Putting a badge for a Facebook Page into your Blog

This article describes making a Facebook badge to promote your page, and putting it onto your blog.

What is a Facebook page

This article is about how to make a badge to promote a Facebook Page.

This is an example of the "follow me" approach to linking your blog and the social networks, although for Facebook pages your reader becomes a Fan rather than a Friend.

Many people are confused about when they should use each of the types of "thing" in Facebook, ie

• Profiles - accounts for flesh-and-blood, living, breathing, individual people
• Pages - for websites, brands, and organisations that don't want to approve all their Facebook members
• Groups -  for organisations that want to approve individual members who join (and in return, group-owners can send private messages to individual members.

The most common "thing" for blogs to have is a Page - and a Badge is the tool which Facebook provides to help you to promote a Page on your blog or other website.

How to make a badge to promote a Facebook Page

View all your Pages using the arrow drop-down at the very top right of Facebook's toobar.
(Facebook chance the place for actions like this from time to time - you may need to look around to find your pages.)

Copy the URL for the Page you want to promote
(One way is to right click on its name, and choose copy-link-location- or whatever phrase your browser uses.   Another is to to go the page, and copy the URLfrom your address bar.)

Come back to this article and click  here --- Facebook Social Plugins, to reach Facebook's tools.
(I used to have instructions to launch this from Facebook - but I cannot find any link to it from my Pages page any more.)

Choose Page Plugin  / Web.  

Scroll down the page, and set the options for your badge.  The first one is critical - the others optional:

• Facebook Page URL - this needs to be changed to the URL of your page (which you copied earlier)
  If you have less than 25 Fans already, then your page's URL will be something like http://www.facebook.com/pages/Are-You-Blogger/144194435594821 and you can get it by copying the link from the list of Pages for your account.
  Once you have more than 25 fans, you can choose a  page-url on the Edit Info > Username screen.

• Tab - the tab on your page that is shown

• Width - choose a value that suits the space on your template where you want to put the box.
• Show faces, show header:  choose options that suit your purpose and blog template
• Show stream:  this controls whether you show posting from the Page inside your blog

As you choose options, the preview at the bottom updates to show what the button will look like:

When you are happy with the selections, choose Get Code.

• Currently, there are options for an iframe or Javascript SDK:   I recommend using the iframe, unless you are comfortable with the two-part installation needed for the Javascripit, and you are sure that the visitors you want to target will have Javascripti enabled. 

Copy the code provided

Install the code into your blog - there several options for installing the HTML, depending on where you want to put the badge or button.


Job Done!   Your blog will now display a gadget that promotes the selected Facebook page - people can view and like your Page from within your blog.

What your visitors will see

People who visit your blog through a web-browser will see a Facebook area, including a Like button and whatever other options you have chosen.

This can be quite a powerful tool:  you can easily use two or three different combinations on different parts of your blog:  one that has no border, no faces and no header but does show a Stream can effectively look like a "live" feed from your Facebook page to your blog, while another one with different options can show off the size of your fan-base.

Be aware that the Like button shown in this button gives people the option to Like your Page in facebook  - not your blog directly, and not the current post that they are reading.   If you want them to be able to Like your blog or blog-posts, you need to provide this option separately (and many of your visitors are likely to be confused by the different).

As always, people who read your blog via a feed reader (Bloglines, Google Reader, etc), or by email subscription (eg having used follow-by-email) may not see the Facebook item, depending on where is places and what options their email program has.

Customizing the code

You can change the characteristics of the box without having to generate the code from Facebook again.   For example you can later the width and/or height - just remember to do it in both of the places required if you are using the iframe option:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fpages%2FBlogger-Hints-and-Tips%2F144194435594821&amp;width=160&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;show_faces=false&amp;border_color=purple&amp;stream=true&amp;header=false&amp;height=395" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:160px; height:395px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

fyi, I could have just quoted this code, and said to use it on your blog.  But I don't usually do this when I'm describing how to link Blogger and any third party product, because it's likely that Facebook (or whoever) will change their code in the future:  it's always safest to get the most up-to-date copy of the code from the source-site when you need it.

The facebook page where you get the code from also has more information about controls you can set in the code, too.   Check it out for more information.

Do you need to own the page you want to promote?

No - not any more.

At one stage, the first step in these instructions was to

"Log into Facebook with a profile (ie personal account) that has administrator rights for the page you want to promote."

But that's no longer necessary.   You can promote any Facebook page that you want to, on your blog.

