How to make a new category / folder in your The Old Reader subscriptions list

This article explains how to make new categories for listing and organizing feeds in The Old Reader.

Recently I migrated from Google Reader to The Old Reader, in readiness for Google Reader's upcoming retirement.

(If you're not sure why I bothered, you might like this simple explanation of RSS and why it matters for Bloggers, in particular ones who want to research things).

I used Google Takeout to migrate my existing subscriptions from Reader to The Old Reader. (And yes, I did carefully file that exported file away, just in case I want to migrate to some other service.)

Because my subscriptions in Google Reader were organized into categories, these categories were automagically imported into my The Old Reader account.

But today I wanted to change my categories - and it wasn't obvious how to do this from either my settings or profile.

How to make a new category AKA folder in your The Old Reader subscriptions list

To add a new grouping to the subscriptions in a The Old Reader account:

• Click one feed that you would like to move to into the new category - and hold it down.

• Drag it to the empty space below your last folder, and drop it into place.  
  Note:   as you do this, the words "NEW FOLDER" appear at the bottom of the list of categories.

To move other items from your existing subscriptions into the new category, just drag-and-drop them too.

How to rename your new folder

To change the name of a folder/category in The Old Reader:

• Double-click on the existing name - this makes the name open for editing.

• Type the new name, and press Enter to save it.

How to change the order of your categories

You can re-organize your folders - but only one at a time.

• Click the folder that you want to move, and hold.

• Drag-and-drop it into the new place.

Putting feed-items into multiple categories?

For the moment, this is not possible: each item that you subscribe to in The Old Reader can only be in one folder.

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Related Posts

Understanding RSS, and why it can make you a better blogger

Google Reader is being retired

Choosing a replacement for Google Reader

Why enabling a mobile template just became more important to some bloggers

This QuickTip explains some recent announcements from Google  about SEO and mobile devices, and what they mean for Blogger users.

If SEO matters for your blog, and your blog is relevant for users with moble devices, then you pretty much need to enable a mobile template.

Why?   In short, because this recent post from Webmaster Central says that for Google the ranking of search results on mobile devices is now impacted by how well sites are optimized for mobile devices.

This means that if you haven't set up your blog for mobile, then it won't come up so highly in the search results seen by mobile users.

As well as the template, there are a range of other factors that affect how well your site works for mobile. Blogger users cannot control a lot of them, though we can think about:

• Page load speed 
• Using the Pages gadget as the top menu bar, rather than a linked-list or labels gadget, - because it converts into a drop-down menu in when a mobile template is applied.

Also, remember that if you make a home-page using a custom re-direct, this will only work in your desktop version. The re-direct isn't applied for mobile viewers, they just see your most recent posts in mobile-friendly tiles.

How to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into Blogger

This article shows how to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into Blogger

Why Open Graph 

Neil Patel recently explained on Quick Sprout why having Facebook and Twitter tags installed into your blog is important.

To cut his long story short, if you install them, then when someone shares your blog-post, the shared item looks better. This means that more people are likely to follow the link and/or share it themselves - so your blog gets more traffic, and people think you're more professional and thus credible.

Neil also stated that if you don't use Wordpress, "you’ll need to manually generate meta tags for each page on your site" - but fortunately for Blogger users who are brave enough to edit their template that's not true.   Blogger provides lots of SEO-supportive features these days, and you can easily use them to make OG-tags work on your blog - even if you haven't quite got your head around what OG is - personally it took me months to understand what it was all about.

The following sections have more details about how to do this.

How to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into a blog made with Blogger

Edit your template in the usual way.

1     Tell Google about the namespace:

Find the opening <html  ... statement, and add the Open Graph namespace information to it.   The code to add is

xmlns:og='http://ogp.me/ns#'

and it goes after the existing namespace statements.   For example, my current tag looks like:

<html b:version='2' class='v2' expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection'
xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'
xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b'
xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data'
xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'    >

or like this after the line is added:

<html b:version='2' class='v2' expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection'
xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'
xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b'
xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data'
xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'
xmlns:og='http://ogp.me/ns#'>

2   Add the Open Graph tags

Find the closing </head> tag.
(Hint:  I often search for just </head   ie without the closing >, in case there's something else in the tag in my template)


Put the following code immediately before it:

