markers, the labels and colours in the key on the left are not always the same as the ones used inside the map.

No Snap-to-roads option for lines

No custom map markers:  if you import a map from My Maps (aka Google Custom Maps), then any custom markers that you have are retained, and you can choose to use them again, but there is no way to add new custom markers.


What else have you found?

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Related Articles:

Creating a Google Custom Map

Adding a Google Custom Map to your blog

Adding 3rd party HTML to your blog

This article describes Google's Inactive Account Manager, a new tool that gives you control over what happens to your Google account if you don't log on to it for a period of time.



Ages ago, I read a thought-provoking article on ProBlogger about making a "blogging will". His main aim was to ensure that his family could access his business assets (ie his blogs etc) if something untoward happened to him.

Now, Google's Data Liberation Front have annnounced a new tool called the Inactive Account Manager, which lets Google account owners say what should happen if they ever stop using their account.

This tool lets you decide

1. If and when your account should be treated as inactive
2. What happens with your data if it becomes inactive, and
3. Who else is notified, and what is said to them.

At the moment, it covers these Google tools - which are attached to your Google account:

• +1s
• Blogger
• Contacts and Circles
• Drive (which I guess means Docs too)
• Gmail
• Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams
• Picasa Web Albums
• Google Voice
• YouTube.

AdSense is a notable exception: I don't know what happens to your outstanding balance and income if your AdSense account becomes inactive.   But I suspect that it might be managed in the same way as a bank account or book royalties - and because each country will have different laws about managing estates and the like, it's not possible to let you "opt-out" in the same way as it is for regular data.

What situations is this for

There are a few scenarios that the IAM ("Inactive Account Manager" is such a mouthful) might be useful for.

Death / Serious illness or injury

The most obvious thing that you could use the IAM to provide for is if you unexpectedly die, or become so sick/injured that you cannot log in any more.

In this case, if your blog and other Google content (eg YouTube videos) is personal, you may or may not want family or friends to access it - and you may or may not want it to be deleted.

But if your blog belongs to an organisation or a business, it's quite a different scenario:   you will almost certainly want someone else to have access.

And if it contains material about a hobby or public interest topic, you may well want to have it transferred to some kind of "data steward" - or you may want your estate to manage it as an asset, if it is profitable.

Losing access to your account

Some people lose access to their Google account because they:

1. Set them up with an external email address
2. Lose access to that email address
3. Forget the Google account password
4. Cannot remember enough details to regain access via the forgotten-password wizard.

The IAM will only help these people if they have set it up, and if they (or a friend) still has access to the alternative email address they entered.   So it's not a universal cure for this problem, but may help a little.

Losing interest in your account

People's lives and priorities change over time.   The blog that was all-important ten years ago may now be a distant memory.   In this case, if IAM is set up, people will at least get a chance to think about whether they want to maintain what was there, or not

The best approach?

There is no "one right way" to use the IAM to look after your blog when you stop updating it.   It's a very private decision, and depends on what risks you think you want to cover off, and how you are using your Google account.

Personally, I don't think that losing interest or losing access are likely to happen.    So I've set up my IAM information to cover the first case, ie death or incapacity, and used it to send messages to carefully selected friends and relatives.  I could do more, eg include details about selling a couple of blogs that would be "assets" in the right hands, and send messages to the firm who would be looking after my affairs.   But it's a start - and as with so many "death and taxes" type of issues making a start is half the battle.

How to set up your inactive account information

Once you have thought about what sort of situations you want to deal with, then setting up your inactive-account information is pretty easy.

To start with, go to the Account Management option your Google account settings page.   Once you're there, there is an easy set-up wizard, which covers the following points.

Warning that you're in danger of becoming inactive

Google doesn't want your account to suddenly become inactive.   So they collect details are used to warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to an alternative address, saying that your account is close to becoming inactive. The current definition of "close" is one-month. Basically, this is your chance to stop the account becoming inactive by logging in.  

They ask for:

• A mobile phone number (which needs to be verified - so it must be one that you can access now)
• An alternative email address (which isn't verified - yet!)

