How to use Picasa-web-albums, without being re-directed to Google+ Photos

This article is about how to you can start Picasa-web-albums in way that stops you being immediately re-directed to Google+ Photos.

Update - August 2016

The article below was written in 2013, and has remained correct until very recently.   But changes which Google started rolling out from 1 August 2016 mean that it is now obsolete.    See the article Picasa-web redirects, August 2016 update for more information.

The following article is kept here for historic purposes only.

What happens when you start Picasa-web-albums?

If you have a Google+ account, either because you only signed up for Google recently, or you had a Blogger account first and then linked your blog to Google+, then you will know that if you go to Picasa-web-albums), you are immediately re-directed to Google+ photos.

When this happens, at the top of the screen, for a few seconds, there is a message saying:

 "Click here to go back to Picasa Web Albums."

But if you do something in Google+ photos, this top banner message disappears, and the only way to get it back again is to close and re-open Picasa-web.   This is tedious - it's a waste of time opening one website just so you can re-direct back to another one.

How to skip the re-direction message

To use Picasa-web-albums, without being sent to Google+ photos, you just need to start it using this link:    https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1

I'm going to put it into the sidebar of my blog very soon, so I have easy access to it.

Is there a problem with using Picasa-web instead of Google+ Photos?

You might wonder if there is a problem with using the old Picasa-web-albums instead of Google+ Photos.

In short, the answer (for now anyway) is no, there is no problem - and I don't expect there to be one anytime soon.

Why?

You still only keep one set of photos in your Google account.   It just happens that Google now have two pieces of software that can access these photos.   One is Google+ Photos, and the other is Picasa-web-albums.    And they both work on the same underlying pictures and photo-albums.   So it won't cause you to run out of space, or to have duplicate copies of your photos.

And Google still need to maintain Picasa-web-albums because there are a substantial number of Blogger users who choose to be anonymous:   Google+ photos simply will not work for them, because it absolutely depends on having the photos associated with an individual, named persons profile.   (And I'm pretty sure that there are no easy ways to transfer ownership of photos from one Google+ profile to another, either, in the event that you want to transfer ownership of your blog.)

Of course we don't know if this will last forever - but my best guess is that you can safely keep using Picasa-web-albums for a good while yet.

---

Related Articles

Transferring your blog to another Google account's ownership

What is Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums - a basic introduction

Creative-Kit photo editor works from Google+, if not from Picasa-web-albums

Options for showing photos in Blogger

Where is the Blogger help forum now?

This quick-tip is about how to find the current version of Blogger's support forum.

27 July update:   I noticed yesterday that Google have changed the process back, and that Blogger's help link now leads directly to the summary page which includes a Community button.   I guess this means they listened - if not to me, then at least to everyone else who complained.




For as long as I have been using Blogger, Google have provided two types of support:

• A set of support articles - some of which aren't up to date - that describe how to do standard things
• A support forum, where people can ask questions, which are answered by other Blogger users. This forum has some people who are tagged as "Top Contributors" who have special rights, like being able to send questions to the Google staff who are also using the foru - but who obviously don't have the time to read all the posts.

Unlike some people, I don't have any problems with the peer-support model. It's 24x7. It supports lots of languages. It gives ordinary people a way to learn more about Blogger, by preparing answers to other people's questions.   It let me build up reputation as a helpful person, and so encouraged other helpers to help me when I got stuck.   It was also a place I could refer to in my own comment moderation policies:   I would rather that people asked for help with their blogs on a public, peer reviewed forum than here on Blogger-HAT where there is not regular review process.

I wasn't to thrilled about the move to a Google-groups based help forum. I can see why using a standard tool is good, but the Group software just doesn't work so well on my small netbook.

And I'm less-than-happy about the way that Google seems to be making it ever-harder to find the forum: a few weeks back they added another click to the process (Gear-wheel > Blogger Help > Community), and now I see there's yet another one (Gear-wheel > Blogger Help > More (the down-arrow at the bottom of the page) Blogger).

