Dreaming of Harley-Davidson? Win Just Hanging out on Social Networks

How much time do you usually spend hanging out on social sites? Do you have a lot of friends there? Indeed, most of us have become addicted to social networks. Virtual communication gradually replaces the live one. Psychologists are concerned about that, but it’s not quite correct to view social networks as an absolute evil. Thanks to social networks lots of people fall in love, make friends or just chat when they feel happy, sad, lonely and are ready to share that with the understanding community. It would be impossible to have so many friends from all over the world without websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others. Moreover, social networks help us find and join the groups of like-minded people, get new knowledge, inspiration, share our content or artworks and even make money.





By the way, what would you like to get as a present for your social activity? A Selfie stick, iPod Shuffle 2GB, $100 on PayPal, Smartwatch Pebble, iPad mini, iPhone 6, Canon EOS 6D, MacBook Pro, Harley-Davidson Street or Tesla Model S? Let us tell you how to get the prize while you are choosing it.


TemplateMonster carries out a “Social Stock” contest. It will be easier to become a happy winner if you spend a lot of time on social networks or have many friends there. Some of them may be planning to launch or renew their website or blog... It’s a good time to ask them about that now. 

The rules of the contest are simple. Actually only five steps separate you and the gadget or vehicle of your dream. Here they are.


1. Apply for registration in the contest.
2. Get a 10% unique promo-code for all TemplateMonster’s products.
3. Share it with your friends.
4. Check how many times it has been used and choose the prizes accordingly.
5. Enjoy the prizes and the fact that you’ve helped your friends to start their own website. 

By the way, you will be provided with some useful instruments after registration. They will simplify the task even more for you


Please click this link to know more details on the contest terms and its wonderful prizes. Don’t you think that it’s really cool to get such costly presents just for helping your friends get a top-quality website template with a 10% discount and launch a nice modern website that will bring their business to the next level? So, what are you waiting for? Have you picked out the prize for yourself? Then, register for “Social Stock” contest and start collecting points. Take this contest as an online game and win. Good luck has finally fallen upon your doorstep!

Search Trends That Will Impact Online Revenue

Search Engine Optimization has a very good impact on online marketing as it will make marketing to be done very much simplier. Anybody can use SEO but many bloggers fail to master the power behind search engine optimisation and in this post by our partner Vebology I will show you how you can market your blog or product by using search trends.

There are seasonal search trends which are mostly affected by economic events and Google updates, These events come out when major public adventures take place.

Below is an infographic provided by vebology to give you more detailed information about the most profitable trends that an online marketer may use to grow their business.

How to use your own icons in Google My Maps

This article shows how to use your own icons to label places in maps that you make with the My Maps' feature in  Google Maps.




My Maps is a tool provided by Google Maps that lets you make a map showing a specific collection of places.

Why is this helpful?   Well, you can search for a collection of places in regular Google Maps, and share the maps you can see - but if you do this, other people will see different places that are marked on the version of the maps that Google shows them, not the same as the places that are marked for you.    To guarantee what set of places other people see, you need to make a map in My Maps, and then you can share this specific map.

My Maps provides a standard set of icons that can be used for labelling places - and these days it's a pretty impressive standard set.   But it still doesn't include numbers, letters or other labels - and the icons provided may not be styled the way you would like.

Luckily Google have provided a way for you to use any icon to label points on a map you make.


How to use your own custom icon in a My Maps map

Make your map, and add the place(s) you would like to attach a custom icon to.

In the bar on the left hand side, hover your mouse over a place-marker which you want to assign a specific icon to.   

The line for that item will highlight slightly, and a small colour / paint-tipping icon appear will to the right of the place description, like this:




Click on the paint-tipping / colour icon

This opens a small hover-window, where you can choose the colour or icon shape.



Click the button at the bottom labelled More Icons.

On the pop-up that opens, you are able to select an icon from one of the categories available (currently Business, Crisis, Facilities and services, Points of interest, Recreational Activities, Transport, and  Weather).   Don't select any of these.



Instead, at the bottom of the screen, enter in the URL (ie website address) of a  file that you want to use as a marker.  (.jpg  .png  .bmp, and .gif   files can all be used).

Click Add Icon.

This adds the picture that you linked to the list of items available under Custom Icons, and selects it.



Click Ok to apply this icon to the point-marker that is being edited.



Job done!   Your map now has a marker that is made from your own image.



