Deciduous blog posts leave evergreens for dead

In a social-media world, deciduous blog posts have an enormous advantage of both ever-green and ephemeral content - find out what they are, and how to use them to best advantage.

Introducing deciduous blog posts

In botany and horticulture, deciduous plants

... are those that lose all of their leaves for part of the year. (Wikipedia)

In blogging, deciduous posts are ones that your readers lose all interest in at certain times - eg posts about Christmas carols during January, or winter gardening tips during spring.

Which sounds bad.

Until you realise that deciduous posts are also ones that your readers (both current and new ones) gain renewed interest in at certain times. That means it's quite reasonable for you - and everyone else  - to mention them on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ each time that the new "season" starts.   If your posts are good, you might even get more new visits from social media in the subsequent seasons than in the first time around.

When you think about it, it's easy to see that in a social-media world ...

Deciduous blog posts leave evergreens for dead.

What does this mean for bloggers

If getting more visitors through either search or referrals is important for your blog, then you should :

• Be systematic about  how you remember to promote seasonal posts you've already published.   

• Find ways to write posts that will be become popular on a cyclical basis.

• Make strategic decisions about whether to change an existing post vs when to make a new post about a seasonal topic.

• Set up Labels or custom-redirects to send people who end up on a previous-year post to the most recent one.

Remember to promote your seasonal posts

Make a calendar of significant factors that should cause extra traffic for your blog, and send yourself a reminder message in time to review and re-share the relevant posts, according to your blog's social media strategy.

Working out exactly when do these promotions can be tricky. Ideally this is based on studying your visitor statistics (Analytics or whatever tool you use) to see when the posts got popular last time around.

You might think that you know anyway, because the seasons are obvious, but it's easy to miss earlier-than-expected surges in interest. For example, posts about Christmas music might actually be popular with music directors who're choosing their Christmas programs in September. But you do need to be careful about and where how you promote posts like this - because no one else wants to be reminded about Christmas so soon!

Finding seasonal posting reasons in non-seasonal blogs

Some blogs clearly have cyclic patterns: gardens follow the natural world, folk songs follow holidays (eg workers-rights songs for labor day, patriotic songs for national days), gift suggestions follow established human seasons (Christmas, Valentines), homeschoolers generally follow the school year.

But if you look harder, you can find seasonal patterns that apply to lots of other blogs, too. For example, one well-known blogger-helper often does a post towards the end of the American college year reminding people to transfer ownership of their blogs to a non-college Google account.

Ways to do this include:

• Blogging about the similarities (or differences) between your niche and some unrelated by widely-known seasonal event  (eg "Writing poetry is not like Christmas because ...".
• Writing about famous people in your topic who have died - close to their anniversary or birthday.   
• Making up your own seasonal patter  eg   "In March, Crotchet-Blogger celebrates cable-stitch". 

Promotion existing posts vs publishing new ones

A big question for bloggers with deciduous blog topics is whether they should publish a new post each season, or just polish and promote the existing post(s).

The answer depends on the nature of the information each season:

Situation	What do do
Are there changes to the information each season?	Make a new post, link to it from the last season's posts, promote it like you do any other post.
Does exactly the same information apply each year	Review the existing post, and then promote it on social media - and perhaps in the blog itself or in other new posts.

For example, one of my blogs is about public transport news in my city.  This has clear seasonal patterns around public holidays, the tourist season, a major sporting event, and the academic year.   The sporting event causes the biggest peak, with web-traffic up by 600%, week-on-week.  Each year's  information for it is very similar: buses leave at (roughly the same time) from (exactly the same place) for (close to the same fare) as last year. But each year there are changes: slightly different times, different effects on other bus services, one year there was a park-and-ride. So for this blog, I do a new post each year.   And I go back into last year's post and add a line like

"This information is for 2013.   Click here for this year's bus services."

and I make the "here" link to a label search for the topic, so that the most recent post will always come up first in the list.

By comparison, in another blog, I've published a printable sheet of non-religious Christmas carol words for which copyright has expired.  Over time, it will be possible to add extra carols to this.  But this won't happen each year - and all the existing content will continue to be relevant forever. So I don't republish this in a new post each year.   Instead, I promote it with a gadget on the sidebar, and I share the post on my social media accounts for the blog.

Be aware that if you do decided to make a slight change to an existing seasonal post, rather than write a new one:

• RSS subscribers probably won't see the enhanced post in their feed.
• Follow-by-email subscribers will see it.

