Showing posts with label Quick-tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quick-tips. Show all posts

RSS feed reader options - the saga continues

When Google Reader was retired, I posted about my search for a replacement.

Eventually I settled on TheOldReader.   This had a few headaches - too many other people made the same choice, so they had performance problems.  Then they were going to shut down.   They they got help and weren't shutting any more.   Now they've siaid that only the first 100 subscriptions are free, and that people need to pay to have more than this.   The design still looks a bit clunky.

I may yet end up paying them $30/year - it's not unreasonable for the service.   But OTOH, I don't see paying a small amount for any service as a guarantee that it will actually survive.

But in the meantime, I'm hunting for options again.    Here's some info about what I've tried.




InoReader

The first tool that has caught my eye is InoReader.   It is
... a Cloud based RSS Reader aimed to fully replace Google Reader and even provide additional tools and functionalities for power users.
Initially it came to life as a proof of concept project, but the author quickly realized that such system cannot be managed and handled by single person for a long time, so the development and support was handled to a company ...

You can register separately, or log in using Facebook or Google accounts. It will import subscription files from the reader part of Google's Takeout file, or other OPML format files.

Google use Google-Sites, so we should too!

This QuickTip explains why I now feel happier about using elements from Google Sites in my blogs.


What is Google Sites, and why would a Blogger use it

Long ago (back in the late 2000's) there was a product called Google Pages, which people could use to make their own simple websites. It wasn't the greatest product that Google ever made (or purchased), and eventually it was retired, with websites made with Pages transferred over to the newer Google Sites.

Sites always seemed a bit clunky. It doesn't seem to have a huge number of users.   And there are vastly better products for building more-complex websites, and for building simple ones (eg using Blogger to make a "real" website).

Now, I did use a Sites filing cabinet as the document-store for one of my sites that makes lyrics of certain public domain songs available in PowerPoint format. I chose it before Google Drive had been released, and when Docs was not nearly as good as it is now. And SEO does matter for this blog, so I came to appreciate that the link to a file in sites includes the file-name.

But I've always had a nagging sense that one day Sites would be retired too, and I'd have to move my files and edit all my posts to re-set the links.


Why won't Google retire Google Sites

Despite my previous misgivings, I'm now feeling a lot more relaxed about Google Sites.  

Why?   Well I don't have a crystal ball.   But this recent post from the Google Testing blog talks about how they are into "dogfooding" and that Sites is one of the tools they do this with, to " host team pages, engineering docs and more"

Just to explain, "dogfooding" is corporate-jargon for using your own products. As in "eating your own dogfood".  It's sometimes called "drinking your own chapmpagne" in companies that see themselves as a bit more refined, or "eating your own cooking".

Google's post is telling us that they are using Sites for building tools that they use in their own work. Most likely, they have a website built in Sites, which manages their plans for future Blogger development, and available only to people inside the company and working on the Blogger project.

So that makes me feel reassured that most likely:
  1. Sites won't be canned any time soon, or
  2. If Sites is turned off, Google will have a replacement tool which will provide the same (and better) features, and they will convert items now built in Sites to this better tool.

Phew!

Maybe it's time to review my file-hosting approach again, or to re-visit Sites and look at their FAQs, home-page and support-community, to see what other Sites tools I might find useful.

How have you used Sites in conjunction with your blog?




Related Articles:

File-hosting options: places to store files that you share from your blog

Why SEO doesn't matter for lots of bloggers

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


quick-tips logo
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 ...)

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

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


quick-tips logo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Now they have announced that this tool has been extended to cover schema.org definitions of seven new types of things:
  • Products
  • Local businesses
  • Articles
  • Software applications
  • Movies
  • Restaurants
  • TV episodes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

At the moment, you can temporarily switch to the old interface by clicking the "options" icon in the black navigation bar and
  • Selecting "My Places" OR
  • Clicking the "classic maps" link.

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

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

How to keep your Blogger password safe

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


quick-tips logo

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

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

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

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

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

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


How to identify your important on-line services

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

Google, of course, think that your Google account is important. But that may not be true for everyone. For most people, the important services are:
  • Ones to do with money (on-line banking, AdSense, AdWords, other affiliate accounts, Amazon and others that you have your credit card listed with)
  • Their primary email account - the one that you set as the password-recovery email for other online services.

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

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


Keeping your passwords somewhere safe

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

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

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

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

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


What worries you about managing your passwords?