Things to be aware of / Troubleshooting

  • You need to load the image file to a file-host which handles picture files yourself:   there is no option to load a file directly from the More Icons tab.
  • The image file needs to stay, unchanged, in the place where you linked to - and that place has to be available to anyone who might look at the map: if you are sharing the map with "anyone in the world" then the markers need to be available like that, too.
  • The image file should be small to speed up loading time:   images in the set of markers I use are approx 2k each.
  • Markers will be displayed in the same small size as Google's markers, ie 32x32 pixels:   there's no point using a large, detailed photograph if it will shrunk down to so tiny that the details can't be seen.
  • You must provide the actual URL of the picture you want to use as a marker, not the Google Photos shareable link.   (Because the latter includes more than just the photo).
  • I don't know any way to bulk-load many custom icons into a My Maps map at the same time.   (There was a way to do this in the old Google Custom Maps, but this doesn't work in My Maps.)    Or to make one icon available to many / all your your My Maps at once.   If you have a solution for this, please leave a comment below.
  • If you your icon background to be transparent, then you need to create it in RGB colour mode: Icons with a transparent background created in Indexed colour mode don't work.



Related Articles

File hosts:  places used to store pictures used in Blogger

Hosting pictures outside of Google Photos / Picasa Web Albums

How to get shareable links to Google Photos

Making someone an author on your blog

This article shows you how to set up another person (ie another Google account) as an author for your blog.

Google, Blog-Authors and Blogger

Setting someone up as an "author" in Blogger is one way that you can let other people post to your blog.

It's easy to do: you tell blogger to create an invitation, which sends the person an email saying you would like to be an author, they click a link in the email and then sign in with a Google account to accept the invitation. And once it is done, the person can write and edit their own posts.
All you need to know is the person's email address: it doesn't matter if it's a gmail address or not.  You can send invitations to people with hotmail, yahoo, and indeed any email address where your invitee can read their email.

 However the other person will need to use a Google account (which doesn't necessarily include Gmail) to accept the invitation: don't waste time inviting people who are allergic to Google and not willing to sign up for an account.


How to make someone an author on your blog

Send them an invitation:
  • Go to Settings > Basic > Permissions
  • Beside Blog Authors, click + Add Authors
  • Enter the email address of the person you want to invite
  • Click Ok


A few minutes later, the email address that you sent to receives an email invitation, like this, from no-reply@google.com:
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: You have been invited to contribute to AnotherTestBlog
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:47:45 +0000
From:   THE NAME OF FROM YOUR BLOGGER PROFILE 
To: maryc@act.nz

The Blogger user Mary has invited you to contribute to the blog: AnotherTestBlog.

To contribute to this blog, visit:
http://www.blogger.com/i.g?inviteID=468-GEEKY-LOOKING-CODE-973&blogID=31-GEEKY-LOOKING-CODE-83

You'll need to sign in with a Google Account to confirm the invitation and start posting to this blog. If you don't have a Google Account yet, we'll show you how to get one in minutes.

To learn more about Blogger and starting your own free blog visit http://www.blogger.com.


When the person who gets the email clicks on the link, they are taken to Blogger, and asked to sign in

Once they have clicked the link and sign in, the Google account that they log in with has "author rights" to your blog (just the one you invited them to, not any others you've made).

The person does not need to have a gmail or Google account for you to invite them to be an author - but they will need to sign in using a Google account (new or existing) to accept the invitation.



What you will see

Once the person has accepted the invitation, the Google account name (which looks like an email address) that they use to accept it is shown as an author on the permissions tab (the one that you went to to invite them to be an author):



If they accept the invitation by signing to Google in with a different email address than the one you invited, you will get a message telling you about this. It says
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Your invitation was accepted using a different email address
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:51:33 +0000
From: Blogger
To: YOUR-EMAIL-ADDRESS

Your invitation for THE-EMAIL-ADDRESS-YOU-INVITED for your private blog "AnotherTestBlog" has been accepted, but using a different email address. It has been accepted by THE-ACCEPTING-EMAIL ADDRESS.

If your invitation has been accepted by someone you do not know or did not intend to invite, please visit the Permissions tab of your blog where you can choose to revoke access.

Thanks,
 The Blogger Team




What your new author will see

When your new author logs in to Blogger.com - using the Google account they accepted your invitation with - they see a regular Blogger dashboard, except that they only have access to a limited range of functions:


An author can:

  • Create a post,
  • Edit the date for posts they have made
  • Turn comments of for posts they can edit (provided the default setting is On)
  • Edit a post that they made
  • Add a mobile device so they can post using SMS/MMS - (this may only work in certain countries)
  • Set themselves up to post using email (the mail2Post feature) - note that their "secret words" address is different to yours - and that an author could use this feature to let anyone else post from their account.
  • Remove themselves as an author


An author cannot:

  • Edit posts made by other authors or administrators
  • Change the template, layout or gadgets
  • Change the blog's URL, title or description
  • Set up for any email address to receive comment-moderation alert messages
  • Moderate comments (even about their own posts), or change the global comments settings
  • Edit any of the blog's Pages
  • See the blog's statistics
  • Install AdSense into the blog (although they can put ad-units of their own inside their own posts)
  • Give other people permission to write on the blog - except by sharing their own mail2Post "secret words" address.
  • Change the default language and date/time settings for the blog
  • Alter the RSS feed settings in any way
  • Set up Google Analytics for the blog
  • Edit the Adult-content warning setting, or the blog's Open-ID URL.


