Simpler - but more limited - AdSense sign-up for Blogger users

This quick tip describes an announcement from Google about an upcoming simplified process for applying to use AdSense on Blogger or Hubpages.

New simpler AdSense application process

Google AdSense have announced that from today there is a change the application process for new publishers who apply to use AdSense through a "host partner site". Currently Blogger and Hubpages are AdSense's "host partner sites" - meaning ones where the "host" provides internet space to store the monetized content, rather than the content-owner buying the internet space themselves.

They say that

"publishers approved for AdSense accounts via a host partner site will be able to place ads on and earn from policy-compliant content they’ve created on any host partner site. If they then decide to show ads on their own domain, ... they’ll need to complete an extra approval step similar to the application process at www.google.com/adsense."

What this means is that if you sign up for AdSense with a host-partner, you will only be allowed to use AdSense ads on host-partner sites. If you want to use AdSense elswhere later on, then you need to do a 2-step verification process, which involves:

• Applying to become a "full" publisher
• Generating ad code,
• Implementing it on a live page of a non-host-partner site.
• Someone from the AdSense team will reviews that site and the ad in it.

If Adsense approve your other site, they give you permission to put ads on any sites other than host-partner sites (of course they still need to meet the AdSense Terms and Conditions). If they don't approve, you can still put ads onto host-partner sites (ie Blogger blogs or Hubpages pages), but you cannot use AdSense on other sites until you have fixed the problem(s) that stopped you from being approved..

Google have said that these changes don't affect people who are already approved as AdSense publishers - so I won't be able to see their effects first hand.

But I'm wondering if perhaps people who are only approved as "host partner publishers" won't have access to www.Adsense.google.com at all? This would be painful, because:

• The reports on the Earnings tab are not nearly as good as the ones in the Adsense interface.
• Some options (eg showing image-only ads, or re-using custom colour palettes, or accessing new mobile-friendly ad-sizes like 300x15) are not available from Blogger's Adsense ad generator.

Also, I'm wonder if perhaps Google have any plans to pay lower rates to people who they provide hosting and unrestricted bandwidth for?  Nothing has been said, but I can see why they would think this is reasonable.

How to sign up

If the site that you want to put AdSense ads on has a blogspot address   (www.example.blogspot.com), then the only way you can now sign up for AdSense is from Blogger's earnings' tab.

If it has a custom domain, then I don't know if it's possible to use the regular AdSense sign-up process, or if you have to use the Blogger one.

Either way, I still recommend that you should protect your AdSense account from malicious use, and also make sure that the ads you display meeting Blogger's Terms and Conditions too.

Add Google Drive's one-click-new icons to your blog or website

This Quick-Tip is about Google Docs / Drive's new short-cut buttons for making a new document, spreadsheet or presentation - and how you can install them into your blog.

Google have announced that one-click icons to create a Document, Spreadsheet or Presentation (now called Docs, Sheets, and Slides respectivly) are available as apps in the Chrome Web Store (a place where you can get various useful tools to install to your Chrome desktop or toolbar.

This is great for people who use Chrome - but some people don't,  for whatever reason.

Another option is to simply put links to the new commands into a place that you visit often - like your blog.  I've done this with a gadget called "Make a file in Google Drive" which you can see in my sidebar now.

To add this to your blog, simply add a HTML/Javascript gadget in the usual way, and put this code into the contents field.