<!-- Begin Open Graph metadata --> 

<meta expr:content='&quot;en_US&quot;' property='og:locale'/> <meta expr:content='data:blog.canonicalUrl' property='og:url'/> 

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName' property='og:title'/>
<meta content='article' property='og:type'/>

</b:if> 

<meta expr:content='data:blog.title' property='og:site_name'/> 

<b:if cond='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl'>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl' property='og:image'/>
<b:else/>
<meta content='URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-IF-THERE-IS-NOT-A-THUMBNAIL-PHOTO-IN-THE-POST' property='og:image'/>
</b:if> 

<b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription'>

<meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' property='og:description'/>

<b:else/>

<!-- Still looking for a way to use the post snippet if there's no description -->

</b:if>

<!-- End Open Graph metadata -->

This code needs to be adapted for your blog.   In particular:

• en_US

This value is fine if your blog is written in US-English. But if you are writing in UK-English, you may want to change it to en_GB.   

And if you are using a different language altogether, you should change it to the two letter code for that language-territory combination:   see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internationalization/  for more information about the codes that they support

• URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-IF-THERE-IS-NOT-A-THUMBNAIL-PHOTO-IN-THE-POST 

Replace this with the web-address of a picture that you want to use if the individual post doesn't have a thumbnail  - perhaps your logo, or a blogger logo.

• App-ID and Facebook-Profile-ID

If you have got an App-ID associated with your blog, perhaps because you signed up to use Facebook commenting with it, then you may also want to add the following statements, just before  the "<!-- End Open Graph metadata -->"

<meta content='App-ID' property='fb:app_id'/>
<meta content='Facebook-Profile-ID' property='fb:admins'/>

Of course putting in your own values instead of the ones in red   (I'm assuming that if you knew enough to get an App-ID, then you will know how to find it, and also about the risks associated with linking your Facebook-profile-ID to your blog.)

3    Check it's complete:

Preview the template changes to make sure that they've worked, and then save them.

Troubleshooting

Testing the OG tags

Facebook have a tool that you can use to see what values the OG tags in your blog have.
It is found here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

Enter the URL of one of the posts from your blog and click Debug to see the OG tags which Facebook finds for it.

Descriptions

The Descriptions tag will only work if you have Search-descriptions on (Option > Search > Meta-tags > Enabled), and have entered a search description for each post using the post-editor.   I had hoped to be able to use post.snippet when this wasn't available, but have not been able to work out the correct syntax to do this.

Pictures

Facebook would like you to use an image that's at least 200x200 as your posts's thumbnail image or as the default image to use for posts that don't have one.

If the picture that you use is smaller than this, they do appear to use it.

However you will see the following message when you use a debugging tool to look at what tags Facebook is reading from your site:

og:image should be larger
Provided og:image is not big enough. Please use an image that's at least 200x200 px. Image 'http://3.bp.blogspot.com/XXX.png' will be used instead.

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Related Articles:

How to add Twitter-Cards to Blogger - these are the Twitter equivalent to Open Graph tags

Advantages and disadvantages of editing your Blogger template

Post.thumbnail:   a summary image for a post

How to edit your Blogger template

Linking your blog to the social networks

Choosing a replacement for Google Reader

This post tells the story of my choosing a replacement for Google reader.

Every so often, I do a post here on Blogger-HAT which is a little "different".

Today, I'm starting the quest to choose a replacement for Google Reader (yes, the turn-off was announced back in March, but there's no point in starting these things too soon - I expect that a few options have improved considerably since then.

One way that this post is different is that I'm going to hit publish very soon, with the post just started not just finished.    So if you're a subscriber and want to see what I end up with, you might like to sign up on Facebook or somewhere, so you get a notification when I've finished.

So let's get started:

First stop:  google.com   [google reader replacement]
A cool 66-million results.   Yeah, I'll zip through those in no time.

Scanning down the list, I don't recognise some of the top placegetters:

The first three are from Google News.   No, don't want to check them - I want comparative reviews, no press-releases.

A post from "howtogeek" - nah, I don't want to be a geek.

One from "workflowing.net" - sounds like a sponsored listing, even though it's not.  But the summary does say "Note: This post is a running list and will continue to be updated with new options and " - let's take a look.   They have five options:
Feedly
Feedbin
Feed Wrangler
Fever

Feedly is the only free one.   They're making the usual mutterings about "look what happened to the last free option" - but I remember Picnik:   it wasn't free, but it still got shut down.    So I'm not hung up about free = no control.