But be aware that if you show the page-feed on your blog, and you don't own the page, then you have no control over what is shown.   It's possible that a feed from someone else's Page will show material which breaks Blogger's terms and conditions - or which you simply don't want on your blog.    For this reason along, I'd recommend only promoting your own, or closely trusted, pages on your blog.

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How to rename picture files in Picasa-desktop

This article is about re-naming files from within Picasa-desktop, to provide SEO benefits for your blog.

Picasa's desktop software is a good tool for organizing and editing photos on your local computer.   And it is still available for you to use, even though Picasa-web-albums has been replaced by Google Albums + Google Album Archive.

For pictures that are important in your blog, I still recommend preparing them in a tool like Picasa-desktop and then uploading the finished versions to Google Photos before putting them into a post, because:

• The desktop tool has better editing tools (cropping, zooming, auto adjustment, adding watermarks) and Picasa-web-albums does.

• It lets you control the size of the uploaded file

• It's easier to ensure sure that you still have full-size files on my local machine for printing etc, as well as smaller, more optimized, copies to use on web-pages.

Picasa-desktop folders have a very nice relationship with files and directories with the Windows file system:

Each Picasa folder = one directory on your computer
Each Picasa photo = one file on your computer.

And this means that you can set various properties (eg file name) from either inside Picasa or from Windows.

Ways to associate keywords with photos in Picasa-desktop

Picasa-desktop has two tools for adding keywords to photographs:

• You can enter a caption for each photo. This is basically some text, which is stored "inside" the photo, in a hidden-field that is only visible when you are using a software tool that displays the captions. (In technical terms, the caption is stored inside the  IPTC/XMP Description field inside the JPEG etc file that you have.)

• You can enter one or more tags for each photo - again, text (individual words or phrases) that is stored in the  IPTC/XMP Keyword field.

Unfortunately captions and tags aren't shown when you put a photo in your blog.

This means that the captions and tags are possibly not used by Google in understanding what the photo is about: I've never heard any SEO experts recommending that the  IPTC/XMP fields should be keyword optimized.   For some bloggers this won't be an issue - but it is if SEO is important for you blog.

Another approach is to put the keyword(s) into the file-name, because file-name is one of the factors that Google looks at when it is indexing images.   And this has a nice spin-off for you as well - it means that they keywords are available to any file-search tools that you use on your computer, not just to specialised ones that work with images.

For a long time, I believed that to change the name of a file, I had to go out to my Windows files (using Windows Explorer or similar, and rename them there) - and then wait for Picasa to catch up with the change that I'd made in the file system.   But one day I accidentally hit the F2 key, and found that it opens up a very useful dialog box indeed.

How to Change the name of a file in Picasa desktop

Navigate to the picture that you want to change the file-name for, using the Picasa-desktop software.

Press the F2 key. This opens a Rename Files window.

Type in a new name for the file, for example    concrete-pig-outside-butcher-shop-in-ireland

Click the option buttons if you want to include today's date or the file-resolution in the name  (I don't usually do this, because I organise my photos into folders according to the date they were taken)

Click Rename to save the change


Job done!    The file has a new name in your computer's file system, and is still loaded in your Picasa database.

How to change the name of a file in Google Album Archive or Google Photos

Currently there is no way to change the name of a file after it is uploaded it to either Google Album Archive or Google Photos:  .

One option is to download the photo, rename the file on your desktop, and re-upload it.   But if you change the name in this way, you also need to change the link to the file in every place that it has already been used.   That said, if you only use your photos in one place each, then making a new copy with a different name, uploading it and changing all the existing links can be a good way to deal with copyright theives who have hot-linked directly to your photos.

How to choose "good" names for your picture files

Early SEO advice was to use:

• Lowercase letters only (some computers don't like uppercase)
• Only hyphens between words (not spaces, underscores, etc)
• Regular characters only (no á é etc)

Today, I'm not sure if it matters so much. In most cases, it's probably more important to use rich, descriptive key words  that describe all the aspects of the photo, than to worry about how they're laid out.   But I do tend to follow the advice anyway - just in case.

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Centering gadgets in Blogger

This article is about centering gadgets from 3rd parties that you install onto your blog.

Previously, I've described how to put HTML code from a 3rd party into your blog.

When code like this is put into a gadget, one common question is "how do I center it?"

There are (at least) three options for doing this, ie for putting a gadget into the middle (horizontally) of the area it is located in.   These are described below.

Option 1: Centre all the gadgets in your blog

To center-align every single gadget in your blog, just, add a CSS rule to your blog.  The rule to add is:

.widget {
  text-align: center;
} 

This will centre the contents and title of every gadget on your blog.

