Delete, change or re-format the "Showing posts with label" message.

This article explains options for deleting, or changing the content or formatting of Blogger's "Showing posts with  LABEL.  Show all posts" message and it's ugly grey box.

If your blog has a Layout or Designer template, then when a person who is reading it chooses a label value, Blogger displays a page with (a summary of) your most recent posts with that label.

If there are more posts that Blogger is willing to show on one page, then there will also be "older posts" and "newer posts" links at the bottom of the page.

And - unless you have removed it - there will also be a message at the top of the page saying "Showing posts with label yourLabel. Show all posts"

Reader actions that cause a visitor to see this message include:

• Clicking a value in your Label gadget

• Clicking a label value that is displayed in your post header or footer
  (unless you have turned them off in the Layout > Blog Posts edit option).

• Clicking a link that you have manually set up to show posts with a specific label (eg if you have used a Pages gadget to make a menu bar, and one of the options in it has a value like http://www.yourBlog.com/search/label/yourLabel?max-results=999

Unfortunately Blogger does not provide any way to customize or configure this message.
.
But it is easy enough to totally delete it, or to change the formatting, or to change the text..

How to delete the "Showing posts with LABEL" message

There are two ways that you can remove the "Showing posts with Label.   Show all posts" message.

Option 1:   Remove the code totally.   

To do this,

1  Edit your template in the usual way

2  Find the following text

<b:includable id='status-message'>
<b:if cond='data:navMessage'>
<div class='status-msg-wrap'>
<div class='status-msg-body'>
<data:navMessage/>
</div>
<div class='status-msg-border'>
<div class='status-msg-bg'>
<div class='status-msg-hidden'><data:navMessage/></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style='clear: both;'/>
</b:if>
</b:includable>

3   Delete that text and replace it with

<b:includable id='status-message'>
<b:if cond='data:navMessage'>
<div>
</div>
<div style='clear: both;'/>
</b:if>
</b:includable>

(If you just delete the text and do not put the replacement in, then it is possible that Blogger will add that section back in again later.)

Option 2:  Hiding the message using CSS

To do this, add  this CSS rule to your template in the usual way:

.status-msg-wrap,
.status-msg-body {
display: none;
}

(This approach is less risky because you do not need to edit your template, and because it's easier to change later.   But some people have reported that on their template, it has not worked.)

How to change the format of the "Showing posts with LABEL" message

Some people don't mind the actual  "Showing posts with Label.   Show all posts" message.   But they want to format it in a way that suits their blog's layout and colour scheme.

This is easily done, by adding some extra CSS rules to your template in the usual way.

To change the format of the message text, use rules like this:

.status-msg-body {

text-align: left;

line-height: 1.4;   

font-weight: bold;

color: red;

padding: 0.5em 0.3em;

width: 100%;

}

To change the grey-shaded background or the box:

.status-msg-wrap {
width: 100%;
margin: 0 auto;   /*  keep the auto statement if the width is less than 100%, so the box is centered */
position: relative;
}

There are a wide range of options - check with CSS reference guides for the options.   You may need to carry out some experiments with your template and how it looks with various options to decide on the best combination for your blog.

How to change the "Showing posts with LABEL" message

There are several ways that you can change the text in the "Showing posts with Label.   Show all posts" message.

Option 1:   Just replace it with some text

To show a sentence of your own instead of Blogger's standard message, 

1  Edit your template in the usual way

2  Find the following text

<b:includable id='status-message'>
<b:if cond='data:navMessage'>
<div class='status-msg-wrap'>
<div class='status-msg-body'>
<data:navMessage/>
</div>
<div class='status-msg-border'>
<div class='status-msg-bg'>
<div class='status-msg-hidden'><data:navMessage/></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style='clear: both;'/>
</b:if>
</b:includable>

3   Replace the line in bold (ie <data:navMessage/> ) with your own words.

For example, you might say

<b:includable id='status-message'>

<b:if cond='data:navMessage'>

<div class='status-msg-wrap'>

<div class='status-msg-body'>

Posts in this category include (use the Older Posts link to see previous posts):

</div>

<div class='status-msg-border'>

<div class='status-msg-bg'>

<div class='status-msg-hidden'><data:navMessage/></div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

<div style='clear: both;'/>

</b:if>

</b:includable>

To show the searched-for label value in your message, you need to use the   <data:blog.searchLabel/>   tag. For example, you might say

<b:includable id='status-message'>
<b:if cond='data:navMessage'>
<div class='status-msg-wrap'>
<div class='status-msg-body'>
Posts about <data:blog.searchLabel/>  include (use the Older Posts link to see previous posts):
</div>
<div class='status-msg-border'>
<div class='status-msg-bg'>
<div class='status-msg-hidden'><data:navMessage/></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div style='clear: both;'/>
</b:if>
</b:includable>

Note:  if you are going to use this tag, then you need to choose your label values very carefully, so that they all make sense.   For example, in one blog I have some posts labelled "For quiz organizers" and others labelled "Finance", "Organisation" etc.    There is no way that I can write a sentence including the labels that makes sense for both of these.