Not enough to compare yet, need to check another list or two.

6 June update:   

Saw this comment on another site.

Looked atThe Old Reader - Clicked on the sign-in with Google and see that The Old Reader is requesting permission to: View and manage your Google Contacts - That's a NO
Looked at Feedly - Clicked on the Get Feedly for Chrome and it states it can Access your data on all websites and Access your tabs & browsing activity - That's a NO

I'm not so fussed about whether something accesses my tabs and browsing activity - but I don't want a Chrome app:   I need something that works in whatever browser I happen to use, be it IE in the office or Firefox or Chrome at home.

12 June:

I found a reference to Rolio somewhere.    Signed up - even though the screen looked rather bare and pale ( = trendy, but harder to read).   Then I subscribed to one feed, and got an email confirming that I'd subscribed.   Ahh ... no, that's going to get wayyy too painful.

16 June:

I'm starting to get concerned about the number of de-recommendations I'm seeing.   There seem to be lots of reasons not to use tools, and no compelling replacement.

So I decided to try The Old Reader.

The bit about it wanting to access your Google Contacts may be true - but it's not necessary.    I decided to keep the two services separate, and signed up with a totally new account, no Google Contacts requests involved.

It looked a bit odd to start with, but once I realized that it doesn't actually work with IE8, and switched to Chrome, it worked ok.   Personally I think the design is a little ugly - but the basics of Google Reader are there.  

Reading their blog, it's still a very young product - three developers, now getting help from the wider community, but still working out a sustainable model for their product.    So it could start charging subscriptions (I'm not keen) or showing ads (doesn't worry me, provided they're not too intrusive) or get bought of by a large player (I'm guessing that won't be Google :-)  ), and I might be searching again.   But it's worth the risk for a while I think.

25 July Update

I was quite happy - until the last few days when TheOldReader has been unavailable due to a hardware upgrade that went wrong.   It's back now, on Friday morning - but it's got me wondering when it might go down next.

So I went looking for other web-browser based feed readers - and was disappointed in how few there seem to be.    One option I've tried is the Digg reader.  For this, I had to sign in with my Google account - though discovered upon later logins that it's possible to log in with either Facebook or Twitter, too.  It won't work with IE8, but is ok on Chrome.   It imported my Google Reader subscriptions ok.   The top-level interface is fine - although the list of feeds doesn't show which ones have new items in them.   The display of individual items in feeds is a little ugly, though.

So at this stage, I'm not sure which option I'll stick with.

29 July

It looks like the decision is being made for me:   I just logged in to The Old Reader, and say the following banner message at the top of the screen:

We have disabled user registration at The Old Reader, and we might be making the website private. If we do, unfortunately your account will not be transferred to the private site, so you might want to export your subscriptions as OPML and start looking for an alternative solution. More details are in available in our blog: http://blog.theoldreader.com

Having read their blog-post:   the plan is to make the site private in two weeks time, unless someone else steps in with a way to make it work.

Not a good week for me - a lot on at the day job.   So I won't be moving anywhere quickly ... but am definitely looking for alternative web-delivered, browser-agnostic RSS-reader options.

Criteria for choosing:

The classic approach to choosing software is to determine your requirements, then evaluate options against how well they meet them.    But I've found it hard to distil my requirements.

Bottom line - it must let import and let me read the RSS feeds I have now, and let me add new ones.

Pretty important:

Not a stream:  I want to catch up with everything in each feed every so often - not just a stream of what's recent.

Must read RSS feeds - not tweets or other stuff.

Nice to have:

Browser independent

Used my Google account (maybe)

Tell Google more about the posts in your blog with Webmaster Central's Data Highlighter - now supporting more data types

This QuickTip is about the new types of "things" which the Data Highlighter tool knows about.

In December 2012, Google introduced the Data Highlighter (DH) - this is a tool that lets you point to items in your blog posts LINK and use them to teach Google how you write about certain things.

Now they have announced that this tool has been extended to cover schema.org definitions of seven new types of things:

• Products
• Local businesses
• Articles
• Software applications
• Movies
• Restaurants
• TV episodes

The basic instructions for using the DH tool have not changed: visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter".

