Are You Blogger: September 2014

Archive for September 2014

Understanding Google Accounts

Pasuruan IT Store September 24, 2014 Add Comment

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

Blogger, Google and Google+ accounts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting a Google account

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

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

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

Account names look like email address

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

willy.worm@yourMail.com

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the confusion and problems:

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

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

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

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

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

Blogs, Blogger and Bloggers, Google Inc vs google - some basic terms

Giving a Google+ Page its own loginID and password

Understanding Google Apps accounts

Fixing conflicting Google and Google Apps accounts

AdSense and AdWords - understanding the difference.

Moving some posts from one blog to another

Pasuruan IT Store September 23, 2014 Add Comment

Pasuruan IT Store

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

Previously, I've written about

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

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

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

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

How to decide

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

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

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

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

And then choose the smallest one.

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

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

Moving all posts from one blog to another

Moving individual posts, or pages, from one blog to another

Converting Posts into Pages

The Difference between Posts and Pages

Did you know that your blog is in the cloud?

Pasuruan IT Store September 16, 2014 Add Comment

Pasuruan IT Store

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

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

He explained that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your blog is already in "the cloud"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More information

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

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

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

The cloud, that big and nebulous thing that everyone seems to be using - does anyone really know what it is? Cloud computing is actually pretty simple: instead of storing information on a specific computer, it gets stored in a networked system that allow access from anywhere that you have an Internet connection. Cloud computing is leveraged to deliver a wide variety of applications. More of our lives are lived in the cloud every day, so we put together this list of the most common uses of cloud computing to help people understand what's going on. File storage and transfer: extend your hard drive by storing documents, apps and other files elsewhere. Also, if you're cleaning up your computer and decide you want to keep some files on your desktop intead of your laptop, cloud systems are the most convenient way to move them over. Backup: everyone has lost something irreplaceable, whether it's a precious picture, a key piece of financial information or the manuscript for the next Great American Novel. Backing up your files remotely is recommended by many data experts, and cloud services are the best way for individuals and companies to do this. Entertainment: Streaming media has become big. Rather than packing computers with large swathes of music or video, many people are opting for services that serve up content on demand, which often means access to more entertainment options than if storing everything locally. Productivity: When's the last time you got home and realised you forgot to pick up something at the store for dinner? Many cloud services offer ways to plan your day, take notes and organize your whole life. collaboration: for business or pleasrure, getting put from multiple people can be hard to pull off, especially when people live far away. Cloud-based apps lets you work together to build documents, spreadsheets, presentations, brainstorms and a host of other ways to join family, friends, co-workers and business partners throughout the world. Social media: from big-name services to small niche communities, people enjoy gathering on-line to share and discuss their favourite topics of interest. The next time that you like, retweet or pin something, keep in mind that you're doing it in the cloud. Email: Web-based email was a cloud service before the cloud was even a thing! Instead of downloading electronic messages to your computer, the cloud lets you view them anywherever you want. There are many other ways that cloud computing is used on a daily basis, of course, and SingleHop has a blend of Cloud services. We'd love to hear about some of the ways you use your cloud on a daily basis.

What you can and cannot know

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

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

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

But is it safe?

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

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

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

What do you think?

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

Understanding Picasa: Picasa-web-albums are Picasa "in the cloud"

Planning a social-media strategy for your blog.

Letting other people post to your blog.

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

How to find other blogs to read

Pasuruan IT Store September 10, 2014 Add Comment

Pasuruan IT Store

This is a quick guide to searching for other blogs to read, now that Google's blog-search tool has been retired.

Locating interesting blogs and websites to regularly read - applying a magnifying glass to the internet

If you write a blog, then reading other blogs "in your niche" (ie about similar topics) is a really good idea. This lets you keep up with what's going on and what other people are saying, and helps you to think up new blog-post ideas.

An RSS-reader is a great tool for managing everything you need to read: it's basically a folder with links to all the blogs and websites you want to follow, which shows when they have been updated. To make best use of it. as soon as you see an interesting website, go to your RSS reader software and subscribe to the website's RSS-feed there-and-then: otherwise you will almost certainly forget. Alternatively you can subscribe-by-email - provided the site offers that option - but many bloggers find that their email gets overwhelmed if they do this with more than a few sites.