---

Related Articles:

Types of Blogger template

Using Labels to categorize your posts

The Pages gadget is a menu bar for Blogger

How to edit your Blogger template

How to add a new CSS rule to your blog template

How to show AdSense ads that are non-standard sizes

This QuickTip is about AdSense's new custom-size-advertisement option, which lets you choose the height and width of each advertisement that you show on your site.

Today, AdSense announced that we can now make ad-units in any size that we want - within certain restrictions.  

They don't use the phase in the text of their announcement, but the post-URL for their says that this feature is  "the-next-evolution-of-responsive-ads" - so I guess it can be seen as part of the efforts to cater to mobile-readers and mobile site-publishers, even though these ads themselves don't adapt to according to the size of your visitor's screen.

What will custom-size text ads look like:

For text ads, AdSesne, will work out the best number of text ads to show in each ad-block, and the individual ads will be shown the same way they that the look inside the standard ad-sizes.

Note that they say

"For unique ad unit sizes, our system will need some time before it can optimize the number of ads shown."

My guess is that this means that initially they will just fit a standard text-unit ad within your custom size, but may manage to figure how how to fit in more content over time, as they observe what display options make most money for you (and thus for them).

What will custom-size display ads look like:

For display ads (ie ones that show pictures which the advertiser has created), AdSense will work out the best size ad to show in the custom space that you select; the only guarantee is that "the selected ad will not be larger than the space requested".

There are some accompanying  rules about maximum and minimum AdSense ad-unit sizes, and any custom ad size that doesn't satisfy these restrictions simply won't appear on a page.  These rules may change (so do go and check the official version) - but to start with they say that:

• Only one dimension can be greater than 300 pixels
• The minimum width is 120 pixels
• The minimum height is 50 pixels
• Neither height nor width can exceed 1200 pixels.

One more point:   a while after the 300x600 ad-unit was introduced, they also added a rule saying there could be no more than one of these units per page.   With custom ads, they simply say:

As always, please use your best judgement when using custom-sized ad units; ad units similar in size to the 300x600 ad format will be subject to similar placement restrictions.

How to create a custom-sized AdSense advert for Blogger

1. Log into www.adsense.google.com using your AdSense account.
2. Start to create an ad unit in the usual way,
3. Select "Custom ad size" from the Ad size drop-down and enter the width and height that you want for for your ad unit.
4. Copy and paste the ad code into the HTML source code provided by AdSense, and add it to your blog in the usual way.

Note: you will only be able to do this if you have gone through the full AdSense sign-up process. If you do not have a custom-domain and signed up for AdSense after the fast-track process for hosted-content was introduced, then your only option is to choose standard ad-sizes from the regular Add-a-gadget > Adsense process.

Finding the co-ordinates of a place in the new Google Maps

This article explains how to get the co-ordinates for a particular location in the new and old Google Maps interfaces.

New vs old Google Maps

In mid 2013, Google started rolling out a new version of Google Maps, which even now (Nov 2013) is still in Beta-testing and only works with Chrome and Firefox on desktop (ie not mobile) devices.  It's related to Google Maps Engine Lite - a better tool for creating custom map - not not exactly the same product.

When I looked at Maps Engine Lite, one of the things I noticed is that there are a number of features which are missing from the new tool- and the lack of a right-click feature on map-positions means that lots of functions are accessed in a different, possibly non-intuitive, way.

How to find the co-ordinates of a particular place in the new Google Maps

Left click on the exact place that you want co-ordinates for.


Notice that there is a small circle which radiates at that place, or the nearest on-street place.   It's a little this, except that it a white/light shade, rather than grey:

In the top left of the map, a small display box appears, showing the nearest street address and a pair of latitude / longitude co-ordinates.

For both the street-address and the co-ordinates:

• You can copy / paste these as text.
• If you hover your mouse over them, then inside the maps a small circle radiates out from that spot.
• They are links: if you click on them, then the map zooms and centres at that place, with a large red marker and the street-address name or co-ordinates displayed beside it.

Note that if the place you originally clicked on is an on-street address, then the address and and co-ordinates will point to the same place. But they are not necessarily the same. (I think this is a mistake on Google's part: if they show an address with co-ordinates immediately under it, most people will assume that the two relate to the same place, but that's not true at the moment. It may change soon-enough though.)

How to find the co-ordinates of a particular place in the existing Google Maps

Right click on the location that you want to find the co-ordiantes for.


Choose "What's here" from the pop-up menu.

At this point, Google Maps will:

• Show the latitude and longitude co-ordinates in the maps search box
• Put a green arrow showing the exact location that you clicked into the map itself
• Put the street address on the nearest on-street location into the maps search-result list, along with a marker to this location on the maps.

So of course you can copy-and-paste the co-ordinates from the search box.

(The pictures in this article above barely look like maps because I'm led to believe that one of the Terms and Conditons for Google Maps is that we cannot put screenshots of the mapping data into how-to articles. So I've kept the places particularly zoomed-in, to avoid any distinguishing features.)