Troubleshooting

Be sure your transfer works

If you are accepting the invitation yourself (eg you are transferring the blog to another Google account that you control), then make sure that you either
  • [Recommended]: use a different browser for each Google account, or
  • Each time you need to change Google accounts, log out of the present account, clear your cache and re-start your browser.

Make sure the emails arrive

We sometimes see questions in Blogger Help Forum from people who say that they sent invitations, but the email message was never received.

The most common solution is that the author-to-be needs to check their spam folder - very often that's where the messages have gone.  If that doesn't work:
  • Try sending the person an email address from your regular email account - so you know if there's a  problem with their email.
  • Cancel the invitation (there's a link in the Invitation screen), wait a few minutes and try again.
  • Try sending an invitation to a different email address that you control, and forwarding that message (without clicking the accept link) to the person.yourself.

If none of this helps, post a question in Blogger Help Forum: tell us your blog's URL, and exactly what options you have tried.


More things to think about

As well as giving the person rights, you may also need to work with them to make sure they understand how you use certain features in Blogger:
  • What policies do you have for responding to comments - Who is notified about comments left about their posts?  What guidelines are followed about complaints?  How do you deal with spam and abuse - and what do you regard as abuse?
  • How do you organise pictures, and other external files that your blog uses?
    I always upload pictures to Picasa-web-albums outside of Blogger, LINK so I can control the picture size/resolution. If you do this, you need to make sure that your new author knows where to file their pictures.
  • Have you got a place where you keep policies, documetation, ideas for new posts, etc (eg I use a separate documentation blog for this) - does your new author need access to this?


What next?

Giving someone administrator access to your blog.




Related Articles

Understanding Google accounts

Putting AdSense ads into your posts

How to put posts into your blog's pages

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts matters for your blog

Your blog and the so-called-social networks:  Facebook, Twitter, eg al

Putting pictures onto your blog

Advertising and your blog, some things to consider

Turning the RSS feed off or on again

By default, public Blogger sites offer an RSS feed.  But there may be times when you need to turn it off, either for good or temporarily.

RSS and Blogger

Previously I've explained what RSS is and why it's important for bloggers.

But there may be times when you want to turn off your RSS feed, either because you don't want to offer one at all, or because you want to make some posts, or changes to existing posts that are not notified to  your RSS subscribers.

Or you may need to turn it back on again - for example, if you want to use a dynamic template, to offer a subscribe-by-email option, or to enable automatic posting to Google +.



How turn off a blog's RSS feed:]

In post-Sept 2011 Blogger (aka the new interface):
  • Go to the Settings > Other tab.
  • Under "Site Feed", use the drop-down to change Allow Blog Feed to "None".  
    (This is the only option that totally turns your feed off:  the others, including Custom, leave some aspects of the feed on.)



How turn on your RSS feed

This is just the same as turning the feed off (see above), except that your need to choose one of these options instead:
  • Full - the whole post is shown in your feed
  • Until Jump Break  - only the part of the post before the jump break is sent to your feed
  • Short - only the first 120 (ish) letters, or less if the jump break comes first, are sent to your feed.

Also, the new interface has a Custom option, and the old interface has an Advanced Mode.   If you use these , you can individually set the value for post feed, comments feed (all comments), and comments-feed-per-post.


Private blogs and RSS
Blogs that are not public do not offer RSS feeds, because they cannot be secured.   So if your blog is private, then it does not matter what setting you choose, your blog will not offer an RSS feed.




Related Articles

Understanding RSS - why it's imporant for bloggers who want to grow an audience

What are dynamic templates

Linking your blog and the social networks

Follow-by-email gadget:  an easy way to offer email subscriptions

Private blogs aren't as secure as you might think

Putting files into Blogger's root directory

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog.


Turnips (Brassica rapa) 
from Wikimedia commons
Originally posted to Flickr 
by thebittenword.com.  
Licensed under the terms of 
the cc-by-2.0.
If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory.   They may even tell you to use an FTP  tool to do this.

Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger.
Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking you to change the website code itself.