Some RSS software suggests websites that you might like to follow - although generally I've found that the suggestions are pretty broad and not overly useful.

So - how else can you find new blogs to read?

How to find other blogs to read

Google's BlogSearch tool, RIP

Google previously gave us a dedicated blog-search tool at www.google.com/blogsearch, which was available from various places, and still comes up in the search results if you google "how to find other blogs"

But apparently this is now re-directing to the Google home page. And even though I'm seeing that the re-directed URL is https://www.google.com/blogsearch?gws_rd=ssl - the search results that it returns are most definitely not just blogs.)

You can still get to it without re-direction at the moment, by going to https://www.google.com/?tbm=blg, but the predictions are that this won't work for much longer.

Google News

This tool is available at https://news.google.com

It looks like there are a couple of versions available.

In the newer one, you can apparently click Search Tools, select the “All news” drop down, and choose “Blogs.

In the older one, which I still have, to prioritise blogs in your news-feed you need to:

Click on the gear wheel (button with a picture of a cog on it) near the top right of the screeen,
Click on the Settings link that is to the right of Save, and
Under Sources set Blogs to More and Press Releases to None
Click Save Changes.

At the moment, the News content from blogs isn't the best - but indications from Google are that it will get better as news-bloggers register their sites.

Search

Old-fashioned searching is probably one of the most powerful way of finding blogs. To use Search to find other blogs:

If you follow a topic, then you should regularly search in Google for interesting questions in your niche, but not choose the most-obvious results from the results page. Instead choose the ones you haven't heard of, but which look promising.

Use a different search engine - either a mainstream one like www.bing.com or www.yahoo.com, or a more specialist custom search in your niche.

Include the word "blog" when you are searching. (This returns websites that use the word "blog" as well as blogs, so isn't perfect. But it sometimes helps to turn up new sources.)

Search for interesting key words together with the phrase "site:blogspot.com". Now, this will only give you sites that don't have custom domains - but some of them are great blogs.

Browse

One of the most important ways of finding sites is by - finding sites. Be curious with everything you read: ask who wrote it, who else they follow, and what they are telling you about where they got their information.

Visit their sites, instead of just reading their blog posts in your RSS subscription tool, and look at their blogrolls and lists of interesting sites, and see if there are any you don't know about.

Follow links in their posts, and assess if they are pointing to blogs that you should be reading.

Look at their Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites: she who they follow or interact with - and then check if those people have blogs.

Ask

This may seem strange but simply asking your readers for suggestions can unearth some blogs that you won't find any other way. Of course it won't work if you ask on your blog and don't have many regular readers yet - but you have nothing to lose.

But there's no reason why you cannot ask in other mediums - eg by leaving a question on your Facebook page or the page of anyone else who might know (and will let you write there0

Similarly you could post a question on Twitter, and a time when people with lots of knowledge about blogs in your niche are likely to be posting.

Use Blogger's Profile linking service

This approach was first described in 2007 - which seems like eons ago. And today won't work for bloggers who have a Google+ profile. But it might work still for new bloggers, in particular.

Look in a Blog Directory

These are also somewhat old-hat, but some blog directories like Alltop and Technorati are still useful if the topics they feature suit your niche.

How do you keep the list of blogs that you read fresh and up-to-date?

Understanding RSS

How to make a real website using Blogger

The Ten-Minute-Guide to starting a blog

Pasuruan IT Store September 01, 2014 Add Comment

Pasuruan IT Store

This article is a fast-and-furious guide to starting a blog - with a focus on getting started rather than researching to the nth degree.

Months ago, I started a properly researched article about "how to started with blogging". It's still a work in progress, and when it eventually gets finished it will have some great advice about researching blog-concepts and choosing great names.

But today I needed a quick-and-dirty version, for someone who doesn't need SEO or a fancy name. Here's what I shared with them.