Other things to think about

When you thinking about how you can get the more traffic using the deciduous posts in your blog, there are a few other factors to keep in mind:

Look for multi-year cycles

Some events happen once every 2, 3 or more years. For example:

• Some sports events (the Olympics, the Volvo Ocean race, the Commonwealth games) happen every-so-many years. 
•  Leap years happen once every four years.
• In some countries, elections happen every five years.

These multi-year patterns can be even more powerful than the every-year ones, because less people are aware of them, and readers in general are not-so-likely to remember what you wrote four years ago.

Don't forget the Southern Hemisphere

Spring starts in September, not February, if you live in the bottom half of the world. And cars need to be prepared for winter in April, not November.

This may mean that you can re-promote posts based on natural seasons twice a year - or that you should target some seasonal posts by hemisphere.

Some readers have different holidays

It's easy to think that all your readers are just like you, and live with the same seasonal patterns that you do.   But that's not always true:

• People who don't live in America might not even know when Thanksgiving or Black Friday is, much less what it means.

• In many Western countries, Christmas is a holiday even for people who aren't religious. But there are countries where Christmas isn't a holiday at all and most people don't even know it exists.

How have you used seasonal / deciduous topics to get new interest in your blog?

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Understanding Google Accounts

This article is about Google accounts:  what they are- and aren't, how to access them, and what the account-names look like.  

Blogger, Google and Google+ accounts

Once upon a time (pre 2006), there was a website on the internet called Blogger.   People created an account on Blogger, and then used it to make a blog - which was owned by their Blogger account.

Then Google (the company that made the search engine) purchased Blogger.   They wanted to integrate their products, so Blogger users had to change their original Blogger accounts to "Google accounts", which still had a Blogger profile.  Google were pretty nice about this:   they kept support old, unconverted Blogger accounts up til 2011, but eventually said that no more conversions were possible.

At the time, very few people understood the difference between Google-the-company and Google-the-search-engine, so most didn't have any idea of the power and importance of these "Google accounts".   However as the other applications available through Gaoogle accounts grew (Gmail, Picasa-web-albums, Google-custom-maps, AdSense, AdWords, etc), this became clearer.

In mid/late 2011, Google introduced Google+, which is a social-networking and identity service.  Originally, G+ accounts required people to use their real names, which some Bloggers didn't want to do.   But this policy was gradually weakened:

• Since early 2013 it has been possible to give a Google+ Page its own loginID and password - effectively making it a stand-alone G+ account,
• In mid 2014 Google announced that real-names were no longer required.

Blogger / Google profiles can be converted into Google+ accounts.

Or they can be left as normal Google accounts   (which are sometimes called "Google Minus" or "G-" accounts).

Getting a Google account

To make a new Google account, you just have to use the Create an Account link near the bottom of the account-selection list on the login-page of any product that Google offers (Gmail, Blogger, AdSense, etc).

You then have to provide a a few details - note though you have to give a first name and last name, these don't need to be your real names any more.

These days, by default, new accounts are Google+ accounts - but you can opt out of this during the sign-up process if you want.    If you do this, you won't have access to all Google's features (eg Google+ Photos) - but you will have everything you need to use Blogger.

Account names look like email address

Google account names always look like email addresses, ie they are of the form:

willy.worm@yourMail.com

If the product that you sign up with is Gmail (which is where Google accounts started, I think), then this makes sense.

However it is possible to have an account name that is simply a text-string that looks like an email address.

For a long time Google didn't even check if there was a valid email account with that address at the time you signed up   This has changed now:  Google warn you that they will send an email message to the account that you give, to verify that you own it, and that you won't have full use of the account until it is verified.

However, even today, if a Google account was created some time ago, you cannot guarantee that the person who owns a Google account still owns - or indeed ever owned - the email-address with the same name.

This means there are Google accounts called Joe.blogs@yahoo.com, and similar.   And there are even Google accounts with a name that is not, and never has been, a real email address.

Some of the confusion and problems:

• If the email address isn't a gmail one, then changing the password of the email doesn't change the password of the Google account

• Some people don't understand that their Google account name is just a set of letters: they don't realise that they can change the email address attached to their account without changing the underlying account (Dashboard > Edit Profile, identity tab).

• Some people lost access to the email address (eg because they leave their job, or use a free service and didn't log on for 30 or 60 or however-many day).

• Some people never had access to the email address, because they used a text-string that wasn't actually an address, and previously Google never checked if non-Gmail addresses actually worked.