Setting the timeout period

You need to choose how much time needs to go by without you logging in before your account is considered to be inactive. The default is three months, and other options are six, nine and 12 months.

Who else to tell

You can nominate one or more trusted contacts - ie email addresses that receive notification, and (if you choose, access to your data), once your account actually becomes inactive.



For each trusted contact, you need to give some message-text and also say which specific Google products they should get access too.



You can also set up an auto-reply to messages to your Gmail account, which is sent in response to all incoming messages after your account becomes inactive - or at most once every 4 days if one account sends you lots of messages.

What happens to your account:

Finally, you choose whether to delete your data once your account is inactive - the default value is "no", but you should change it to "yes" if you want to be sure that your blog etc are removed.

Confirmation

After you have saved your settings, you will get an email confirming that you entered.    (In my case, this message took several days to arrive - possibly because I get up my IAM settings fairly shortly after it had been introduced.   Hopefully it's got quicker now.

Limitations of the IAM

At the moment, IAM lets you set thresholds, notifications and actions for a whole Google account - there is no way to say that some blogs should be kept, and some deleted.

And there are still lots of things that we don't know about how IAM will work in practise.

• Do you get only one reminder - or one every time you reach the inactive-account threshold again  (ie every 3, 6, 9 or 12 months)?

• What happens if you're one administrator of a team blog, and your account becomes inactive with instructions to delete it - but there are other member or administrators who are still actively contributing?   (I would hope that the presence of these people means that your "delete" instruction is ignores, at least for the blog.   But I suspect that this won't be an easy scenario to provide for - and it's possible that Google haven't worked through all the options here.
  
  Ditto other shared resources (YouTube Channels, Shared folder/documents in Drive, etc)?  The dimensions will be different in each product, but the underlying problem is the same.

So while I think that IAM is a great idea, I'm also a little nervous about what problems it could cause if people choose to delete things without thinking through all the consequences.

And if you are going to set it up for your own personal blogs, then maybe now is a good time to transfer ownership of blogs that you made for clubs / societies / organisations / businesses to generic accounts being managed for them.


What other issues do you see?

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Related Posts

Understanding Google accounts

Team blogs:  letting other people write to your blog

Transferring blog ownership

Understanding how Blogger and Picasa-web-albums work together

Setting up AdSense for your blog

This quick-tip describes some tools that I've recently discovered that measure page-load speed and make suggestions about how to improve it.


Google have said a number of times that page-load-speed (ie how quickly a visitor to your blog sees it load onto the screen) is one of the factors in SEO.

And even if SEO isn't important to your blog in terms of getting visitors, page-load speed is important for making your visitors happy: even your mother isn't going to be happy if your blog takes five minutes to show her the pictures of your new baby.

So Google's tools for measuring and improving page-load speed are valuable tools for most bloggers.

Where to find them:

The tools are available at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

The most important one for Bloggers is in the Analyze section, called Insights, found under the "Analyze your site online" link.

There are other tools there, too (eg an API, the Page-speed service, extensions for certain browsers), but they are well outside what Bloggers need to know.

How to use the Pagespeed tool

To find out what Google thinks of your blog's page-load speed, simply type your web-address into the box in the middle of the Pagespeed  Insights screen, and click the Analyse button.




In a few moments, the screen refreshes with the results.

At the top of the results, there is your site's score out of 100.

Then there is a list of suggestions, broken down by priority (high, medlium, low) based on their "potential performance wins" (how much difference they make) and amount of "development effort" ie how hard they are to do).




Not all of these suggestions are relevant for Blogger users, because we don't have total control over how our posts are converted into website pages. However ones that are relevant include:

• Optimize images
• Serve scaled images,
• Putting CSS into the document head  (in our case, putting it into the template rather than into individual posts)

If you go into the details of the particular suggestions (using the entries in the left hand sidebar), you can see how much impact they will have, and get information about what  you need to change to implement the suggestion.

Why bother

Given that so many of the suggestions aren't relevant for Blogger why use the tool at all?