So here's a quick link, which I'm going to keep up to date, and put on my sidebar too. Click it to go straight to the Blogger help/product forum:      https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/blogger

How to make AdSense ads in your site load faster

This article is about a new, faster, type of AdSense code which is available, and how you can add it to your blog.

AdSense have announced that they are now providing a new, faster, type of code for their ads.

This code is "asynchronous", which means that other content on the page will still keep on loading, even if the advertisement is delayed.

This a good thing, because it lets your blog's visitors see your posts more quickly.  Also, if SEO matters for your blog, then having it load as quickly as possible is important, because Google likes pages that load quickly.

How to put asynchronous Adsense ads into your blog

Blogger have not commented, but I am 99.99999% certain that the new asynchronous ad-code has not be implemented into the AdSense gadgets that are available from Blogger's Add-a-gadget tool.

So to put it into your blog, you need to:

• Follow the standard instructions for getting AdSense code for a website.

• When you reach the Ad code box, choose 'Asynchronous (BETA)' from the Code type drop-down menu

• Install the code into your blog in the same was that you install any other 3rd party HTLM .

You may also want to use techniques like centering gadgets on your blog - but remember that the changes which you are allowed to make to AdSense code are very limtied.

Troubleshooting

AdSense are still describing this new code as "beta" - this means they're pretty sure it's ok, but it might still have some glitches.   So if you do use it, check out your blog in a variety of browsers (ie Chrome and Firefox) to make sure that it's working, and keep an eye on your AdSense earnings too - if they drop unexpectedly, you might want to switch back, and check if that was the problem.

They recommend that if you are going to use the asynchronous code, you should change all the ad-units on your site at once. This could take a while if you've installed ads inside your blog psots but may be worth the effort.  That said, personally I'm going to wait until the new code isn't described as "beta" anymore before I put into the posts in one of my blogs.

Does it work?

Just before I published this post, I replaced the AdSense ads on this blog with the new versions of the code.  Do you think that it makes Are-You-Blogger load quicker?

Has it made your own blog load more quickly?

---

Related articles:

How to put AdSense ads inside Blogger posts

How to add a gadget to your blog

Installing 3rd party HTML into Blogger

Does search-engine traffic matter for your blog? 5 reasons why not

Tools for measuring how quickly your blogger pages load

How to centre-align gadgets in Blogger

Allowable changes to AdSense ad code

What is Google Friend Connect

This article describes Google Friend Connect, and how it can be used at the moment.

Google Friend Connect (GFC) was one of Google's earlier social-networking attempts, introduced in 2008.

Originally (you can still see the full description here), GFC promised a range of social features that website-owners, including bloggers, could include on their sites. including:

• Add GFC features to a website by installing snippets of HTML code onto the site, or or using the  API.
• Users sign in to your website, using GFC with an existing account (e.g. Google, Yahoo, AOL)
• Users can create or import profiles (e.g. Twitter), discover other users, and send private messages to each other.
• Social gadgets, eg for posting comments and links, rating and reviews, that you could add to your site, which your visitor could use once they had logged in with GFC.
• Website owners can set up questions to be asked when a user used GFC to join their site. The idea was for them to find out their member's interests - and that the information would be on the member's GFC profile.
• Tools to create, manage and send website newsletters, which could be personalised, based on the answers that members gave when joining the community.
• Matching AdSense ads on shown to users looking at your website site to the interests they had listed on their GFC profile.
• Tools to look at your user's interests and your site's membership statistics.

Effectively, Google Friend Connect was a group of tools, and some stuff in the background to make them work together:  The tools were for website owners who wanted to grow a community, and for "information consumers"  (that means people who read blogs and websites) who wanted to sign-up to their favourites sites.

You can find out more about how they were supposed to work in this video - for as long as it's still available on YouTube:

What happened

Less than four years after the launch, Google announced that Friend Connect would be "retired for all non-blogger sites in March 2012".   Their announcement was light on details about what exactly this meant, but reading various blog posts it seems that:

• The GFC dashboard, where users could manage their profiles was turned off
• The site where website owners could get the code to install the GFG gadget  (and do other things like send newsletter or get statistics) was turned off.
• Blogger users could still add teh GFC gadget to their blogs   (until the widget was removed in ... not sure exactly when, but it's not available now).
• Updates from non-blogger sites were no longer sent through GFC.
• Updates from Blogger sites were still send through GFC, and users could continue to get them through Google Reader (until it was turned off in July 2013) or the Blogger Dashboard.