---

Related Articles:

How to embed a Google custom map into your blog or website

Google Maps Engine Lite - a better tool for creating custom maps

Adding tooltips or hover text to Blogger posts and gadgets

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.

But tool-tips can be used on other things too, including pictures and text: put your mouse over This Text to see one.

They can be particularly useful if you want to provide a translation for a few words from another language, or a definition for technical terms, but don't have enough to make a glossary worthwhile.

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 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.

---

Related Articles:

Adding a new CSS rule to your template.

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

Using marker-text to find places in your HTML

Stop Google from "fixing" pictures that are loaded through Blogger

This article is about how you can stop Google from automatically "enhancing" pictures that are loaded in Blogger - even if you do not have a Google+ account.

Google has started automatically "fixing" new pictures as they are added to your blog

In May 2013 Google added the Auto-Enhance and Auto-Awesome features to Google+ Photos. These are meant to make your pictures look better, ie more like those which are taken by professional photographers.

These features are turned "on" by default. And because:

• Photos loaded using Blogger are stored in Picasa-web-albums, and
• Picasa-web-albums and as Google+ Photos actually have the same collection of photos - yes, even for accounts that do not use G+,

the effect is that auto-enhance and auto-awesome are applied to all images loaded through Blogger's post-editor, header-picture loading tool and gadget-picture loading too;.

Why is this a problem

In many cases, these features work as they are intended to, and the illustration that is shown on your blog is more attractive than the one you uploaded - it's brighter, clearer and loads faster.

But there are some situations where the effect of the auto-enhancement is not good. These include:

• Pictures with some transparency - which is auto-corrected to either light grey or black
• Pictures that are intended to be dull / dark / shady - these are automatically lightened.]
• Pictures that are loaded at a certain photo quality - are automatically downgraded to a lower quality (which is fine for viewing on screen, but not so fine if you actually want to use your blog to share high-quality photos).

Blogger users who have a non-white background, and who deliberately upload images with a transparent background so their blog background will "show through" the image have been particularly annoyed by this.   And I have been less than impressed by the faint grey "wash" added to the background of some of my diagrams - for example:

The left-hand picture was auto-enhanced, the right hand one was not

How to turn off photo auto-enhance if you use Google+

If your blog - and the account you use to post to the blog - is linked to your Google+ profile, then you can stop your photos from being changed by:

• Opening the Google Plus settings tab.
• In the "Photos" section, un-ticking "Automatically enhance new photos"

This stops the auto-enhance and auto-awesome tools being applied to any new photos that you upload from now onwards using Google+ Photos, Picasa-web-albums or any Blogger feature that lets you load a picture (the post-editor, the header widget settings, the picture gadget settings).

Alternatively, you can turn off the auto-enhance and auto-awesome changes that are made to specific pictures by by finding them in Google+ photos and un-ticking "Auto-enhance" in the "More" menu.

How to turn off photo auto-enhance if you do not use Google+

There is currently no option in Piscasa-web-albums to turn off the auto-enhance feature.
This means that if you load photos to either Blogger or Picasa-web-albums, using a Google / Blogger account that is not linked to a Google+ profile, you cannot stop auto-enhance from happening.

Some people have suggested that the way around this is to:

• Temporarily link the blog to a Google+ profile (either your own one, or one that you create just for the purpose - eg "Mr John Smith")
• Turn off the auto-enhance feature using the Google+ procedure listed above
• Fix up the damage to any pictures that you loaded through Blogger or Picasa-web-albums between mid May 2013 and today by finding them in Google+ photos and un-ticking "Auto-enhance" in the "More" menu.
• Unlink the blog from the Google+ profile.

However I do not believe that this is entirely correct:   my tests suggest that whether or not photos are auto-enhanced is controlled by the settings on the Google+ account that is used to upload the pictures, no matter whether the blog is attached to a Google+ profile or not.

(I've been testing this a lot because I have a number of blogs that are linked to Google+ Pages that are in my personal profile, but which I generally post to using a different Google account that has a more generic name like "Editor, Table Quiz Helper", and it's own separate set of Picasa-web-albums:   I want to be able to hand these accounts on to my successor when I leave the community groups that they are for.)

Previously, the main options that I identified and recommend were:

• Making a Google+ profile for the Google account that you use to upload the pictures, or

• Giving your Google+ account permission to upload pictures to the Picasa-web-albums of the Google account that owns the blog.  
  This option is tedious, but more line with Google's terms and conditions for use of Google+, while still letting a separate non-individual Blogger account own the underlying blog and supporting pictures etc.

However another option, which I now think is better, is to:

• Make a Google+ Page for the blog
• Give that Page it's own login-name and password - effectively turning it into a separate new Google account
• Give that new Google account administrator rights to the blog
• Make the setting change described above in "How to turn off photo auto-enhance if you use Google+" while you are logged in as the new Google account
• Use the new Google account to load photos to the blog:   this will mean that the photos are placed in the Google+ Photos album associated with the page, and so you can access them using either Picasa-web-albums or Google+ Photos.

Other Options

If you really don't want to use even a minimal Google-plus account, then your options are limited.