One reason is that it gives you a way of looking at the effect of gadgets that you add to your blog:  looking at the page load score before and after adding the gadget shows if it makes much difference to your load time.   Based on this, you may decide to only show certain gadgets on a particular page.

This article introduces Google Webmaster central's first-steps-SEO cheatsheat, and explains how the points in it apply to Blogger.



Google have produced a "first steps cheat sheet" for people who've got a blog or website, "but never gave search much thought". They describe it as a "short how-to list with basic tips on search engine-friendly design".

It lists things you can do which may "help Google and others better understand the content and increase your site’s visibility".

You can find it here. (It's a one-page PDF file).

The Webmaster Central post where it was announced said to "read it, print it, share it, copy and distribute it" - so I'm going to tell you how the points listed apply to Blogger users.

One caveat:  As I've explained previously, SEO (aka search engine-friendly design) is totally irrelevant for some bloggers.  Unless you know that being found in search-engines is important for your blog, then  please don't waste any more time on this.

But if you do depend on Google (or Yahoo, Bing, etc) to bring visitors to your blog, read on, then these are the first things that Google suggest you should think about.

I've divided them into three sections:

1. Looking good in the search results
2. Helping Google to understand your pictures
3. Update and keep going.

Looking good in the search results

Blog address

Make sure that your blog's URL is "descriptive and easy-to-read".

The URL is the blog's website address:  you choose it when you first set the blog up, but you can change it again later if you need to, using  Settings > Basic > Publishing in the Blogger dashboard

Many people recommend using a custom domain because it look more professional and like a real website.   But the same "descriptive and easy to read" guideline matters even if you use a blogspot.com address.

An example search-engine results page - if your blog looks good here, then it will get more visitors.

Overall blog title and description

Your blog Title should "Describe your ... [blog very] concise[ly]."

Your blog's Description should "Describe your ... [blog] in a concise, informative phrase."

You can edit these under Settings > Basic > Basic in the Blogger dashboard.

I usually make the title match the blog's URL  (viz http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/ /  Blogger-hints-and-tips) - but it can be a little longer, maybe about five words.

Blogger lets you make the description up to 500 characters long, but I usually recommend less than this - a maximum of 160 is better.

Post title and descriptions

You set the title in the Post-editor, when you are first writing a post.   And you can change then later by editing the post again after it has been published.

Some people suggest using a catchy phrase that people are likely to share on Facebook, Twitter etc for the first week after you publish a post, and then changing it to a more descriptive phrase (which looks better in search results) after that.

Post descriptions

Meta descriptions are page summaries which are often used by search engines to describe your blog on the search-result listings.

Turn on descriptions in Blogger by

• Going to Settings > Search preferences > Meta-tags in the blogger dashboard.    
• Choosing the choosing "yes" radio button
• Putting the overall summary for the whole blog into the text field.   (I recommend the same one from Settings > Basic > Basic) into the text field
• Clicking Save changes

Once Descriptions are turned on, there will be a Search Description entry in the right-hand Post-settings area each time you edit a post.  Write a short (160 characters or less) unique description for each post into this.

Help Google understand images

File names

Before you load a picture to your blog (or to a photo-hosting service like Picasa-web-albums or Google+ Photos), give it a short, descriptive file name.  

For example, I just made the screen shot that I used in the previous section, and called the file  "seo-basics-meta-description-field-blogger-post-editor.png"

Tagging

Google's sheet just says to Use an “alt” and "title" tag to describes the picture.   I've described this in detail previously - see Telling Google, and visually impaired people, about your pictures

You can also use the "add caption" feature (on the tool-bar when you hover over the picture in the post-editor) to add a short caption describing the picture.

Put information in text, not just pictures

Look again at the picture that I used in the previous section.   When I was making it, I put the 160-characters-long suggestion right inside the picture.   This is useful for readers who see more detail in the photos than the text.   But it's no good for search engines:   Google is clever, but it's still not clever enough to extract reliably the meaning from text you have photographed.

So I made sure that the 160-character advice was in the text, as well as in the picture.

Update and keep going

Lots of people start a blog, and then get discouraged because it's not successful straight away.