In these cases, problems happened when that email address was the only tool that the person used to identify their Google accounts.  If it's not real, or they can't access it any more, then Google can't help when they forget their passwords,etc.  So there are some blogs that can never be accessed ever again, because Google has no way of being sure who owns the Google-account that made them.

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Moving some posts from one blog to another

This article is about how to copy some of the posts from one Blogger blog to another.

Previously, I've written about

• moving individual posts, or pages, from one blog to another and 
• moving all posts from one blog to another.   

They are in separate articles because the techniques used are quite different in each case.

If you only want to transfer some posts between two blogs, then you need to choose between:

• Moving each post individually,or
• Moving all the posts then and deleting the ones you don't want from the "new" blog.

Before you start, decide what should happen to any posts that are already in the destination blog:  if you want to delete them, you need to do it from the Posting / Edit Posts tab (press the delete link beside each one).  Don't just delete the enter blog (from the Settings / Basics tab), because that will remove your access to the URL.

How to decide

Choosing whether to most post individually, or moving all of them is firstly about maths.

You need to estimate the time needed for each option, ie

• Time to move a post individually, multiplied by the number of posts to be moved

• Time to export and import, plus (time to delete a post times the number of posts that will need to be deleted).

And then choose the smallest one.

Except - you may like to figure in the chance of making a mistake, or of wanting to make small changes to come posts along the way.  Possibly you need to consider which approach you're most comfortable with - so it may not even be about maths at all!

Either way, remember that Pages (see The Difference between Posts and Pages) in the first blog, need to be moved individually because they aren't currently included in the export file.

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Related Articles

Moving all posts from one blog to another

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Did you know that your blog is in the cloud?

This article explains the relationship between your blog and "the cloud", and other ways that you might be using the cloud without even realising it.

A few days ago, I received an email from Sam who works for "SingleHop, a company that specializes in cloud computing."

He explained that

"Due to recent events like Heartbleed, the Target breach and the leaking of celebrity photos to the public, the world is abuzz about "the cloud." However, you may be wondering what exactly it is and what it does. We are hoping you would be interested in sharing a post with your readers about cloud computing in everyday life.

In a nutshell, the cloud is a way to store data remotely, rather than on your home computer. This gives you easy access to your photos, documents, and other files from anywhere at any time. We are hoping that by spreading awareness about how the cloud works, we can help others make smarter decisions about what they post/share online.

We have put together a graphic discussing some of the most common ways you use the cloud. We would love to share this with you so that you can use the information to help create a post about how you use cloud computing in your day-to-day life.

Being the suspicious sort, I wondered if this was come kind of spam / scam. But it didn't feel totally spammy: there was no link to SingleHop in the email, his message text didn't come up in any of the hoax or urban-legend sites, and the company looks legitimate - though I cannot see how they will benefit from being linked to from my blog.

I wrote back to Sam, and sure enough he sent me a graphic. It looks sensible-enough, doesn't appear to have any viruses in it, and a Google image search isn't showing it anywhere else on the web. So far, so good.

I had asked "what's the catch" and he replied "No catch, we're just trying to spark discussion and create awareness about how people use the cloud. We’d love for you to talk about how you use the cloud, whether it’s to be productive at work, share special moments with friends or relax at home."

So here goes - a blog post about blogs, bloggers, Blogger and the cloud, with an illustration compliments of SingleHop (who didn't ask for the backlink).

Your blog is already in "the cloud"

For all the hype, "the cloud" is nothing new - at least not for individuals.

 As Sam said the cloud is just "a way to store data remotely, rather than on your home computer". 

I've been doing this on in Blogger since 2006 and doing it seriously (ie writing for more than just myself) since 2009. I've been using internet-email since 1987 - eve though most of the world didn't start until ten years later.   More recently I switched to using email accounts that let me keep all my email on-line and access it via IMAP rather than downloading it to my PC using POP3.

Obviously - if you have a blog made with Blogger, then it is already in "the cloud".

And this is true whether your have a public blog, or a private blog with restricted readers:  even those select people will be seeing the version of your blog that it on the internet.

The same if you are using Picasa-web-albums or any other picture-hosting service to keep photos that you show in your blog.   Or Youtube to store your videos, Google-Contacts to manage your address book, Google Drive to store the PDF files that you distribute through it, or a Facebook page, Twitter account or Pinterest boards to promote your blog.

These are all "in the cloud" because people who see them on your blog see the version that you uploaded to the internet, not the one on your home computer. This means that the pictures, videos etc can still be seen, even when your computer is turned off.