Use another picture host

You could load the pictures that you want to use in your blog to another picture-hosting service (eg Flickr) - however doing this means that you posts will not have a thumbnail image.

Minimise the damage

If you make sure that pictures which you load have a white background (or whatever colour background your blog has) instead of being transparent, then the impact of auto-enhance will be a lot less.    I have found that if you use a .png file rather than a .jpg, the background is white instead of transparent.   (This is fine for me, because I use white blog backgrounds.)

Wait for things to change

A very simple fix would be for Picasa-web-albums to use default values of "No" instead of "Yes" for auto-enhance and auto-awesome, or to set these up as settings in the PWA profile.

Another option is that Google may improve the enhancement algorithms (ie rules which control how pictures are "touched up").

Fingers crossed, one of these will happen soon.

---

Related Articles:

Giving another Google account Administrator rights to your blog

Turning a Google+ Page into a separate Google account

Post.snippet and post.thumbnail - how they are derived from your blog post

How to add a picture to your blog, using the picture gadget

Making a Google+ profile for the Google account that you use to upload the pictures,

Giving your Google+ account permission to upload pictures to the Picasa-web-albums

How to let another person load pictures to your Picasa-web-album

This article shows how to let another person (Google account) upload pictures to your Picasa-web-albums:   this is one possible way to work around the issues with Google's photo auto-enhance feature.

Picasa-web-albums and your Google account

Previously I've described Picasa desktop vs Picasa-web-albums, and noted that you can upload pictures to your PWA folders using either of the two pieces of software.

Each album and folder in Picasa-web-albums belongs to one Google account (which may or may not have an associated Google+ account).

Google now provide a tool to transfer Picasa-web albums from one account to another - but only once ever in the life-time of the album.   You cannot transfer ownership to one person now, and to another person in  a year's time (which is quite different to the way you can easily transfer other aspects of your blog to a new owners).

And Google also provide a way for an account owner to let another Google account add photos to the owners albums.

How to let another Google account add photos to one of your  Picasa-web-albums.

Log in to Picasa-web-albums using the Google account that owns the photo-albums and other related things (eg blogger administration rights), and which you want to be the main owner/administrator of your photos.
(See Stop being automatically redirected from PWA to Google+ Photos if you have difficulty staying in Picasa-web-albums.)

View the  individual album that you want to allow someone else to add photos to.

Click the Share button in the right-hand panel.

If your account does not have a Google+ Profile, then clicking the Share button opens the basic Picasa-web-sharing invitation.   In it:

• Enter the email address of the Google account that you want to give upload permissions to, and any message that you want to send them., 
• Tick "Let people I share with contribute photos".   
• Then click Share Via Email.

Standard Picasa-web-albums album sharing settings screen

If your account has a Google+ Profile, then clicking the share button open a "Share on Google+" window.  To use this to give someone permission to upload to the album:

• Remove any suggested circles
• Enter the Google account name(s) that you want go give upload permissions to.
• Click Share
• When you return to the standard Picasa-web-screen, in the right-hand-panel, click the "allow uploads" icon to the right of the name that you entered.

Google+ Profile photo-album sharing request screen

Allow shared-with users to upload pictures to your album

What the people you have invited will see

The people who you have invited to contribute pictures to your Picasa-web-albums will get either an email message or a Google+ notification telling them about the permission you have given them.

When they go into Picasa-web-albums, they will see the album that you have shared listed as an album that they can see - and they will have an Add Photos link where they can upload pictures in the same way they would add photos to their own albums.

Sharing several or all your albums at once

Picasa does not seem to provide any options for this at the moment.

---

Related Articles:

Understanding Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums

How to set up a Google+ Profile for an existing Blogger account - and why you might not want to

Transferring ownership of your blog to someone else

Stop being automatically redirected from PWA to Google+ Photos

How to set up a Google+ profile for an existing Blogger account

This article is about how to set up a Google Plus profile for a Blogger account which already exists.  It looks at the history of Blogger and Google accounts, how to make a Google+ profile for a Blogger account, and what the consequences of this might be.

Google+ and Blogger accounts

Once upon a time, you could sign up to use Blogger without using Google at all.

Then Google purchased Blogger, and over time the two types of accounts were slowly combined - and everyone who had an old "Blogger-only" account was asked to convert it to a Google account, which also gave them access to other features like Picasa-web-albums, Analytics, etc. People who signed up to Gmail first found that this made them a Google account that had access to email (via a gmail address), and Blogger, PWA, etc.

More recently, Google introduced Google+.

Today, people who sign-up to use Blogger are asked for their real name during the registration process, and are automatically set up with a Google+ account at the same time. But it is possible to opt out of this and not use Google+ with the Google/Blogger account. And there are many people - and organisations - who have Google accounts which were created before Google+ was launched and which do not currently have a Google+ profile.   This is is not a problem until the owner finds there is some feature in Google+ which affects how Blogger operates, eg the auto-enhance features in Picasa-web-albums / Google+ Photos.

Luckily it's very easy to set up a Google+ profile for an existing Blogger or Google account.   And doing this does not force you to actually use Google+ for anything:   it's possible to set up the Google Plus account, use it for whatever you need to, and then never use it again.