But this is a big mistake.  Domain age, ie how long you have had the website address for, is one factor that search-engines take account of. Even if you don't get many visitors in the first year, the fact that your blog has been going for a year and you are still posting to it makes it attractive to Google.

So Google's final piece of advice is to keep going, and to publish new posts on your blog on an on-going basis.  

A few final words from me

Google's advice is a good starting point.   The bottom of their cheat-sheet links to various other good sources too:

• Google SEO Getting Started guide   (a much longer and more detailed version of the cheatsheet)
• Webmaster Academy (a series of instructional videos)
• Webmaster Tools - an online utility that you can use to measure and diagnose SEO issues with your site.

These resources are all good - but they aren't targeted to Blogger users, so sometimes they recommend changes to things we cannot change (eg URL-structrue), or they simply explain things in non-Blogger ways.   So read them, but don't get to worried if you cannot put all their advice into practise.   SEO is one of those areas where even doing some of what is recommended can help a lot.

There are about a zillion websites offering SEO advice too - just google and you will find them.    Look for ones that are up-to-date (the SEO "rules of the game" change often), and have lots of positive comments.

Keyword:  You will see lots of SEO advice about keyword research.   Google do have a free keywords tool - but it looks like it's going away - so don't get hooked on using it.   Overall, my advice is to ignore this for a very long time in your blogging:  focus on writing content that your blog-visitors will want to read, describe it in interesting ways, and the keywords will look after themselves.    

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Related Articles:

Telling Google, and visually impaired people, about your pictures

Using Blogger to make a real website

Editing a blog-post that you have already published

How to put a picture into a blog-post

Introduction to Picasa and Picasa-web-albums

This article describes Blogger's share-to-Google+ feature, and shows how to stop Blogger offering to share to your Google + circles every time you publish a new post, and what you cannot (yet) do with the feature.

Automatically updating Google + from your blog

If you have linked your blogger-account to your Google+ profile, then by default you are shown a pre-filled Google+ share box with details of your post in it, every time that you publish a post, including times when you edit a post that has already been published.

The share box has a snippet and thumbnail picture  based on your post, and section where you can add a comment, remove the description, choose the circle(s) to share it with, and say to also email people who are not in your circles.

You can change the picture associated with the shared post using the arrows (hover over the top left of the suggested picture - the arrows circle through the other available pictures. Or you can remove it using the cross button (hover over the top-right of the suggested picture).

The top right corner shows whether the post is being shared to your personal profile to the the Google+ Page that you previously linked with the blog.



This is one of the easiest ways of sharing your blog posts with any of the social networks: it lets you customise the content of the message and target it carefully, without having to leave Blogger to do so.

Don't bother me: stop Blogger offering to share to Google-plus

If you don't want to see the "share on Google+" option every time post, you can turn the feature off for individual blogs. To do this:

1   Go to the Google + tab.

2   Untick the "Prompt to share after posting" button, currently found underneath your list of Pages

(Unlike some tabs, changes on this tab are automatically saved.)



Why would you want to do this?   After all, if your accounts are linked, then surely you want to share your posts to Google+?

Actually there are a number of reasons why you might want to disable this feature.   Some that I can think of are:

• If you make frequent edits to existing posts it would probably annoy the people in your circles if you shared all of them - and it slows you down, because the share screen takes a few seconds to load every time you publish.

• If you use a private blog to prepare your posts before publishing them - obviously there's no need to share these posts with yourself! 

• You might just want to do the share, but at a later time than the initial post, to spread out the new-post impact.

Even if you've turned off the "offer to share" option, you can still Google+ share individual posts by selecting "share" from underneath the title in the Blogger Dashboard > Posts tab.

Troubleshooting the Google + share option:

You only see this option if when you publish a post, if:

• You have connected any of the blogs owned by your blogger account to Google+

• You have not previously turned it off for this particular blog

• Your blog is not private.
  If you try it on a blog with restricted readership, instead of an error message you are given the not-very-helpful option to share the Blogger sign in screen, like this:

Doing more with the Blogger / Google-Plus share feature

Currently there is no way to:

• Totally automate the share, so it happens without you pressing Ok in the "Share this on ..." box.