There are also new ways of interacting with your blog, which "the cloud" is making possible, eg I'm currently experimenting with an app called Pixlr, as a way to manage the size of photos loaded to my "quirky pictures from my city" photoblog directly from my phone.   But the basic idea - that your blog is "in the cloud" hasn't changed since well before the cloud became hip.

Are there other ways that you can, should and do use "the cloud"?

Probably. Some of these will just be about the way your blog develops - for example if you start makign vlogs (video-blog-posts), you can store them on YouTube.

Others could be more suable. Looking through Sam's picture (below), one issue that stands out for me is backup: as well as using Google Takeout to make periodic copies of the contents of all my blogs, I should probably start to save these somwhere extra-safe just in case anything bad happens.

And for some types of blog, using streaming-media might be important.  SingleHop says that this is for entertainment.  But I can easily see it being useful for choral singers who are learning new works, teachers who want to share their materials, and even sports players who want to train to specific regimes that are distributed by "video", and available to play when needed - as well as for bloggers who write about these topics.

More information

Sam's graphic is shown below: he didn't say whether it it was ok to include in my post or not, so I thought I'd risk it and share it with you - I'm sure he'll be in touch if he wants me to take it down!

Most probably, your blog itself will fit into his social media category: blogs are really just ultra-long Twitter posts, delivered inside a tool that gives lots of creative freedom about how material is displayed.

But in some cases, you may fit into the collaboration category, if you are writing a team blog and have set up other team-members to write in it. B ut what do you think - does it belong somewhere else?

What you can and cannot know

For most bloggers, their use of "the cloud" will be pretty invisible: they see themselves as using Blogger or Wordpress or whatever, rather than using "the cloud"

If you look harder at Sam's company website, you will see that they are offering virtual private cloud services. In very, very rough terms, this means they own a very large set of computers, and rent out space on them - set up so that only people from the organisation which has leased the space can see the space and use the computer-power behind it.  This is different to public cloud services, where the processing power is shared with other people using the same computer.

For almost all cloud systems that you will use as a blogger, you aren't going to be certain whether they are based on public-cloud or private-cloud services - but for all practical purposes, you don't need to know.

But is it safe?

This is the biggest question for most when people someone starts talking about "the cloud" - especially if they've heard about passwords being hacked etc

Certainly my first reaction was that the companies I work within my day job would never use the cloud, because they would have to put too much sensitive data onto computers outside their control. And for some, this is true.

But what I eventually realised is that generally the large "cloud services companies" provide better computer security than you do in your house - and far better than the single IT-staff person in a small company can manage.  So overall, I think it's now safe to say that "the cloud is as secure as any other computing tool you use", and that the biggest risk to the safety of your information comes from choosing bad passwords, or having viruses / malware attack your computer.

What do you think?

Are you happy that your blog is in "the cloud" - would you prefer a blogging solution that let you keep your private blogs, at least, in a non-cloud place?

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Letting other people post to your blog.

Blogs, bloggers, Blogger - understanding the basic defintions around blogging

Finding a picture's location (URL) in Google+ Photos or Picasa-web-albums

This article is about how to find the URL (web-address) of a picture that is stored in Picasa web albums.  It is written for Blogger users, but the same technique can be used by anyone who uses Picasa-web-albums.

Google+ Photos, Picasa-web-albums and your PC

An introduction to Picasa. describes the relationship between Picasa and Picasa-web-albums.  A key difference between is that :

• Picasa is a program, written by Google, which runs on your PC even when it's not connected to the internet, and 
• Picasa-web-albums is a Google program that you use through your web-browser and some accompanying space on the internet where your pictures can be stored.
• Google+ Photos is another Google program that you use through a web-browser (Chrome, FireFox, Internnet Explorer, Safari, etc), and a space on the space on the internet where you can keep pictures.   

Both Picasa-web-albums and Google+ Photos use the same space on the internet to store photos for each person.    This means that if there are features (eg finding the URL of an individual photo) that are not  available in one program, then you can just use the other program instead.

This means that each and every picture in your Piscasa-web-albums has a unique URL, ie web-address, where it can be found.

How to find the URL of a picture in Google+ Photos or Picasa-web-albums

• Sign in to Picasa-web-albums, using the google account that owns the album that has the picture you want.   (If you are already signed in to Blogger you may not have to log in again.).

• If you are re-directed to Google+ Photos, either follow the Return link - or use the approach described here to return to Picasa-web-albums.

• Find the album which contains the picture you want to find the web-address for.
  