How to set up a Google+ account for an existing Blogger account

Log in to Blogger using the Google account that you use to edit / administer your blog at the moment.


In another tab or window in the same browser, to go www.plus.google.com


If your Google account is not already set up for Google+, then the Google Plus registration screen will open, with some details automatically filled in from your Blogger/Google account profile.

Check these details, enter a gender and date of birth, tick the "I understand the Picasa" changes box, and press Upgrade.


Depending on how Google has interpreted your name from your Google / Blogger profile, you may get an error message like this:

The name you entered doesn't seem to meet our Names Policy. Check it over and try again.
Did we mess up? Click here to submit an appeal (usually processed in 24 hours).

If so, you can either submit an appeal (by clicking the button) or change the name that Google suggested from your Blogger profile - for example by removing any hyphens from it..   Notice that they don't actually ask for your real name - even though this is what Google Plus is supposed to have.


Once you have resolved any problems with the name etc, your Google Plus profile will be created.

Customizing your Google+ Profile - or not

After your profile is created, the sign-up tool takes you through two more screens where you can connect to other people, and to choose people or pages to follow.  

If you want to use your Google+ profile, then it is a good idea to do this.

And if you don't connect to any people, you will get a message telling you that you might be lonely - just click Continue Anyway, unless this concerns you.

Has this linked your blog to Google+?

Absolutely not.  

The procedure described above simply creates a Google+ profile for the Google account that you are using.    It does not change your blog settings in any way, and any Blogger posts that you make will still be attached to your Blogger profile, not to the Google+ profile.

If you want to attach your blog to your Google+ profile, then you can change this by clicking the Get Started button on the Google+ tab, and accepting the changes.    But this is not compulsory - and it may not be a good idea on if you are an administrator of any team blogs, because this switch affects all your blogs.

Terms and Conditions

Notice that you were not asked to agree to any Terms and Conditions at any point in the Google+ account creation process - apart from agreeing that you understood the impact on your Picasa-web-albums.

However there are, of course, some.   You can read them here.  There is also a Names Policy, which says that:

Google+ profiles are for individuals. If you want to use Google+ to represent someone or something other than yourself -- like your business, your band, your family, or your pet -- you should create a Google+ page instead.

So if your Blogger account represents something other than you (eg I have one for my choir, and one for a local parents group), and you convert it to a Google+ profile, then you will be breaking Google's rules - even though they did not point this out to you during the conversion process, and even though there are some aspects than you cannot set for a Google+ page.

So you need to be aware of this, and weigh up whether the benefits of having a non-compliant Google+ account are worth the risks involved.

At the moment, it's just not clear how much Google are viewing this as a problem, and whether they will do things like delete Google+ profiles that break the rules in this way.    By comparison, Facebook do this.   But the Google+ situation is a little different because of the historic nature of the separate accounts.

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Related Articles:

Understanding Google accounts

Ways to let other people contribute to your blog

The "follow by email" gadget: an easy way to add an email subscription to your blog

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 theme:  you can only control them by editing the gadget colours in your theme.

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.

You can get a list of the people who have signed up to receive your blog-posts by email - be aware that this is all people who have subscribed, not just ones who used the widget.

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,

How to get a list of people who are subscribed to your blog by email

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

Customizing Feedburners verification message

Dealing with the "Keyword not provided" problem in your statistics

This article explains why the proportion of "keyword not provided" visits to most websites is increasing, and gives you options for finding out what keywords people are searching for when they reach your blog.

Why the percentage of not-provided search visits to your blog has increased

If SEO is important for your blog, and if you therefore watch the Stats > Traffic Sources tab in your Blogger dashboard or your Google Analytics results, you'll probably have seen that proportion of your search-visitors whose keyword is "not provided" has gone up a lot recently, to be more-or-less 100% of your Google search traffic.   (In the Blogger Stats tab "not provided" isn't shown - but the number of visits per keyword is now massively less than the vists from Google.)

This is no accident: Google is now witholding the keywords that people use, and (says that) this to protect your visitor's privacy. The issue has been widely discussed in sites like SearchEngineLand.

Opinions vary, but many people believe that

"Not knowing keywords has big implications if you use data about what people search for to decide how to develop your blog." [tweet this quote].

For example,   I publish listings of the contents of old (ie graphical copyright expired) song-books in a particular niche on one of my blogs.  There are far too many songs for me to load the full text or sheet music of all of them. And this is a niche with lots of competition:   there are a zillion websites distributing song-lyrics (most illegally).  But by watching the search-terms that led people to arrive at certain pages, I can identify particular songs that people were looking for and not finding anywhere else (the so called "long tail" of search keywords). If these songs are now in the public domain, I can make a dedicated page for them, and share what I know - in many cases after doing more research and pulling together information from a range of different sources.    Not knowing the keywords that people use to get to the book-listing pages would totally destroy this approach.

What you can do about it

So far I've identified three alternative options for getting data about what my visitors are searching for.

Ask for user-provided information

I've used Google Docs to make a data-collection form, and invited my visitors to use it to tell me about songs they are looking for.