<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;">
<a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/document/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgOnzFF_6SJxwEOU-Fl_f4JsE_JuJWAQcRENJmt9eXkP732KQFR28LPpw0SbkK2NstjNM6jL45rtPJrlzf9W_3hYQY704cIQCFrlexBBwiRkYFiXbRh97e5vu3iATyatQe7oz7Um1H4gMo/s80/made-new-word-processing-document-google-drive.png" /><br />
Document</a></div>
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;">
<a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTTsPVsrsOchgVt5bigVOr4mOJNV3yLe5KhAqcAwe1PURW4_n8h3TLVD5ui8LFGneQqkfiGb9heYVzxtUuShS1405BVAYQmmhKA6xzWcalEOaUHZtHbyCLS4AJDvVM8lws5ewIt_Q8ZeL9/s80/made-new-spreadsheet-google-drive.png" /><br />
Spreadsheet</a></div>
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 0;">
<a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LLZ9VVaSV-inMFI5wFKvHr4FOYyLK4vEux1yc5g2LHcr5Je-z5HVj6E5OyD-YDlZQ1PXvbBgebBqYZnpvxLy5236u_HTIhO2YerObDvmaK8_-qh8BGgiG9LNOcL9V2sey2afphncxpDC/s80/made-new-slideshow-google-drive.png" /><br />
Presentation</a></div>
</div>
<!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.areyoublogger.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

Features

• There is no gadget title in the code, so that you can put whatever title you want into the title field of the gadget. 
• People can click either the picture of the text to create a new document - and when they do, the new document will be opened in a new tab or window.  Your blog (etc) will stay open in its current tab or window.
• There is one "em" of space between the icons - this is enough to look good on most blogs.   However if your sidebar (or wherever you put the gadget) is particularly wide you might like to increase it - do this by finding "1em" in the code above, and replacing it with a larger value.

Code for just one type of document

You don't have to put the code into a gadget - it can go equally well into  a post - for example if you want to tell people to make a document of their own, and do it "right now".

In this case,you might like to show just one type of document icon, rather than all three.   The blockks of code for that are shown below - note that I would usually recommend pasting them into the HTML view of the post editor, to be 100% certain that they work correctly.

To make a new word-processing document:

<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;"><a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/document/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgOnzFF_6SJxwEOU-Fl_f4JsE_JuJWAQcRENJmt9eXkP732KQFR28LPpw0SbkK2NstjNM6jL45rtPJrlzf9W_3hYQY704cIQCFrlexBBwiRkYFiXbRh97e5vu3iATyatQe7oz7Um1H4gMo/s80/made-new-word-processing-document-google-drive.png" /><br />Document</a></div></div><!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.areyoublogger.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

To make a new spreadsheet file:

<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;"><a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTTsPVsrsOchgVt5bigVOr4mOJNV3yLe5KhAqcAwe1PURW4_n8h3TLVD5ui8LFGneQqkfiGb9heYVzxtUuShS1405BVAYQmmhKA6xzWcalEOaUHZtHbyCLS4AJDvVM8lws5ewIt_Q8ZeL9/s80/made-new-spreadsheet-google-drive.png" /><br />Spreadsheet</a></div></div><!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.areyoublogger.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

To make a new Google Docs / Drive presentation:

<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 0;"><a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8LLZ9VVaSV-inMFI5wFKvHr4FOYyLK4vEux1yc5g2LHcr5Je-z5HVj6E5OyD-YDlZQ1PXvbBgebBqYZnpvxLy5236u_HTIhO2YerObDvmaK8_-qh8BGgiG9LNOcL9V2sey2afphncxpDC/s80/made-new-slideshow-google-drive.png" /><br />Presentation</a></div></div><!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.areyoublogger.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

Creative Kit photo editor works in Google+, if not in Picasa

This Quick-Tip is about using the Creative Kit, which has been giving me grief recently when I tried to use it from Picasa-web-albums.

---

Sept 2013 update:   Creative Kit has now been totally discontinued.   Use either Picasa-web-albums or the Google+ photo editor instead.

---

For ages, I've occasionally used the photo-editor in Picasa-web-albums (the online version of Picasa) to edit photos that I've already uploaded, and want to change without changing the URL.   This editor was originally Picnik - until Google sold that product and replaced it with Creative Kit a while ago.

This has sometimes been slow, which was annoying, but I put up with it because it was just so useful.