Google now advise that "The tagging process takes about 5 minutes for a single page, or about 15 minutes for a pattern of consistently formatted pages."

After you have done some tagging, you can verify Google's understanding of your structured data. If Google has understood your work correctly, and you "publish" it to Google, then, when your site is displayed in search results, Google will use enhanced displays of information "like prices, reviews, and ratings".

It will take time for this to happen: Google needs to re-index your blog-posts before it takes effect.

Note:  schema.org is a markup language that this tool is based on.    However not all item types are covered by the tool at the moment.   So, for example, we can only use the Data Highlighter tool to show Google how articles, products, TV-show episodes etc are represented on our blogs.    It doesn't go into more detail for things like blog-posts which schema.org does have definitions for.

How to access your Google Custom Maps after migrating to the new Google Maps

This QuickTip is about how to access your existing Google Custom Maps, once you have started using the new Google Maps interface being introduced in mid 2013.

Google is now offering the opportunity to migrate to new Google maps.  (ref: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-new-google-maps-now-available.html)

However one disadvantage is that "My Places", which includes Google Custom Maps, is not part of the new Google Maps interface.

At the moment, you can temporarily switch to the old interface by clicking the "options" icon in the black navigation bar and

• Selecting "My Places" OR
• Clicking the "classic maps" link.

Or you can get to them by navigating to https://www.google.com/maps/myplaces

From here you can see and edit your existing Google Custom Maps, but you cannot create new ones. To do that, you need to use Google Maps Engine Lite - which was announced recently.

How to keep your Blogger password safe

This QuickTip introduces a useful post about password management from Google.

Giving computer or password-management advice to people who don't have lot of experience with IT has always been challenging: there is a lot of background information that you need to know before it all starts to make sense.

And eaching colleagues to use a mouse back in the 1990s was a lot easier than explaining on-line services and security is in the twenty-teens!  I know that I'm not the only person who struggled to explain the difference between email and gmail to someone who just didn't understand "gmail is one type of software for doing emails" - he just kept asking "so what does fmail do?"

To help with this challenge, Google have released a very carefully written article with advice about managing passwords. My guess is that lots of research went into working out exactly how much someone who uses a few on-line services needs to know, and how to explain it simply.

They key points they cover are:

1. Use a different password for each important service
2. Make your password hard to guess
3. Keep a copy of your password somewhere safe (and yes, it's ok to write it down, provided you write it somewhere safe)
4. Set a recovery option.

And of course the article has plenty of useful links to show you how to do these things for your Google account.

There are a couple of things that I would like to say a little more about.

How to identify your important on-line services

This is a very personal process, and may vary over time.

Google, of course, think that your Google account is important. But that may not be true for everyone. For most people, the important services are:

• Ones to do with money (on-line banking, AdSense, AdWords, other affiliate accounts, Amazon and others that you have your credit card listed with)
• Their primary email account - the one that you set as the password-recovery email for other online services.

After that, it's very individual. For some people, Facebook is important, while other people don't use it at all. Ditto Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube etc. Job-hunting websites may be very important at certain times in your life, and of no importance at all in-between times.

Personally, I started deciding if passwords were "important" or not years ago: ones that are vital always get a unique passphrase, while lower-priority ones usually get an obvious variation on one password that I use in lots of places.

Keeping your passwords somewhere safe

The issues you need to consider here are probably wider than you think.

Most people plan to deter hackers and other malicious people. Keeping passwords in a paper notebook in your bedside table, not beside your computer, is probably enough to keep things safe from them. (Unless of course you are so famous that hackers might break into your house looking for your password - and if that's the case, you probably don't need to read this post!)

But it might not keep them safe from obsolescence - for example from becoming out-of-date when you change a password or set up a new account on your computer but don't immediately walk upstairs to update your notebook.

And it most certainly won't work if there's a fire in your house: your passwords will be safe, but totally inaccessible too.  And while it's easy to say that if your house burns down you've got more important things to worry about, for people who make their living on-line, losing access to their accounts could make things a lot worse.

Personally, I haven't worked out a good solution for this yet: it seems to me that it's some kind of balance between keeping password in safe on-line services (as much as any electronic "vault" is every really secure), and using a range of off-line options.

What worries you about managing your passwords?