The advantage is that I can ask them for richer information than just the keywords, eg where / when they remembmer it from, multiple snatches of the lyrics, what style the music is, etc.

But the disadvantage - and it's a big one - is that it only works for people who actually get to my site and then go into the other page where this form is kept, and fill in the form. I don't want to go into details - but let's just say that I haven't been run off my feet!

Get data from WebMaster Central

If you have verified your blog in Google Webmaster Tools, then the Search traffic > Search Queries tab shows the queries that have caused your blog to show up in search results pages, as well as how many times this has happened and what position, on average, you had in these pages.

This is richer information than you get from Analytics or Blogger-Stats, which only tell you about people who actually visited your blog.

But the disadvantages are that data is only kept for 90 days, and it only shows the top 2000 keywords.   Both of these are issues for me - some of my song-book contents are seasonal - if something is being looked for now, then the moment (week, month) may have passed by the time that I've noticed the trend, researched the song and written it up to a standard that I'm happy to publish. So really I want to checking the logs for nine months ago, so I can research things that are likely to be popular again next year.

Get data from AdWords

Advertising campaigns are the one place where Google is passing the search-keywords through to back-end systems. And because of this, Adwords does have data about what your visitors are searching for - provided you've set it up to collect this data. To get it up:

Firstly, sign up for an AdWords account. You probably have to deposit $10 into the account to get started - but you don't actually need to set up any advertising campaigns or spend any money after that.

Then link your AdWords account to your Google Webmaster Central account.

Once this is done, Adwords will start collecting the search-keywords for your blog. To get at the data:

• Log in to AdWords
• Select "All Online Campaigns,"
• Make an empty campaign (if you haven't got one already)
• Go to the "Dimensions" tab
• Change "View" to "Paid & organic".

AdWords will display your stats, since you signed up and linked your account. This includes the top search terms that users got to your site with, number of clicks, number of queries and some other measures too.

I'm only just starting to assess how well this will for for my song-listing site - will update this post when I have more specific information about how well it works and whether I can get actionable results from it.

What other alternatives have you found?

Leave a comment below, and I'll expand this list as we find out more options for accessing keyword-based search traffic information.

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Related Articles:

Using Google Docs to put a survey questionnaire into Blogger

Six reasons why SEO doesn't matter for your blog

How to edit a picture in Picasa Web Albums or Google+ Photos

This article is about how to edit pictures in Picasa web albums, and how to use Picasa-destop to edit pictures in your Google+ Photos.

Picasa-web-albums vs Google+ Photos

Picasa-web-albums is a on-line photo storage and management tool, now owned by Google.   It is the on-line version of Picasa, a desktop-tool.   (Learn more about PWA and Picasa here.).

Google would ideally  like everyone to use Google+ Photos.

But there are many people who store pictures in albums that are not associated with their personal Google+ accounts:  these may be for businesses, schools, clubs, etc.

So it is likely PWA will continue to exist for a good while yet.   And I am sure that Google appreciate this:  they have made a number of changes to Picasa-web-albums to make it work better both with Google+ and without it.

Options for editing pictures that are are uploaded to Google

• If you have a Google+ account, then there are two ways of editing photos that you have loaded to Google (it doesn't matter whether you loaded them using Picasa-web or Google+Photos).  
  
  Both of these options are described below.   Using the Google+ editor (option 1) doesn't need any software installed on your PC.   But it's very slow to load, offers you less control, and is currently missing some key features - and it only works if you are using Chrome as your web-browser, not Firefox or Internet Explorer.

• If you don't have a Google+ account, then Google / Blogger only provides only one way to edit photos that you have loaded to it (apart from downloading the photo, editing it on your PC and re-uploading it - which changes the URL you need to use to link to the photo).   This is Option 2 below.

Option 1: Using Google + edit a picture in Picasa-web-albums

Log in to Picasa-web-albums, using your Google+ account.  
(See here for what do to if you are automatically re-directed from PWA to Google + Photos)


Navigate to the photo that you want to edit.  
(Make sure you're looking just at that photo, not at the album it is in - this can be confusing in cases when the photo is also the album cover.)

Choose Edit in Google+ from the Actions drop-down menu.

This opens a new window or tab.

If you are not signed in with your Google + account, you will be invited to join.

If necessary, sign-up for Google+, or sign in with the correct account, and start again.

Now, you will be looking at the photo in the Google+ Photos picture view.   From here you can do simple edits:

• Crop the photo
• Tag people
• Rotate the photo

as well as using the other Google+ Photos features (share, slideshow, delete, zoom)

To do more changes, choose Edit (yes, you need to choose it a 2nd time) from the top menu.

If you are not using Google Chrome, then you will get a message saying that the Google+ photo editor only works with Chrome, and giving you a link to download it.    If necessary, switch to Chrome and start again.

Wait while the photo editing tools are loaded  (this does take a while, perhaps even a minute or two).