But recently it stopped working totally:  it would load, the progress-bar would get about half-way along the screen, and then hang, with a message:

We noticed Picnik is loading slowly. It’s possible waiting
may solve this issue. If you’re still having trouble:
[t1]   Click for Assistance»

Waiting never solved the problem for me (trust me, I tried), so eventually I tried the help-link, which went to this Picnik help page.

After following lots of the instructions, I finally found this helpful line in the Adope Flash Player re-installation instructions:

If you are using the Google Chrome browser, Adobe® Flash® Player is built-in but has been disabled. To enable Flash Player, follow the steps in this TechNote

Which sounded hopeful - it's only recently that I've switched to use Chrome all the time, so maybe this was the problem.   But it didn't help - despite what they said, Flash was enabled in my setup.

Eventually, it occurred to me that since I have a Google Plus profile, my albums are now accessible via the Plus interface too.   So I went there, chose Photos, found the album, opened a photo, chose creative kit ... held my breath for a few seconds ... and the editor opened up and worked nicely.

I'd still like to get this working from Picasa, because it just looks so much nicer from the small screen that I use a lot of the time.   Suggestions are very welcome!


PS   Thanks to Hardeep of Widget Craft who used the picture that I'd made as the thumbnail picture for How to Edit Your Blogger Template in one of his articles, and thus inspired me to start putting my own name onto the image files I make.

Making custom domains work without the www at the start

This Quick-Tip is about an issue that some people have had with their "naked" custom domain not re-directing to the www-at-the-start version, and how to fix it using a feature in your Google Apps account.

Since Blogger released their initial fix to the custom-domain mapping problem of mid-September 2012, some people have found that it's not possible to set up the custom domain so that my-domain.xxx works as well as www.my-domain.xxx does.

There is an option for this in Blogger's Settings > Publishing area.  But last night, when I set up a "subdomain" style entry for news.my-domain.xxx and directed my latest-updates blog from my-domain.blogspot.com to news.my-domain.com, found that this didn't work.
(Obviously I didn't use my-domain.com - but the principle applies.)

However today I found an approach that does seem to fix this:

1   Log in to the Google Apps domain administration account (the same one you used to set up the 2nd CNAME record - if you don't know how to get into it, some of the information here may help)

2   Go to Domain Settings > Domain Names, a

3   Sroll down to where it says:  Redirect the naked domain (http://YOUR-DOMAIN.INFO) to ... (whatever it says now)

4   Click the Change Redirect link under this.

5   Make sure that www (lower case) is entered in the field.

6   Click save.


I cannot guarantee that this will always fix the problem.   But it did for me just now, and I've seen a couple of other posters saying that it helped them too.    So I thought it was worth sharing.

Google product cancellations for October 2012

This Quick-Tip is about the products that Google is dropping, or making changes to, from October 2012.

Google's latest announcement about retiring products came out yesterday (Saturday).   Seems odd that they're calling it "spring cleaning", since it's autumn / fall in most of the countries where major Google products are based.

So what's on the list that will affect Blogger-users?

AdSense for Feeds is being switched off - this has never been much of an earner for me, but I guess it could be significant for some people who have very large subscriber audiences.   There's one line that worries me a little ""Publishers can continue to use FeedBurner URLs powered by Google, so they won’t need to redirect subscribers to different URLs." - it's saying "no change to Feedburner", but I wonder why they feel the need to say this.

Storage limits in Picasa and Google Drive "will be consolidated over the next few months" - we get five gig of free storage across both products, not in each one.   But on the plus side, people who've paid for storage in one of these services will be able to  use it in either of them.

No new Google News Badges will be issued from mid-October, and there will be no more Recommended Sections.   I don't know these products well, but they may be relevant for people who have built a blog that shows news feeds.

Insights for Search has been merged into Google Trends, and expanded to cover more countries.   Trends for Websites is no longer being updated though, which could be missed by people who use this tool to figure out what to blog about.

+1 Reports in Webmaster Tools are being removed, because Google Analytics has better tools.   I'm guessing that any bloggers who are seriously tracking their +1 performance will be using Analytics anyway.