Google Buzz's last-gasp addition to your Google Drive

This QuickTip is about a file that Google Buzz is going to put into your Google Drive, as part of it's final turn-off routine, for all Buzz accounts that haven't yet been deleted.


quick-tips logo

Google Buzz was one of Google's early-and-short-lived social networking attempts, but was used by some bloggers looking to promote their blogs.

It was closed down in October 2011

I haven't seen it published in any of the Google blogs that I follow, but recently I was sent an email saying that the last step in the close-down will happen on or after 17 July 2013, when Google will save a copy of the Buzz posts from any remaining active Buzz accounts to the account-holders Google Drive

There will be two types of file, and the files won't count against your storage limits.   They say:
  1. The first will be private, only accessible to you, and have a snapshot of the Google Buzz public and private posts that you wrote.
  2. The second will have a copy of your Google Buzz public posts. It will be visible to anyone with the link, unless you change it later, and may appear in search results and on your Google Profile (if you've linked to your Buzz posts).   Any existing links to your Google Buzz content will redirect to this file.

Something to be aware of, if you used Buzz to make controversial comments:   Comments that you made on other users' posts will be saved to those users' files. After the file-download described here id done, the other user can change the sharing settings of those files, if they choose to do so. And if they do, and if you have commented on another person's private post, that person could choose to make that post and its comments public.   To remove the chance of that happening, you could delete all your Buzz content well before 17 July 2013

The Buzz-download Google Drive files will only contain comments from users who had enabled Google Buzz.  They won't include any comments that you deleted before Google moved your data to your Google Drive.

AdSense now allow changes to their advertisement code

This QuickTip is about a change to AdSense's policies about modifying their ad code: in short, you are now allowed to change the code in certain way, to achieve certain things.


quick-tips logo
AdSense have announced changes to their "Modifying ad code" policy.

In the past, publishers weren't allowed to change AdSense ads in any way other than what could be done through the AdSense ad-code generator or Blogger's Add-a-gadget / Adsense tools.

Now, however, some changes are allowed, so you can do things like:
  • Responsive design: creating a single webpage that adapts to the device on it’s being viewed on (eg laptop, smartphone or tablet).
  • A/B testing: creating multiple versions of a page and comparing how they are used to see which page is the most effective.
  • Setting custom channels dynamically:
  • Ad tag minification: Enabling your site pages to load faster by reducing the amount of data to be transferred.


In several places, AdSense say that the goals of these changes should be to "maximize ad and user experience" - and most of their Terms and Conditions about what you're not allowed to do still hold, so it's clearly not carte blanche to make any changes you want.

Provided you have enabled a mobile template then responsive / adaptive website design isn't and issue which Blogger users have to worry much about - although there are some things you can and should do.

A/B testing is certainly relevant- and I'll be looking to see how much support their code offers for this.

Right now, I'm not sure how relevant dynamic custom channels and minification are for Bloggers - will be investigating this over the coming weeks.

See AdSense's help-centre article for details and the specific code snippets related to the these types of changes.

Newer AdSense ad-unit sizes are now available inside Blogger

This QuickTip shares a feature that I just noticed inside Blogger's Add-a-gadget > Adsense option.


quick-tips logo

Previously I've mentioned that rather than using the AdSense gadget offered by Blogger's Add-a-Gadget wizard, I usually get ad-code from AdSense and put this code into my blog as an HTML widget.

This gives:
  • Access to a wider range of ad-unit sizes, 
  • Better control over the gadget alignment
  • Ability to re-use  AdSense's colour palettes that I've saved before
  • Access to an "image ads only" option that Blogger doesn't have.


The downside that if I have enabled a mobile template for the blog, then visitors who look at it using a mobile device don't see any ads.   I did find work-around for this, but it had a nasty side effect if I wanted to add another gadget to the template - and that's a story for a different post.

Tonight I happened to look at the options in the Add-a-gadget > AdSense  option again, and was delighted to notice that the newer ad-sizes (eg 300x600 wide skyscraper) are now available there.    I have no idea how long they've been there - but I haven't seen it mentioned on any of the other blogs I read, so thought it was worth a mention here.


Adsense ad-unit size options now available in Blogger's AdSense gadget - include the wide skyscraper and the 300x15 mobile banner


This doesn't solve all my issues, but did mean that I could use a standard AdSense gadget on a blog where I was particularly keen to have one that filled the whole width of the sidebar.

Like they say in Tesco - every little helps!


Update:   shortly after I wrote this post, AdSense announced a new ad-size (970 x 90 pixels) - and unfortunately it's not included in Blogger's AdSense widget.