Once loading is finished, the current Google + Photo editor functions are available from the right-hand bar, like this:

At the moment these are:

• Tune (brightness, contrast, saturation, shadows, warmth)
• Selective Adjustment (lets you specific areas for other options to be applied to)
• Details (sharpness and structure)
• Crop and Rotate

• Black and white
• Centre focus (adjust brightness and blur around the centre)
• Drama
• Frames
• Tilt-shift
• Vintage
• Retrolux.

When you  are happy with your photo, click the Finished Editing tick box at the bottom of the right-hand bar, and the changes will be saved (this may take a few moments).

You are left in the open Google+ Photos tab or window, not returned to Picasa-web-albums.   When you go back to Picasa-web-albums and refresh the page (F5), the changes that you made in Google+ photos will be shown.

Option 2:   How to use Picasa-desktop edit a picture in Picasa-web-albums

This option only works if you have Picasa desktop software installed on your computer.

Log in to Picasa-web-albums, using your Google account.

Navigate to the photo that you want to edit.   (Make sure you're looking just at that photo, not at the album it is in - this can be confusing in cases when the photo is also the album cover.)

Choose Edit in Picasa from the Actions drop-down menu.

A pop-up window will tell you that your web browser wants to open another program (ie Picasa-desktop) to do the editing.

(The exact text is something like:   "External Protocol Request:  [your web browser] needs to launch an external application to handle picasa: links.   The link requested is ... The following application will be launched if you accept this request   c:\Program Files\Google\Picasa\Picasa3.exe ... If you did not initiate this request, it may represent an attempted attack on your system.   Unless you took an explicit action to initiate this request, you should press Do Nothing.")

Choose Launch Application.

Picasa will load on your computer, and you will be asked to confirm that you do want to edit the selected picture.   Choose Edit Image.

A copy of the picture that you want to edit is opened in the desktop-Picasa editing tools window.

From here you have access to all Picasa's standard photo editing tools (including the text tool for adding watermarks).

The photo you are working in is a copy taken from your Picasa-web-albums, it is not the same as the copy of the picture which may already be on your computer.   It is stored in a directory of your Picasa-installation called "Online Edits", not in your main My Pictures directory.   So if you choose a function like "Back to Library" you are taken to the Online Edits folder inside Picasa-desktop.

From here you can use all of Picasa-desktop's editing features, including straightening, red-eye reduction, text-editing, re-setting the neutral colour.    The only exception is the Edit in Creative Kit option:  this is still one of the options in Picasa-desktop, but if you use it, it takes a long time to load and then eventually says "Error connecting to Creative Kit... error 500" - and explains that Creative Kit has now been discontinued.

When you are finished editing, to put the edited photo back into the same Picasa-web-album that it came from, with the same file name and URL:

• Make sure that you are logged in from Picasa-desktop to the same Google account that you were using initially.  
  (Picasa-desktop remembers your sign-in details from the last time you used it - if it's different from what you need, just choose sign-out from the top-right corner, and then sign in to the correct account when asked.)    
  
• EITHER:

• Choose Share on Google+    (if you are using a Google + account)
• In the sharing-details window that opens, change the Album-name from Online Edits to  the album that the photo came from originally and choose Upload
  
  OR
• Return to the Online Edits folder / library
• Save the changes using the Save icon
• Choose Enable Synch from the Sharing drop down.
• Wait for the changed photo to upload.
  
  (I think Google have some work to do here - you can only control synching for the whole album, not for individual photos.   I expect this to be improved in the future.)

Job Done:  your Picasa-desktop-edited photo appears back in your online Picasa-web-albums with the changes that you just made, and any existing links to it (eg from your blog posts) will show the changed version of the picture.   And you can put the edited picture into your blog posts or other websites in the usual way.

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Related Articles

Introducing Picasa and Picasa-web-albums:   an overview

Stop automatic redirection to Google+ Photos

How to put a picture into a blog-post

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

What is Creative-Kit, and how to use it

This article describes Creative Kit, which was a photo-editing tool for enhancing pictures in your Picasa-web and Google+ albums.

A little history: Picasa, Picnik and Creative Kit

In 2002, a company called Lifescape created a program called Picasa, which people could use to manage photos on their PC.

Google purchased this in 2004 and then integrated it with web-storage, linked to a person's Google account, to make Picasa-web-albums: see Understanding Picasa and Picasa-web-albums for more information about how they work together with Blogger.

Picasa has some photo-editing functions (cropping, red-eye removal, sharpening, lightening, making collages, etc).  Useful, far easier to use than Photoshop - but without features that some people wanted. So in 2010, Google integrated a photo-editing tool from Picnik, a small company that was offering a subscription-based photo hosting and editing service.

Picnik's editor did some cooler things than Picasa, (applying visual effects, watermarks, etc).   The tool  had some serious fans, and a quirky culture which saw them show messages like "packing the lunch" "watching the flowers", "chasing butterflys" while Picnik was loading.  The type of messages that are funny the first few times, but quickly get tedious. And people using Picnik via Piscasa-web-albums often found that it was very slow.

In 2012:

• Picnik announced that they were closing down their separate photo hosting service, and moving the product to Google+.