• Show the labels from your post in your shared item

• Schedule the share

• Automatically share posts published with mail2Post or which are scheduled to Publish in the future.

• Change whether the post is shared to a selected Google+ page or your personal circles
  This is controlled by a global setting that you can edit on the Blogger Dashbaord > Google + tab, but you cannot alter it on the fly.

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Related Articles:

Post-snippet and post-thumbnail: where do they come from

Linking your blog to the social networks

Prepare Posts in Private, so you can Publish when they're Perfect

How to edit posts that you have already published

Mail2Post: post to your blog without using Blogger

Using Labels to categorize blog-posts

This article describes the Creative Commons search tool, which you can use to look for pictures, videos, music etc that are available for other people to use under a Creative Commons license.

What is Creative Commons

Previously I've described how copyright applies to bloggers, how you can protect your blog-content from copyright theives, and what you can do if they take you work anyway.

The focus in that series was looking after your own rights.

But rights always come with responsibilities. The details vary by country, but in general you cannot just copy other people's recent work without their permission - in the same way that they cannot copy yours.

Some people, though, are happy to give other people permission to use their work, often with certain conditions (eg you must including an attribution link to the creator).

Creative Commons is an easy, legal way for creators to give permission for things they create to be used by other people. It is a framework which offers "licenses" that creators (writers, artists, composers, poets, etc) can apply to their work to say that other people can make copies, and what conditions apply  (eg non-commercial use, only if you attribute me, etc)

To use it, authors, artists, etc don't need to register their work. Instead, they go to the Creative Commons website and get code / text to put with their published work to show what rules apply.

Then they can publish or upload their pictures, writing etc anywhere they want, and by linking to the licence the work is as protected as anything on the internet can be.

How to find pictures & music that are Creative Commons licensed

Creative Commons have a very useful search tool, found at http://search.creativecommons.org

This is not a search engine. Instead it is a front-end-tool that lets you choose:

• The keywords you want to search for (the search words)
• The type of license that you need (use for commercial purposes - yes or no, modify, adapt, build upon - yes/no)
• Which of the file host/search services to use (eg flickr, Google, Open clip art library - etc)

Once you have entered the search options, click on the source that you want to look in, and you are  taken to that site and shown the results of the search-query and options you entered.

For example, when I entered:

• "Christmas"
• Commercial allowed (because I wanted to make a picture to use in Blogger-HAT, where I have advertising)
• Changes allowed (because I wanted an image that I could use as the basis for another one, rather than exactly as it is now)

and clicked on Fotopedia, I was shown:



From here I could use the search tools in Fotopedia to refine my image-search and find just the right picture that I could use to represent a Christmas carol worksheet on my blog.

What sources are included

Today, the sources that are linked to from Creative Commons search are:

• Eurpoeana - media
• Flickr - pictures
• Fotopedia - pictures
• Google web - web search results
• Google images - pictures
• Jamenda - music
• Open Clip Art Library - images
• SpinXpress - media
• Wikimedia Commons - media
• YouTube - video
• Pixabay - images
• ccMixter - music
• SoundCloud - music

It wouldn't surprise me if this list grow/shrinks, as sites become more or less useful as sources of public-domain or creative-commons-licensed materials.

Things to watch out for

Creative Commons cannot guarantee that the results of searches that start in their tools will always be available for re-use: source systems may change their approach, items may be mis-tagged, content owners may change their mind, etc. So they recommend that you should always click-through to the original image in the source site, and double-check the license and attribution requirements there.

Also, some sites may allow you to link directly to the copy of the image on their site. this can be a lot quicker than making your own copy, uploading it and included it in your blog.  But doing this means that the image will not be used as the thumbnail-image for your post. And if the picture is ever removed from the original site - or its web-site address there changes - then the link in your blog will not work any more.

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Related Articles:

Bloggers and Copyright - an overview

Protecting your blog-contents from copyright theft

Taking action when someone has used your copyright materials

Thumbnail images - a picture to summarise each post

Adding a picture to Blogger