Option 2: Only center-align the specific gadget

To only centre-align one gadget, which is made from HTML/Javascript code, you can just put the gadget-code from the 3rd party (eg PayPal, Amazon, etc) inside a centering statement, like this:

<div style="text-align: center;">

PUT THE CODE FROM THE 3RD PARTY HERE

</div>

Install the code into your blog the way you would usually install this 3rd party code.

This will centre-align the contents (not title) of the specific gadget that you add.

Note the American spelling of the word "center" - and don't forget to put the closing </div> statement at the end.

There may be some gadgets where it would be possible to add the centring statement to the gadget code itself, rather than putting it outside.    I don't recommend this (unless you're so comfortable with HTML and CSS that you don't need to be reading this article), because it introduces a risk that you will interfere with some other aspect, or that you will lose the centering if you ever need to refresh the code.

Option 3 - Make a new style rule just for the gadget

If you only want to centre one (or several) gadgets - not all of them - then it's best to define a new style that is to be used on specific gadgets:  put this new style into your template, and then apply it to the gadgets like this.

<div class="YourNewSytle">

PUT THE CODE FROM THE 3RD PARTY HERE

</div>

This approach will only centre the gadget contents - not any header that you give to it.

There are lots of options that you could put into the new style rule, but at a minimum it needs to have

.YourNewStyle
{
  text-align: center;
}

Notice that there is a "." (ie a full-stop) before the name of your new style.

Also, it's best not to use a number as the style-name (eg "2nd-gadgetStyle"), because this doesn't work with some browsers.

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Lining up the first post and the sidebar

In some Blogger templates, there is a big gap between the bottom of the header and the start of the first post, and this means that the posts and the sidebar are not aligned.  This article explains how to adjust the gap, and so remove that problem.

In the templates that Blogger provides, as well as all third-party templates, the amount of space between elements on the screen is not accidental:   designers put a lot of effort into working out what spacing will look good, and then finding ways to put CSS code into the template so that the spacing they want is shown in any browser software that Blogger supports.


But there are times when you may want to change this spacing, and this is easy to do, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your template, and if  you can work out exactly which part of the template code to change.

The pre-Header gap

A pet-hate of mine is the blank space above the first post, which looks strange unless you put something else in to the space.  In this example, I've got an AdSense link-unit in the area highlighted in red, just to fill in the empty area:

How to change the gap above the post header

1  Edit your template  - don't forget to take a backup.


2  Find this code

h3.post-title, .comments h4 {
  font: $(post.title.font);
  margin: .75em 0 0;
}

The exact numbers used in your template may be different:  the key thing is to find the CSS command that is putting a margin above the post header.  In the template that I took this example from (Simple), it's the "0.75em" - which puts 75% of the space of a the post-header characters as a blank space above the header.


3   Change the first margin value:  how much to change it by depends on your template, but in some cases I've used 0 successfully.

In CSS, when a margin statement has three numbers beside it, they refer to the

• top, 
• left-and-right, 
• bottom 

margins respectively.   So if you want to do something else to the post-header, eg indent it, this is the place to make changes


4   Click Preview to see what the blog will look like - keep doing this until you get the right setting.


5   When you are happy with the spacing, click Save Template to apply the changes to your blog.   (Or Clear Edits if you cannot get it right and need to stop trying).


Note:  If you make a big change to your template like this, it would be a good idea to check out out in at least one version of the other browsers that your readers use - at the moment, this usually means Internet Explorer 8, Firefox and Chrome.   But it may depend on your niche - a tool like Google Analytics will give you some statistics about what browsers, and screen sizes, your visitors have.

Also, it is possible to make this change by just installing a new CSS rule for h3.post-title into your blog - because the latest one found is always the one used, and because the template designer's Add CSS function puts the rules you add after the othr rules.   I don't recommend it here, though, because working with the original rule makes it easier to see the effect of making changes to any of the values in the area.

Other affected spacing

If you have more than one post per page, then this change will also reduce the amount of space between the bottom of one post and the header of the next one.   Depending on your template, you want want to add a little more space into the margin statement in the bottom of the post-footer, eg

.post-footer {
  margin: 20px -2px 20;
  padding: 5px 10px;
}

If you display comments in your blog, you also need to check the impact on comments, because the original command applied to h4 items in comments as well.

If you are making a lot of changes, you may want to make a test blog, and plan your changes in private before applying them to your main blog.

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Getting the HTML code to put a picture into your blog's sidebar, header or footer

You can use the Post Editor to get the HTML code that you need to put a picture into your sidebar (or header or footer, or anywhere else a gadget can go).

The Picture gadget is the normal tool for adding a picture to your blog's sidebar.