How to get started with making a blog

Know your objectives

Think about what you want to do, what you want to write about, and what you want to achieve from it.

Write this down.

Be prepared to revisit these objectives every time you need to make a decision about something. Imagine you need to choose between a girly-pink looking template or rugged-outdoors one. Simple - just look at your objectives and see who you're writing for.

Choose a platform

There are lots of alternatives for tools that you can use. Mostly though, it boils down to Wordpress or Blogger.

Wordpress disciples will tell you that it is The Only Way, usually with a far-away look in their eyes.

Personally, I don't like zealots, and I think that Blogger is good-enough to get started with - and there are ways to change to Wordpress later on if you want to put the work into learning it.

Choose a name

Every blog needs a name. What that name is really doesn't matter that much. You just need one that you can live with: If you become wildly popular, then the rest of the world will love whatever you chose. If you don't, then it won't be due to the name you chose.

So go to the platform you chose, and start a blog with any old name that isn't taken already. Just make sure that you can remember what it is, and that you're not too embarrassed to tell your mother about it (this alone will stop you from choosing anything really stupid).

Do some basic setup

My guide to what this involves with Blogger is here.

Even if you don't use Blogger, you probably need to think about the issues covered there, especially about security vs public access.

Write

Start writing

Write two posts of 300+ words each. Link them to each other: for example If post one is about crossing Australia by camel, then post two might start "When we got to Adelaide after our camel ride, we decided to try ... - and you need to put a link from the words "our camel ride" back to post one: this is called cross- linking.

Write another five posts. Put cross-links between them. Don't link every post to every post. But make sure that every post has 2-3 links, and that every post is linked to at least once.

Write five more. Cross link them to each other and the first seven.

Then go back to your objectives, think about how hard it's been to get this far, and figure out if you want to spend any more time on this hobby. If you do - keep writing.

How to get readers

If getting other people to read your stuff is one of your objectives, then in no particular order:

Email a link to your mum or your dad. Ask them to visit every day, just in case you've said something new.

Put a link in your email signature.

Share your posts on Google+ (even if you just share to Public - it seems to make a difference)

Contribute to some forums / bulletin boards where you can put links to specific posts as part of an answer. But I really do mean contribute. Your other content should vastly outweigh your self-links, so you aren't seen as a spammer.

Set up a Twitter account for the blog, and do the same thing.

Set up a Facebook page. Invite all your friends to like it. Every time you post to the blog, post a link to it on the FB page too.

f you think that Google+, Twitter and Facebook are a waste of time - then that's fine as far as your personal life goes. But if you want to promote a blog or website, then you simply have to get over yourself and use social media for blog promotions anyway.

How to make your blog stand out from the rest

If you've got some big objectives about having lots of readers or being famous, then you'll need to make your blog really stand out. This is a never-ending process, but here are some good first steps:

Stir up trouble: Be controversial or outrageous in what you write. But do be sure you have the stomach and the stamina needed: People will discover that it's your who's writing the posts, even if you try to hide it. You will get abuse, and maybe legal threats.

Also, remember that writing 2 witty posts is easy, doing it every day / week or even month is a lot more difficult.)

Choose a niche, ie specific topic to write about, that no one else has written about. Or one that others have covered, but go for a different angle - eg if everyone else has described how they partied through Australia on the Oz Experience Bus, you focus on how befriended pensioners as you crawled through Queensland on the local bus, travelling only one town a day. Or something.

Spend some time googling possible niches before you start. But don't get caught in the trap of forever researching and never writing.

Read some other similar blogs, see what is successful, and do your own variation on that. Not the same thing - that's just plagiarism and you'll get caught. But something similar.

Prepare your posts in private, publish when they're pristine. No one wants to read your typos.

Use good photos or illustrations. If you don't have a picture to go with something, don't bother blogging about it.

Job Done!

That's it: getting started with blogging in one 10-minute stream of consciousness (+ editing time :-) )

There are about 494,432,987 million similar articles on the internet, so if you need more suggestions, Google "how to make a blog", and take it from there.

Happy posting.