How to add a file to your blog's root directory

The short answer for Blogger users is "sorry, you cannot do this".

 The long answer is still no:  "there is no way to do this, but see the rest of this article for an explanation of why, and some suggested work-arounds."


Why not? Every other website tool lets me do this.

Home - cpg1.5.x demo 1287551599033
Posts:  Blogger's tool for managing
the content on our blogs
If you're clever, and have lots of time, you can make a website just using a text-editor like notpad, a graphics programme, and ftp software that lets you put the files into the right places on computer that's connected to the internet.

Tools like Dreamweaver take away a lot of the time-consuming work, and some of the need for cleverness.  But you still need to know a lot about the internet to do things in a way that makes a good website.

Content management systems make this easier still: they let a technically-minded person do the nuts-and-bolts work to make the website, and give authors / artists / editors / content-creators simpler-to-use tools that let them put "stuff" (ie content) into the website, without needing to worry about the details of how it works.

Blogger is a (very simple) website content-management system, it creates our web-pages for us based on data that we put into certain places. Administrators can set up and change templates, other people, eg authors simply make posts.

When we use Blogger, the main way that we change the data in our web-pages is using the Blogger software. 

Some items inside posts or gadgets can be changed using other software, eg Google Docs, provided they were were set up using that other software in the first place. But - key point - there is nothing in the way that Blogger is put together that means we need to access the base directory. So they don't let us do so.    And I doubt that this this will change anytime soon.


What to do instead

The options for getting around this restriction depend on how the file that you need to put into your root directory is intended to be used.


Installing code

If you have code to install into your blog, and a file to go with it, then you just need to
  1. Host the file somewhere else (maybe in your Picasa-web-album for the blog, if it's a picture)
  2. Change the code to point to the full path of where you have hosted the file, instead of the relative path used in the code
For example, here is the code for a button linking to my blog, with the picture in the root directory:
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.areyoublogger.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="//Logo.png" width="100" /></a></div>
To change this to use a specific location, I just add a file-path and the file-name of the picture wherever it is hosted.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.areyoublogger.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh86rlBmDlB-Z4rZ3eWjsFzrfLPhtqSTJUBFplqXP-MFlM0_xYiunzCUGyaoqUmAiLqEEXnZ2NX6oxlcoa__9_Qw-bWci3qbQpjGlLzZB_pKxzd2km8ev_0DFjgS8FebcjzejwwmxxPUy2v/s320/Logo.png" width="100" /></a></div>

TIP: blogger's editor sometimes gets links mixed up, so it's important to start the filepath with "http://"




Verifying ownership

If someone wants to use a file's position to check that you control a website, then they will have code on their own website that looks for the file in your root directory.

You cannot change this code. And you cannot place the fie.

So you need to ask them for an alternative way to verify, that is suitable for people without root directory access.

 If they don't have any alternatives, try lobbying for this on their product support forum:  by not having alterantives, they are ensuring that Blogger users, among others, cannot use their service.

If the official answer is still "no", then you could also ask in other on-line forums if anyone has found any other work-arounds.


What other reasons have you found for installing files to your root directory?   
What work-arounds have worked for you?




An afterthought: what isn't recommended

Transclusion-iconI've recently seen someone suggest in a help forum that people with custom domains can put files into their blog's root directory by FTP'ing the files into place.

 This may be true, if the service that you are purchasing from your domain registrar includes file-hosting. But file hosting(*)
  1. Isn't necessary for a custom domain used in Blogger (since Google hosts our files for us), and
  2. Isn't available as part of the services when you buy a custom-domain through Blogger.

So it's not a general solution for most Blogger users, though it may work for some.

Initially I was a little sceptical of the idea: Blogger doesn't expect to see any files in our root directory, so I was concerned that it might do strange things if it found them there. But on reflection, I think there is probably a low risk of this happening, since the file-location is outside Blogger's control.

(*) To avoid any confusion, file hosting and DNS hosting are not the same thing. If you buy a custom domain for your blog from a registrar without going through Google/Blogger, then you do need to pay for DNS hosting, but do not need to buy file-hosting.



Related Articles

File hosts - places to store files used in your blog.

Picasa-web-albums: a quick introduction

How Blogger data is organised

Setting up a new administrator for your blog

Options for letting other people write in your blog

Partnering For Good Successful Business

If you run a small business, blog or online store a strategic partnership is simply what your business needs. But before you happen to make conclusions with any company or partnership you have to first evaluate how you as a co-operation or an individual can benefit from the business. I am sharing this information to help you do well in business partnerships which will also boost your activity and revenue.


Why Should you do a partnership?