But sometimes you want more control over the picture size or behaviour.  Eg, you may want to have two pictures very close to each other and guarantee that they're the same size.

To do this, you need to get the HTML code for the picture, and then put it into your blog as an HTML-gadget.  Fortunately, Blogger's Post-editor make it very easy to do this without writing the code yourself.

Using the Post Editor to generate the HTML for a picture

1  Start a new Post  (NB   you're not ever going to publish this:  it's just a work-area)

2  Don't enter any text:   just use the Picture icon on the toolbar to add a picture.   Blogger will prompt you to upload the picture, or to choose it from a Google-album-archive or to enter its URL:  add the picture the way that you usually would.

3  Switch to the HTML tab   (top left of the editing window).

This show you the HTML code for displaying the picture, as it is set to display in the Post (depending on the picture-settings you've chosen, it may be centered or right/left aligned, and the size may vary).

4  Copy the HTML.

5  Switch back to Compose, so that you don't get confused the next time you edit a post.

6  Return to the list of posts:  you may be asked if you want to leave the page without saving - the answer is Yes.  Or you may have a new draft-status post, which you can delete.



Job Done!   You now have some HTML code in your memory which you can paste into an HTML/Javascript gadget, or anywhere else that you may need it - even into another post that you are editing in a separate window, or into a totally different tool.

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Showing your oldest blog-post first - and the rest in reverse order.

Blogger does not have an option to display your posts in reverse order - so that the oldest post is first, and the most recent post is last.  

But this article describes displaying your posts in this way by manipulating their post dates.  And it links to an article about some other possible options.

Overview

Previously I've discussed the options for giving your blog a home page.  One option is to organise the post-date for each of your posts, so that you control the order posts are displayed in.

This is easy enough to do, although there are a couple of risks that you need to be aware of as discussed below.

Blogger Posts and the Post-date

Each Post in your blog has a date-time value, which is called its "post-date".   Normally , this is set to the date/time when you publish the post for the first time.  But you can change the post date for any post, and you can do this either when you post it first or later on.

The post-date is important because it controls the order that posts are shown in:

• The post that appears first when a reader visits your blog is the one with the most-recent Post-date.

• If you have more than one post-per-screen, then the next-most-recent post is on the screen underneath the first one.  And then the second-next-most-recent, etc.

When a reader is looking at any post, and they click Newer-Posts or Older-Posts, the post-date is used to decide what posts to show on the next screen.

This means that you can make your posts appear in the order than you wrote them (ie first post first, second post second, etc) by changing the Post-date so that:

• your first post has the most-recent post-date, 
• your second post has the next-most-recent-date, 
• your third post has the third-most-recent poste date
• etc

An alternative approach is to just make one post always appear first, and let the other posts appear in the order that you posted them.

How to make your posts appear in reverse order, using dates

1  Give your first Post a post-date (eg today), AND remember that date.

2  Give all other posts (even ones that you write next week, or next year) a post-date that is earlier than the post-date you picked in Step 1.

• If you want your posts is strictly reverse order, you need to give each one a date that is earlier than any existing post.  This is quite easy:  just look at the list of posts in Posting > Edit Posts and scroll to the bottom of the list to see the oldest date used so far.

3  Turn off the post-date display on your posts (since the post-date won't make sense, because you're manipulating the dates).

• To do this, go to the Layout tab.  
• Choose Blog-posts (edit).    
• Un-tick the date under "Post Page Options".
  

4  Remember to make the same date change for every post you write from now on.


Also, if it might be relevant for your readers to know when you wrote a post, make sure that you always manually put the date into each post.

Risks of this approach

If you follow this approach, you will give a far-in-the-past date to pages that you never want to appear first.  There is a risk that Google might convert the data behind older posts at some time.   If your post-dates get too far into the past, then it's possible that they might not cope well this.   This could be for reasons that seem logical, or because of things that are totally to do with the internal workings of Blogger's database, and make no sense to you at all.

Also, be aware that Google might choose to force the post-date to appear on posts at some time in the future.  At the moment, they don't:  it's your choice.   But you cannot guarantee that they won't change their minds about this, one day.   (Personally I think they probably won't, and I've built a couple of "real" websites that make use of the technique described here.   Just remember it's not guaranteed.)

An Alternative Approach

Adam of Too-Clever-by-Half has suggested a totally different way to display your posts in reverse order.   I haven't used it, but think that it has a lot of potential in some situations, provided you are comfortable using Yahoo pipes and RSS feeds to display things on your blog.

He has also recently shared another approach he found, which uses a script to manipulate elements within Blogger, and so is more robust than his first approach.

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