Google didn't provide give any options for moving GFC user or relationship data into any other tools.

And why?

Overall, my guess is that GFC didn't get enough users - or perhaps it just didn't give Google with enough of a platform for the social features that they wanted.  Possibly this was because:

• The things which Google Friend Connect promised a number of privacy / security questions. I can't put my finger on exactly what worried me - but somehow it just sounds wrong to me..
• People asked "Why would I want to share all my interests with someone just because I read their website? I can maybe understand it for a blog, but not for websites in general."

So why did anyone bother - and why is the GFC Followers gadget still on some blogs.

Obviously there were problems with Google Friend Connect:   Personally, I never quite understood it, despite using Blogger long before GFC was introduced.   Even when I started Blogger-HAT in late 2009, GFC just never stood out as something that was important-enough for me to understand.

But some people did use it - and in particular enough Blogger users that Google decided not to turn it off for Blogger.

I noticed that other people had a GFC gadget on their blogs, so I added one to Blogger-HAT - as much as anything because I use it as a test-site to try out features to see how the might work on my other sites.

Finally today, the penny dropped when I saw this a comment "some people that they used their GFC/Blogger Dashboard in place of something like Google Reader" here while I was researching this article.   What it means is that if you signed up to a blog/sites using the GFC-Follow gadget, then you can use the bottom part of the Blogger dashboard instead of an RSS reader.

Today, readers can still sign up for websites which have the Follow on Google Friend Connect gadget on them, but the gadget cannot be added to any new sites, at least not using Blogger's standard tools for adding a gadget to your blog.

The Blogger-dashboard is still being updated with posts from Blogger-based sites that you've signed up to using GFC.

Lots of people are speculating that sooner or later this will be turned off, but no one knows exactly when that will happen.

---

Related Articles:

How to add a gadget to your blog

Where to find the HTML code for popular gadgets

Linking your blog to the social networks

Putting a Facebook Page badge into Blogger

AdWords external keywords research tool is going to be retired

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Related Articles

AdSense vs AdWords what's the difference

 Five reasons why SEO is irrelevant for your blog

Getting started with SEO for Blogger users

New Google+ badges and follow buttons can be used in Blogger

This Quick-tip introduces the new Google+ plugins that Google released in late June 2013

Recently, Google+ Developers blog announced a vastly improved set of Google+ plugins for use with websites.

Most (all?) of them are not yet available as Blogger gadgets, so you have to get the code from the Google+ resources site, and add it to your blog like you would add any 3rd party code.

The new options include a more "industry-standard" follow on Google+ button, and new badges for Pages, Communities and Hangouts, as seen here. (I've previously explained why you might like to have a G+ community alongside your blog.)

They are configurable (size, dark/light, style, etc) - but  you need to work out how to apply the configuration settings to the code.   That said, I've added them to this site without any configuration (see the top of the sidebar), and the default options appear to work well. And it's not actually as hard as it looks: in general you just follow the pattern of:

• Changing   https://plus.google.com/{pageId}     to link to the "thing" (Page, Community, Profile) that you are displaying in the badge.

• Using the "<div class="g-page" data-href="https://plus.google.com/{pageId}"></div>" form of the code, ie the one that's completely inside a "div" statement.

• Adding extra information to it using "data-"   for example,   "<div class="g-page" data-href="https://plus.google.com/{pageId}" data-layout="landscape" data-width="200">

There is one interesting sentence in the announcement:

"Existing badges will stick around for up to 90 days, giving you time to configure the new version for your website. After 90 days, we'll automatically upgrade any Google+ badges to the new design."

I wonder how that will relate to the Google + gadgets that are available in Blogger's Add-a-gadget function now - maybe they will be automatically be changed too.   (In 90 days ... yeah, right ...)