Business is done best when you have an extra hand that will boost you revenue and impact simply because a good business partnerships allow you as a businessman and blogger to be able to reach higher business levels that you wouldn't have achieved on your own influence.
By having a good business partnership you increase your power in that particular industry as you will be sharing exchanging different skills in a more mutually productive way. This means that you as a business can gain access to certain levels of the market that you wouldn't have reached which means a major increase in the business revenue.
Finding a Perfect Business Partner
Finding a good partner in business is what no body can value or measure as out there can be good partners and also bad partners who can really disturb the quality of a business just for the sake of selfish desires. This means that as an individual you should have the ability to make good decisions that can help prosper your business.
Eventually as an individual you might lack a certain business skill which somebody might know best, the lack of the skill will cause your blog or business to lack at some point and the finding a partner will improve your business reducing the gap within the business.
Finding a good partner is surely a difficult thing that anybody can guarantee but by getting yourself deep into a certain business industry you will meet people with brilliant ideas and skills in that certain market you might be in, there is a lot more that one can do such as attending business workshops, participating in Forums, attending business conferences and seminars.

Ensuring A Good Business Partnership

Keeping a business partnership stable will require you a certain skills and duties because most business partnerships usually dont succeed as parters might not agree on certain conditions. As business person in a certain business, it is best that you improve your partnership by deciding roles on which each individual should carry out. I probably recommend the partnership to do the below mentioned points to ensure business success.


  • Vision - The vision of any business or partnership should be made known to all partners to insure successful partnership and business.



  • Partner Roles - As I have mentioned earlier, in a partnership there should be roles and there shouldn't be one who will carry out most of roles compared to the other because that might boil your business partnership.



  • Shares - It might be tempting to have 50% share as your partner but to give you advice that is really not a good Idea because there should be at least one authoritative voice in the partnership which will ensure that decisions are taken accordingly and productively.



  • Responsibilies - Responsibility is the most important aspect of business.


Avoiding Business Partnership Falls

Business Partnerships can be drafted successfully as I have mentioned in the above paragraphs above but that is not enough when humans are involved because that can drive a number of emotions and ego's that can affect your business negatively. I prefer that the business associates should draw up a written agreements can help solve the business pitfalls that are faced by many partnerships.
The drawn up agreement should include some important things such as Roles and Responsibilies that each partner will hold in the partnership.

New years Gift from Ajaxsurf for Bloggers and Forex Traders

Well 2015 has been a remarkable year for me as I made it to the top as a forex trader and a blogger which has motivated us to increase our quality as a blog, I Sifiso Nkwanyana and the Ajaxsurf team have decided to give our clients a gift which will help boost their financial lives and learn to make consistent profits that will help the master the art of online monetization.



Since I graduated from high school I had the passion to become a multimillionaire, I dreamt big in such a way that my friends would say that I am crazy but that gave me confidence to do more than they ever thought. I came from a middle class family as many bloggers and hustlers out there but I chose to be different from others and have my way to the top as a junior blogger who started a blog just because I wanted to create a platform that would allow my Facebook page followers to in contact with me easier without having to log into Facebook. I wanted to have a direct interaction with them without having any possible limits.

In my second month I started reading other blogs online and I learnt about website monetisation which was something new to me simply because I had never heard about online monetisation but I was much familiar with stock trading which I did when I was kid in a demo using my cellphone, Trading stocks and helping people become better had been my passion as I was motivated by Prince Nkosinathi Mazibuko who I knew while I was in high school and surprisingly he made his first million at an age of 19 years. I was greatly motivated but because of the bad myths people said about trading I lost trust and focussed on Engineering and Blogging which did made me a lot of  money but it happened that earlier in 2014 I meet with a guy by the name Sandile Shezi who clearly made my mind open even though he lied by somethings he claimed but I was motivated to go back to Forex trading and I have made money like never before such that I used somebody's laptop to make money and buy my own laptop and from there I had made great profits.

With me sharing this I am not trying to boast about something but I am making you know that there is always hope whether your dreams seem impossible to others, I want to share my knowledge with you because I believe that you can also make it as a trader and make real money and finally reach the dream to financial freedom because to speak the truth, financial freedom is the dream that everybody wishes to achieve despite what conditions they grew on. I believe that anybody can be successful and I dont see a reason why some people should be poor and live a life of struggling.

My video Forex Educational course will be available for purchase at an incredible amount of $100 whereby the price is cut by 70% , buy it today as a gift to change your financial status and improve yourself as a forex trader. please feel the form below to request the online forex trading course gift and we will get back to you in a moment.

foxyform     

Well we wish you the best year of 2016 which is the year for doing great things.