  
• Click on the album to open it. 
  Note:  each album has one picture, usually the first one loaded, set as the cover.   Be careful to actually open the album, and not just work with the album cover, because the URL for it is not the same as the URL for the picture.
  
  
• Click on the picture you want:  it will open in a large "photo" view
  
  EITHER:
  
  
• Click on "Full details page" in the right-hand bar.
  This opens the picture in a new browser window or tab.
  Copy the contents of the address bar in this new window - this is the URL of the photo..
  
  OR
  
  
• Right-click on the picture once you're in "photo" view, and choose the appropriate option for your browser.   In the current versions, this is:
  
  Chrome: Copy image URL
  Safari: Copy image address
  Internet Explorer: Properties > Copy the URL address shown
  Firefox: Copy image location
  

Job done!   
The web-address of the photo is now in your computer's clipboard, and can be pasted into other places where you might need to use the photo's URL, eg in adding a photo to a post, or as a gadget.

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Adding an RSS feed icon to your blog, using Feedburner

Feedburner's chicklets are used to add the standard "orange radar" button to your blog.  This lets readers to subscribe the RSS feed of your choice.   The information is targeted to Blogger users, but most of it applies to anyone who uses Feedburner.

What is a Chicklet, and why you need one:

Previously I've explained how to remove the (ugly and confusing) "Subscribe to Posts (atom)" link from your blog, and why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important to your blog and how to create a Feedburner feed for it.

But an RSS feed is useless unless people subscribe to it.  So as well as making the feed, you also need to put something in your blog that lets your readers sign up for it.

A standard option for this is the orange square with "radar" markings on it, which many people call a "chicklet" (since it lets your viewer - the chicken? - have access to the feed you are providing).

Feedburner also has options for:

• Using a custom icon from popular web aggregators
  I'm not sure that this is a great idea, because you don't know what feed-reader software your readers actually use, and the whole point of a feed is that you don't dictate how people see your blog.

• Using an icon that promotes Feedburner.  This cute, but I've never seen anyone use it.

How to add a chicklet to your blog:

Log in to Feedburner, using the Google account that owns the feed.

Click on the name of the feed you want to provide a subscription tool for.

Choose the Publicize tab.

Choose the Chicklet Chooser option, from the left navigation bar.

Choose one of the options shown:  the default one is the standard-size RSS-radar-button.

Scroll to the bottom of the screen and either

• Copy the HTML that is shown, and add it to your blog in the same way that you would add any other 3rd party HTML,
  
  OR  (note:  there have been some reports that the option below doesn't work any longer, as Blogger has changed but tools like Feedburner have not help up)

• Choose Blogger from the drop down list beside "use as a widget in", and click Go. 
  
  This takes you to a Blogger screen where you can choose which blog you want to add the gadget to (if your current login has more than one), and what title to use for it. 
  
  When this is done, click Add Widget. 
  
  This takes you to the Design > Layout tab, where you can drag-and-drop the widget to wherever you want it.  
  (When I tried it just now, instead of the layout screen I got a "bad request" message.  However pressing Save and then View Blog brought up the blog with the gadget showing, and I was able to go back and edit the layout later on).

What your readers see:

Your readers will see an item, wherever you put it, that looks like this:

Subscribe in a reader

or



or

or something similar, depending on what option you chose from the Chicklet Chooser screen.

When someone clicks on one of these items, they are taken to either a screen where they choose which feed-reader software to add your site to (if you've used the first option), or to the specific feed-reader software.

Customising the widget code:

If you use the generic RSS button, then you may want to customise the widget code slightly:  It looks ugly not to have a space between the picture and the word "Subscribe" - and it's good to have the phrase "RSS" on the screen because that'ss what RSS-savvy people search for when they're looking at a website and want to find the subscribe option.  I also prefer if the subscribe action opens in a new tab/window, rather than taking the reader away from my blog.

This is quite easy to do, if you put a few line breaks in so you can see that

• the code is actually two separate link statements
• the first one has an image (the orange "radar bars" that it takes from Feedburner)
• the second is a text link
• both of them link to the RSS feed address

So it's quite easy to add a couple of extra spaces (shown as   ), change the text as I've done below, and add   target="_blank"   to both of the links

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Are-You-Blogger" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" target="_blank">
<img src="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/feed-icon32x32.png" alt="" style="vertical-align:middle;border:0"/>
</a>

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Are-You-Blogger" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" target="_blank">

Subscribe via RSS

</a>

I generally also put the option to subscribe to my blog by email and the Feedburner FeedCount item (which shows the number of subscribers) in the same area, to give people options, and to encourage them to subscribe.

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