• Google's announced that they were were closing Picnik, and using Picnik's engineers to “continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products."   (ref:  closure announcement).

Today, the original Picnik photo-hosting-and-editing service is most definitely closed.

The Picnik photo editor has been either replaced with or re-badged as "Creative Kit", and is available through Google+.  They may have intended to make it available through Picasa-web-albums too - but as I noted in previously, this feature isn't working. Possibly this is about selling additional storage space:   Picasa-web-albums are available to any Google account, while Google+ Photos is only available to named individuals.   So each person can have lots of Google / Picasa accounts (with free storage on each one), but only one account Google+ account.

How to access Creative Kit

To start creative Kit, so you can edit a photo with it:

• Go to Google+, and log in to your Google account that has Google-Plus enabled.
• Go to your Photos page (which may be on the left-sidebar, or under the More tab on the left sidebar if your screen is small)
  

• Go into an album, and open the photo you want to edit.
• On the menu at the top of the screen, click the Edit button.

This opens the photo inside a window with photo-editing tools. The screen just looks like another set of options within Google-Plus, but actually you are now inside Creative Kit, and you can use it to edit your photo.

When you are finished editing, choose the Save button from the top-left hand side. This give you an option to apply your changes to the current file, or to save a new copy of the file.

• If you choose Replace then any places (eg blog-posts) that link to the existing photo will now link to the edited photo.

• If you choose Save a new copy then your existing file is not changed and a new copy of the file will be made in the same folder as the existing one but with a slightly different name.

If you upload pictures into your blog-posts inside Blogger, then the picture files are stored in Picasa-web-albums LINK. If you have Google+ enabled for your account, then you can access these photos directly through either Picasa-web-albums or through Google+, even if you have not linked your blog and your Google+ profile. So you can use the Creative-kit method of editing these pictures, even if you didn't load them via Google+.

What features are available in Creative Kit

At one point Picnik used a "fremium" approach: Basic features were free for everyone to use for free, while people needed to sign up and pay a subscription to use the Premium ones. This has changed, though,and now features are are all free.

At the time of writing, the features include:

Basics

• Black and White
• Bocal B&W
• Boost
• Soften

Camera

• Lomo-ish
• Holga-ish
• HRD-ish
• CinemaScope
• Orton-ish
• 1960s

Colours

• Tint
• Vibrance
• Duo-Tone
• Heat Map 2.0
• Cross-Process

Touchup

• Blemish Fix
• Shine-be-Gone
• Airbrush
• Sunless Tan

Google Plus Exclusives

• Daguerreotype
• Reala 400
• Green Fade
• Magenta Fade
• Polaroid* Plus
• Sun Aged

Troubleshooting / Where to get help

Creative Kit uses Adobe Flash Player. If Creative Kit doesn't work inside Google+, try installing a newer version of Flash Player.

If that doesn't help, try:

• Clearing your cache

• Clearing Flash shared objects
  These are data files are created by the Creative Kit on your computer, like cookies.  To clear them, go to Abobe's Flash Player help web site.
  The Settings Manager that you see is not just an image; it's the actual Flash Player Settings Manager. Scroll through the list of sites and select www.picnik.com and www.gstatic.com.
  
  Click the Delete Website button for each, and confirm the deletion.
  
  Open the Global Storage Settings Panel. Check both of the following boxes:
  - Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer.
  - Store common Flash components to reduce download times.
  
  Once you've cleared your local shared objects, clear your browser cache again.
  

• Using a different browser, eg Chrome or Firefox.

• Disabling ad-blocker or flash-blocking extensions

For more assistance, there is a Creative Kit help-centre in Google:
https://plus.google.com/100432630524345907101#100432630524345907101/posts

Is Creative Kit just Picnik with a new name?

Most probably: the controls and features are very similar, and the press-releases seem to tie up. There is one screen that names both while the photo-editor is loading in Google+>Pictures.

But on the other hand there's no official confirmation either, and there are some product differences. It's possible that Google's engineers were simply inspired by the former Picnik colleagues to create similar controls, and that the underlying photo-editing tool is different. Who knows.

What we do know is that many of the much-loved Picnik features are available in Creative-Kit, provided you're willing to load your photos to a Google+ account.

TL;DR

You can edit a photo in Creative Kit by uploading it to your Google+ account, then choosing the Edit button when you are viewing it.

This may be the same Picnik photo editor that was available in Picasa-web-albums until 2012. Or it may not. Either way it lets you crop, re-colour, apply lots of filters etc for free.

Don't want to put your photos into Google+? Bad luck, there's no other way to use Creative Kit / Picnik on them at the moment. Find another on-line editor instead.

Update

In mid 2013, Google Plus replaced CreateKit with a new photo editor (which only works on computers running the Chrome web-browser).    Therefore it is no longer possible to use Creative Kit. 

Picasa-web-albums still has  a link to Creative Kit.   But this does not work, and PWA now has other options for editing pictures that have been uploaded to it via Blogger or otherwise.

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Related Articles

Creative-kit works with pictures accessed through Google+, but not Picasa-web-albums

Adding a picture to a blog post

Introducing Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums