Webmaster tools Structured Data Testing Tool - helping bloggers who care about SEO

This quick-tip introduces the Google Webmaster Tools structured data testing tool, which gives you a view of how your site looks to the search-engines.

Today I discovered that Google Webmaster Tools offers tools for testing the structured data on your website.

I haven't seen any announcements about it, just noticed it there when I was looking for something else - so I'm not sure if it's really new, just new-to-me, or I've been lucky enough to get a it before most people do.

You can find it here (or at least that's where I'm finding it):    http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Once you're at that page, you can paste in either an URL (your own, or someone else) or some HTML, press preview - and the system will show you how the meta-tags, open-graph tags and other Google-supported structured data on your site looks to Google.   This isn't important for many bloggers - but is very useful information if SEO matters for your blog.

And you can also "Select the HTML tab to view the retrieved HTML and experiment with adjusting it." - and so test out the effect of making changes to your template etc.

The results show you:

• A preview of how the URL looks in a Google search-engine-results-page.
• Authorship testing results - whether have a Google+ page or profile associated with the site
• Authorship email verifications results
• Publisher markup verification status
• An extract of the structured data

I don't even begin to understand what all the results mean.    And I'm not sure if we can do something about all results that are shown - eg   checking Blogger-hints-and-tips currently tells me that there are values for properties that I've never set (eg blogid and postid)  and also properties that aren't part of the schema, eg:

• Error: Page contains property "image_url" which is not part of the schema.
• Error: Page contains property "blogid" which is not part of the schema.
• Error: Page contains property "postid" which is not part of the schema.

But, much like the syntax-checker provided by Facebook for checking how successful you were at  installing Open Graph tags I'm sure that this will be a useful SEO diagnostic tool.

read more...

How to replace a file in Google Drive with a new version

This article is about how to update a file that you have loaded to Google drive. It only applies to files that have not been converted to Google Docs format - for example, PDF, Word, Excel etc files.

New versions vs new files in Google Docs

On a couple of my blogs, I provide files that people can download and use themselves.

When you share a file in this way, there are three main issues to consider:

• Where to put the file
• How people will find it
• What format to use.

Today, Google Drive is the most obvious file hosting option for people using Blogger. (A file host is somewhere that you can put files which Blogger cannot upload - see File Hosting options for Blogger for more details and other alternatives.)

I thought a lot about the best format to use for these files: if I convert them to Google Drive (AKA Docs) format, they won't count against my file-storage quota, and everyone has access to Google Drive/Docs.  But not everyone has a Google account, or access to Docs at the time when they want to work on the file. And some people might struggle with using Word tables and formatting. So in the end, I decided to stick with MS Word and PDF formatted versions, for now at least.

Click here to open the PDF version.

And I tell people about these files by writing a blog post (eg "Table Quiz Answer Sheets") introducing the template, and put a link to each files in it (eg like the picture on the right for the PDF version - for info about how I did this see "Putting text and pictures side by side" ).

However I know that some people choose to note / bookmark / share / etc the location of the file, rather than the blog post. This is fine by me: the point of my blog is to provide tools, templates and advice. I ENsure that there is branding and a link to my blog on the downloaded files, so everyone who sees the printed version knows about my blog.   But I'm not fussed if some repeat-business goes directly to the files - I think they'll come back back to my site when they need advice or a different template.

But what happens if I want to change the file, for example to fix a typo that was missed originally, or to add a new feature?

If I just upload a new Word or PDF file to Google Docs then the links to this file will be different - even if it has the same name as a previously uploaded file.   People who go directly to the original file file will get the old (wrong) version - or even worse, I'll delete it and they will have a broken link.

However I've found that if I use Google Drive's tools for loading a new version of the file, then people with the link will always go directly to the latest version - and I can choose whether to keep the older versions inside Drive, or to delete them.

How to load a new version of a file to Google Drive

Log in to Google Drive, using the Google account that owns the document.


Navigate to the folder that the file is in.


Tick the document that you want to replace or update


Select More, from the navigation options bar above the list of documents


Go to Manage Revisions

Upload your updated version, using the Upload New Revision link:

If you want, delete the older non-current one using the "x" checkmark to the right hand side of the screen.

Job done:  anyone who goes to the existing file link will now get your most-recently-uploaded version of the document.

Troubleshooting

If there is no "Manage Revisions" option, then most probably the file is in native Google Docs format rather than another like Microsoft Word or PDF.   In this case, you need to edit it on-line.  Unfortunately I haven't found a way to temporarily leave the old, unedited, version available to any one who looks at the file before you have finished opening it.   This could be particularly annoying if you want to make a lot of changes -  in this case, it may be best to convert the file back to a downloadable format (Word, etc) and work on it locally before re-uploading and then copy-and-pasting te new contents back to your original file.

Can this be done with the Drive desktop software?

The short answer is: I don't know.

 I have multiple Google accounts, for different blogs, so I've decided that it's safest to always use the web-browser based tools to manage files in Drive, rather than try to work with different accounts on different areas of my local file store.

If you do know, please leave a comment below.

Other options?

I'm certain that there are othr tools in which it's easier to replace an existing verison of a file with a new one without changing the link to the file.    The following notes discuss the ones I've tried so far.

Google Sites

Originally I used "filing cabinet" pages in Google Sites to store the files which I make available. This has a couple of advantages:

If you upload a new file with the same name, then

• The link does not change
• The sharable link includes the original file-name, which makes it easier for me to be sure that I'm putting the right link into my blog posts.

However, Sites isn't Google's preferred way of managing documents now and I have a nasty feeling that one day it may go the same way as Google Pages, Reader, Picnik, etc.  So I decided a while ago to stop using Sites for this.

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Related Articles:

File Hosting - places to store files that you use in your blog

Understandiing Google Accounts

Showing things side-by-side in Blogger

read more...

How to use Picasa-web-albums, without being re-directed to Google+ Photos

This article is about how to you can start Picasa-web-albums in way that stops you being immediately re-directed to Google+ Photos.

What happens when you start Picasa-web-albums?

If you have a Google+ account, either because you only signed up for Google recently, or you had a Blogger account first and then linked your blog to Google+, then you will know that if you go to Picasa-web-albums), you are immediately re-directed to Google+ photos.

When this happens, at the top of the screen, for a few seconds, there is a message saying:

 "Click here to go back to Picasa Web Albums."

But if you do something in Google+ photos, this top banner message disappears, and the only way to get it back again is to close and re-open Picasa-web.   This is tedious - it's a waste of time opening one website just so you can re-direct back to another one.

How to skip the re-direction message

To use Picasa-web-albums, without being sent to Google+ photos, you just need to start it using this link:    https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1

I'm going to put it into the sidebar of my blog very soon, so I have easy access to it.

Is there a problem with using Picasa-web instead of Google+ Photos?

You might wonder if there is a problem with using the old Picasa-web-albums instead of Google+ Photos.

In short, the answer (for now anyway) is no, there is no problem - and I don't expect there to be one anytime soon.

Why?

You still only keep one set of photos in your Google account.   It just happens that Google now have two pieces of software that can access these photos.   One is Google+ Photos, and the other is Picasa-web-albums.    And they both work on the same underlying pictures and photo-albums.   So it won't cause you to run out of space, or to have duplicate copies of your photos.

And Google still need to maintain Picasa-web-albums because there are a substantial number of Blogger users who choose to be anonymous:   Google+ photos simply will not work for them, because it absolutely depends on having the photos associated with an individual, named persons profile.   (And I'm pretty sure that there are no easy ways to transfer ownership of photos from one Google+ profile to another, either, in the event that you want to transfer ownership of your blog.)

Of course we don't know if this will last forever - but my best guess is that you can safely keep using Picasa-web-albums for a good while yet.

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Related Articles:

Transferring your blog to another Google account's ownership

What is Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums - a basic introduction

Creative-Kit photo editor works from Google+, if not from Picasa-web-albums

Options for showing photos in Blogger

read more...

Where is the Blogger help forum now?

This quick-tip is about how to find the current version of Blogger's support forum.

27 July update:   I noticed yesterday that Google have changed the process back, and that Blogger's help link now leads directly to the summary page which includes a Community button.   I guess this means they listened - if not to me, then at least to everyone else who complained.




For as long as I have been using Blogger, Google have provided two types of support:

• A set of support articles - some of which aren't up to date - that describe how to do standard things
• A support forum, where people can ask questions, which are answered by other Blogger users. This forum has some people who are tagged as "Top Contributors" who have special rights, like being able to send questions to the Google staff who are also using the foru - but who obviously don't have the time to read all the posts.

Unlike some people, I don't have any problems with the peer-support model. It's 24x7. It supports lots of languages. It gives ordinary people a way to learn more about Blogger, by preparing answers to other people's questions.   It let me build up reputation as a helpful person, and so encouraged other helpers to help me when I got stuck.   It was also a place I could refer to in my own comment moderation policies:   I would rather that people asked for help with their blogs on a public, peer reviewed forum than here on Blogger-HAT where there is not regular review process.

I wasn't to thrilled about the move to a Google-groups based help forum. I can see why using a standard tool is good, but the Group software just doesn't work so well on my small netbook.

And I'm less-than-happy about the way that Google seems to be making it ever-harder to find the forum: a few weeks back they added another click to the process (Gear-wheel > Blogger Help > Community), and now I see there's yet another one (Gear-wheel > Blogger Help > More (the down-arrow at the bottom of the page) Blogger).

So here's a quick link, which I'm going to keep up to date, and put on my sidebar too. Click it to go straight to the Blogger help/product forum:      https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/blogger

read more...

How to make AdSense ads in your site load faster

This article is about a new, faster, type of AdSense code which is available, and how you can add it to your blog.

AdSense have announced that they are now providing a new, faster, type of code for their ads.

This code is "asynchronous", which means that other content on the page will still keep on loading, even if the advertisement is delayed.

This a good thing, because it lets your blog's visitors see your posts more quickly.  Also, if SEO matters for your blog, then having it load as quickly as possible is important, because Google likes pages that load quickly.

How to put asynchronous Adsense ads into your blog

Blogger have not commented, but I am 99.99999% certain that the new asynchronous ad-code has not be implemented into the AdSense gadgets that are available from Blogger's Add-a-gadget tool.

So to put it into your blog, you need to:

• Follow the standard instructions for getting AdSense code for a website.

• When you reach the Ad code box, choose 'Asynchronous (BETA)' from the Code type drop-down menu

• Install the code into your blog in the same was that you install any other 3rd party HTLM .

You may also want to use techniques like centering gadgets on your blog - but remember that the changes which you are allowed to make to AdSense code are very limtied.

Troubleshooting

AdSense are still describing this new code as "beta" - this means they're pretty sure it's ok, but it might still have some glitches.   So if you do use it, check out your blog in a variety of browsers (ie Chrome and Firefox) to make sure that it's working, and keep an eye on your AdSense earnings too - if they drop unexpectedly, you might want to switch back, and check if that was the problem.

They recommend that if you are going to use the asynchronous code, you should change all the ad-units on your site at once. This could take a while if you've installed ads inside your blog psots but may be worth the effort.  That said, personally I'm going to wait until the new code isn't described as "beta" anymore before I put into the posts in one of my blogs.

Does it work?

Just before I published this post, I replaced the AdSense ads on this blog with the new versions of the code.  Do you think that it makes Blogger-Hints-and-Tips load quicker?

Has it made your own blog load more quickly?

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Related articles:

How to put AdSense ads inside Blogger posts

How to add a gadget to your blog

Installing 3rd party HTML into Blogger

Does search-engine traffic matter for your blog? 5 reasons why not

Tools for measuring how quickly your blogger pages load

How to centre-align gadgets in Blogger

Allowable changes to AdSense ad code

read more...

AdWords external keywords research tool is going to be retired

This quick article shares an observation about the likelihood that Google's free Keywords Research Tool is being turned off.

Most SEO advice says that if SEO is important for your blog, then you should use a keyword research tool to find out the words and phrases that people are actually searching for, and then use these words (so-called "keywords") a lot, because they are most likely to get more visitors for your blog.

There are many tools that can be used to look for keywords, but Google's own keywords research tool is often recommended:  it's free, and no one knows more about key-words than Google does.

The tool is provided as part of the AdWords product (ref AdSense vs AdWords what's the difference).

Usually, you need to sign in to an AdWords account to use their tools.   An AdWords account may be based on your usual Google account, but because it can be used to buy advertising, Google ask you to put a small amount of money into it, so you can use it to pay for advertising campaigns immediately.    (They don't charge you immediately, they just want your account to have a positive balance, so it's able to be used.)

However their Search-based Keywords tool (announced back in 2009) and it's upgraded version, the Keywords-tool ( http://www.adwords.google.com/keywordtool or https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - both which currently re-direct to https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS ) have been available without logging in, provided you complete a simple captcha-text .

Today, though, I've noticed this announcement at the top of the page:

In the coming months, the external Keyword Tool will no longer be available. To get keyword ideas, sign in to your AdWords account and try Keyword Planner.

I cannot see any announcements about this in the AdWords blog.   But this actually has very little information about the keywords tool anyway, most of what is there dates from 2008/09, and they haven't used "keyword" as a label for their posts.  

Google aren't in the habit of putting up notices like that which are wrong, so my guess is that, sooner or later, this tool is going to be removed, and their only keywords-research option will be the Keyword Planner, which isn't free .

So maybe it's time to start finding a new favourite free keyword research tool.   Some reviews to get started with:

• Search Engine Land:  Three Free Keyword Research Tools
• 22 Free Keyword Research Tools

Or maybe bloggers should just forget about keyword research, and focus SEO-basics, and then on writing good quality, natural-language, unique content.

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Related Articles

AdSense vs AdWords what's the difference

 Five reasons why SEO is irrelevant for your blog

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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

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 ...)

read more...

How to make a new category / folder in your The Old Reader subscriptions list

This article explains how to make new categories for listing and organizing feeds in The Old Reader.

Recently I migrated from Google Reader to The Old Reader, in readiness for Google Reader's upcoming retirement.

(If you're not sure why I bothered, you might like this simple explanation of RSS and why it matters for Bloggers, in particular ones who want to research things).

I used Google Takeout to migrate my existing subscriptions from Reader to The Old Reader. (And yes, I did carefully file that exported file away, just in case I want to migrate to some other service.)

Because my subscriptions in Google Reader were organized into categories, these categories were automagically imported into my The Old Reader account.

But today I wanted to change my categories - and it wasn't obvious how to do this from either my settings or profile.

How to make a new category AKA folder in your The Old Reader subscriptions list

To add a new grouping to the subscriptions in a The Old Reader account:

• Click one feed that you would like to move to into the new category - and hold it down.

• Drag it to the empty space below your last folder, and drop it into place.  
  Note:   as you do this, the words "NEW FOLDER" appear at the bottom of the list of categories.

To move other items from your existing subscriptions into the new category, just drag-and-drop them too.

How to rename your new folder

To change the name of a folder/category in The Old Reader:

• Double-click on the existing name - this makes the name open for editing.

• Type the new name, and press Enter to save it.

How to change the order of your categories

You can re-organize your folders - but only one at a time.

• Click the folder that you want to move, and hold.

• Drag-and-drop it into the new place.

Putting feed-items into multiple categories?

For the moment, this is not possible: each item that you subscribe to in The Old Reader can only be in one folder.

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Related Posts

Understanding RSS, and why it can make you a better blogger

Google Reader is being retired

Choosing a replacement for Google Reader

read more...

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.

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:

• Page load speed 
• Using the Pages gadget as the top menu bar, rather than a linked-list or labels gadget, - because it converts into a drop-down menu in when a mobile template is applied.

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.

read more...

How to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into Blogger

This article shows how to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into Blogger

Why Open Graph 

Neil Patel recently explained on Quick Sprout why having Facebook and Twitter tags installed into your blog is important.

To cut his long story short, if you install them, then when someone shares your blog-post, the shared item looks better. This means that more people are likely to follow the link and/or share it themselves - so your blog gets more traffic, and people think you're more professional and thus credible.

Neil also stated that if you don't use Wordpress, "you’ll need to manually generate meta tags for each page on your site" - but fortunately for Blogger users who are brave enough to edit their template that's not true.   Blogger provides lots of SEO-supportive features these days, and you can easily use them to make OG-tags work on your blog - even if you haven't quite got your head around what OG is - personally it too me months to understand what it was all about.

The following sections have more details about how to do this.

How to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into a blog made with Blogger

Edit your template in the usual way.

1     Tell Google about the namespace:

Find the opening <html  ... statement, and add the Open Graph namespace information to it.   The code to add is

xmlns:og='http://ogp.me/ns#'

and it goes after the existing namespace statements.   For example, my current tag looks like:

<html b:version='2' class='v2' expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection'
xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'
xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b'
xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data'
xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'    >

or like this after the line is added:

<html b:version='2' class='v2' expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection'
xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'
xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b'
xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data'
xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'
xmlns:og='http://ogp.me/ns#'>

2   Add the Open Graph tags

Find the closing </head> tag.
(Hint:  I often search for just </head   ie without the closing >, in case there's something else in the tag in my template)


Put the following code immediately before it:

<!-- Begin Open Graph metadata --> 

<meta expr:content='&quot;en_US&quot;' property='og:locale'/> <meta expr:content='data:blog.canonicalUrl' property='og:url'/> 

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName' property='og:title'/>
<meta content='article' property='og:type'/>

</b:if> 

<meta expr:content='data:blog.title' property='og:site_name'/> 

<b:if cond='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl'>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl' property='og:image'/>
<b:else/>
<meta content='URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-IF-THERE-IS-NOT-A-THUMBNAIL-PHOTO-IN-THE-POST' property='og:image'/>
</b:if> 

<b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription'>

<meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' property='og:description'/>

<b:else/>

<meta expr:content='data:post.snippet' property='og:description'/>

</b:if>

<!-- End Open Graph metadata -->

This code needs to be adapted for your blog.   In particular:

• en_US

This value is fine if your blog is written in US-English. But if you are writing in UK-English, you may want to change it to en_GB.   

And if you are using a different language altogether, you should change it to the two letter code for that language-territory combination:   see https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internationalization/  for more information about the codes that they support

• URL-FOR-IMAGE-YOU-WANT-TO-USE-IF-THERE-IS-NOT-A-THUMBNAIL-PHOTO-IN-THE-POST 

Replace this with the web-address of a picture that you want to use if the individual post doesn't have a thumbnail  - perhaps your logo, or a blogger logo.

• App-ID and Facebook-Profile-ID

If you have got an App-ID associated with your blog, perhaps because you signed up to use Facebook commenting with it, then you may also want to add the following statements, just before  the "<!-- End Open Graph metadata -->"

<meta content='App-ID' property='fb:app_id'/>
<meta content='Facebook-Profile-ID' property='fb:admins'/>

Of course putting in your own values instead of the ones in red   (I'm assuming that if you knew enough to get an App-ID, then you will know how to find it, and also about the risks associated with linking your Facebook-profile-ID to your blog.)

3    Check it's complete:

Preview the template changes to make sure that they've worked, and then save them.

Troubleshooting

Testing the OG tags

Facebook have a tool that you can use to see what values the OG tags in your blog have.
It is found here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

Enter the URL of one of the posts from your blog and click Debug to see the OG tags which Facebook finds for it.

Descriptions

The Descriptions tag will only work if you have Search-descriptions on (Option > Search > Meta-tags > Enabled), and have entered a search description for each post using the post-editor.   I had hoped to be able to use post.snippet when this wasn't available, but have not been able to work out the correct syntax to do this.

Pictures

Facebook would like you to use an image that's at least 200x200 as your posts's thumbnail image or as the default image to use for posts that don't have one.

If the picture that you use is smaller than this, they do appear to use it.

However you will see the following message when you use a debugging tool to look at what tags Facebook is reading from your site:

og:image should be larger
Provided og:image is not big enough. Please use an image that's at least 200x200 px. Image 'http://3.bp.blogspot.com/XXX.png' will be used instead.

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Related Articles:

Advantages and disadvantages of editing your Blogger template

Post.thumbnail:   a summary image for a post

How to edit your Blogger template

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read more...

Choosing a replacement for Google Reader

This post tells the story of my choosing a replacement for Google reader.

Every so often, I do a post here on Blogger-HAT which is a little "different".

Today, I'm starting the quest to choose a replacement for Google Reader (yes, the turn-off was announced back in March, but there's no point in starting these things too soon - I expect that a few options have improved considerably since then.

One way that this post is different is that I'm going to hit publish very soon, with the post just started not just finished.    So if you're a subscriber and want to see what I end up with, you might like to sign up on Facebook or somewhere, so you get a notification when I've finished.

So let's get started:

First stop:  google.com   [google reader replacement]
A cool 66-million results.   Yeah, I'll zip through those in no time.

Scanning down the list, I don't recognise some of the top placegetters:

The first three are from Google News.   No, don't want to check them - I want comparative reviews, no press-releases.

A post from "howtogeek" - nah, I don't want to be a geek.

One from "workflowing.net" - sounds like a sponsored listing, even though it's not.  But the summary does say "Note: This post is a running list and will continue to be updated with new options and " - let's take a look.   They have five options:
Feedly
Feedbin
Feed Wrangler
Fever

Feedly is the only free one.   They're making the usual mutterings about "look what happened to the last free option" - but I remember Picnik:   it wasn't free, but it still got shut down.    So I'm not hung up about free = no control.

Not enough to compare yet, need to check another list or two.

6 June update:   

Saw this comment on another site.

Looked atThe Old Reader - Clicked on the sign-in with Google and see that The Old Reader is requesting permission to: View and manage your Google Contacts - That's a NO
Looked at Feedly - Clicked on the Get Feedly for Chrome and it states it can Access your data on all websites and Access your tabs & browsing activity - That's a NO

I'm not so fussed about whether something accesses my tabs and browsing activity - but I don't want a Chrome app:   I need something that works in whatever browser I happen to use, be it IE in the office or Firefox or Chrome at home.

12 June:

I found a reference to Rolio somewhere.    Signed up - even though the screen looked rather bare and pale ( = trendy, but harder to read).   Then I subscribed to one feed, and got an email confirming that I'd subscribed.   Ahh ... no, that's going to get wayyy too painful.

16 June:

I'm starting to get concerned about the number of de-recommendations I'm seeing.   There seem to be lots of reasons not to use tools, and no compelling replacement.

So I decided to try The Old Reader.

The bit about it wanting to access your Google Contacts may be true - but it's not necessary.    I decided to keep the two services separate, and signed up with a totally new account, no Google Contacts requests involved.

It looked a bit odd to start with, but once I realized that it doesn't actually work with IE8, and switched to Chrome, it worked ok.   Personally I think the design is a little ugly - but the basics of Google Reader are there.  

Reading their blog, it's still a very young product - three developers, now getting help from the wider community, but still working out a sustainable model for their product.    So it could start charging subscriptions (I'm not keen) or showing ads (doesn't worry me, provided they're not too intrusive) or get bought of by a large player (I'm guessing that won't be Google :-)  ), and I might be searching again.   But it's worth the risk for a while I think.

25 July Update

I was quite happy - until the last few days when TheOldReader has been unavailable due to a hardware upgrade that went wrong.   It's back now, on Friday morning - but it's got me wondering when it might go down next.

So I went looking for other web-browser based feed readers - and was disappointed in how few there seem to be.    One option I've tried is the Digg reader.  For this, I had to sign in with my Google account - though discovered upon later logins that it's possible to log in with either Facebook or Twitter, too.  It won't work with IE8, but is ok on Chrome.   It imported my Google Reader subscriptions ok.   The top-level interface is fine - although the list of feeds doesn't show which ones have new items in them.   The display of individual items in feeds is a little ugly, though.

So at this stage, I'm not sure which option I'll stick with.

29 July

It looks like the decision is being made for me:   I just logged in to The Old Reader, and say the following banner message at the top of the screen:

We have disabled user registration at The Old Reader, and we might be making the website private. If we do, unfortunately your account will not be transferred to the private site, so you might want to export your subscriptions as OPML and start looking for an alternative solution. More details are in available in our blog: http://blog.theoldreader.com

Having read their blog-post:   the plan is to make the site private in two weeks time, unless someone else steps in with a way to make it work.

Not a good week for me - a lot on at the day job.   So I won't be moving anywhere quickly ... but am definitely looking for alternative web-delivered, browser-agnostic RSS-reader options.

Criteria for choosing:

The classic approach to choosing software is to determine your requirements, then evaluate options against how well they meet them.    But I've found it hard to distil my requirements.

Bottom line - it must let import and let me read the RSS feeds I have now, and let me add new ones.

Pretty important:

Not a stream:  I want to catch up with everything in each feed every so often - not just a stream of what's recent.

Must read RSS feeds - not tweets or other stuff.

Nice to have:

Browser independent

Used my Google account (maybe)

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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.

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.

read more...

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.

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.

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How to keep your Blogger password safe

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

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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Setting up Google Analytics so it gets AdSense data from more than one blog or website

This article is about setting up Google Analytics on your blog in a way that includes data for AdSense clicks and behaviour.

Google Analytics and Blogger.

Analytics is Google's tool for measuring website performance:   how many visitors, how long do they stay for, what pages do they look at - and if you use AdSense, where are your earnings coming from. It's a major step up from Blogger's Statistics displays, and has far more details eg where the visitors came from, what browser they are using.

When people first started using Analytics with Blogger, they followed the standard Analytics instructions to edit their template and add the tracking code to it.

However if they switched to use a different template, the tracking code was lost unless they remembered to re-install it - and many people didn't remember.

So some Google engineers started telling people to put the code into an HTML/Javascript widget instead, because widgets are kept through template changes.

This worked well, until mobile templates were introduced. By default, mobile templates don't show HTML-Javascript gadgets. And while this can be changed, it involves editing your template (so brings back the "what if the template is changed" issue) - and it relies on the mobile-visitors using devices that run  Javascript.

So Blogger added a field to the Settings tab where you can enter the Google Analytics profile ID for the blog:   GreenLava over at BloggerSentral wrote an excellent post about using this, including how to
check if your existing template has the code needed to make use of this new field.

But recently I've noticed that while setting up Analytics this way collected data about visitor numbers, it doesn't always get data about AdSense (eg how many ad-impressions, what page do "clicks" come from, what were the keywords, what browser were getting the AdSense clicksetc). In fact, this data has been missing for all but one of my blogs recently.    So I did some investigation and found that this is deliberate - but that you can fix it.

Getting AdSense data from Analytics

If you only have one blog, and you have linked your AdSense and Analytics profiles, and  put AdSense ad units in your blog by getting the ad-code from AdSense and adding it as code, then you should be seeing AdSense data in your Analytics account.

To check, log in to Analytics and check the Reporting > Standard reports > Content panel:   when you expand it there should be a line for AdSense, and when you click that line some data should appear in the middle report panel (assuming your blog has some non-ad-blocked visitors).

But if you have more than one blog or website, then AdSense data is only put into Analytics for the one that is identified as "primary" in your Analytics profile. (For me, this is was the first blog that I added AdSense to.)

To get AdSense data in Analytics for more than one site, you need to get the tracking code-snippet for non-primary website from Analytics - see below for exact instructions for this- and install it in your blog. As before, there are two choices for doing this:

• Edit your template and add it to the header (but remember that it will be lost if you change templates)
• Add it using an HTML-Javascript gadget which you put near the top of the page (but note that it won't get AdSense data from mobile visitors)

I've found that AdSense ad units that were added from Blogger's Add-a-gadget wizard don't report data through Analytics even if the tracking code is installed - and this support article from Google confirms that this is expected behaviour.   I haven't been able to find any way to work around this, as yet.

How to get the AdSense tracking code for non-primary websites and blogs

Log in to Analytics with the Google account that owns your AdSense profile, and in which you have linked AdSense and Analytics.


Click on the Admin tab in the top right hand corner of any page.


Click on Accounts List (if you aren't already there).


Click the name of the Account you want the tracking code for (if you have more than one account).   Note - stop at the name of the account, don't go down to an individual site's analytics profile.


Click the Data Sources tab, and then the AdSense sub-tab (underneath Data Sources).


Under Secondary Analytics properties, find the name of the profile associated with the blog/site that you want to make the code-snippet for.


Click the Code Snippet link to the right of the chosen profile name.


Copy the code that is shown, and install it to your blog the same way you would install any other 3rd party code - but remember the points above about the consequences of the different ways of adding it.

Repeat this for any other blogs, except your primary one, which you want Analytics to track AdSense data for.

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Related Articles:

Adding a HTML-Javascript gadget to your blog

How to edit your Blogger template

Showing gadgets on mobile templates

AdSense and AdWords - what's the difference

Setting up AdSense for your blog

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How to re-direct an old custom domain - and all its posts - to a new one

This article describes options for making link to a blog's old URL automatically point to the blog's new URL after a custom domain change.

If you have a blog made with Blogger which has a custom domain, then it's easy enough to switch this blog to use a different domain. Doing this moves both the content (posts and pages) and template (layout, structure, colour-scheme).

Often when people make this type of change, they want to set up re-directs so that if anyone clicks an external link to the old custom domain, they are re-directed to the same content on the new domain.
For example, www.old-domain.com/current-Page.html should redirect to www.new-domain.com/current-page.html.)

With many other website building tools, the .htaccess file for the site lets you set up re-directs like this. But things are little different when you use Blogger.

Your Blogspot address VS your custom domain

Your blog always has a blogspot addresss - let's call it: www.yourBlog.blogspot.com

When you publish to a custom domain, Blogger automatically handles the re-direction from www.yourBlog.blogspot.com to www.yourCustomdomain.com for you. This works at all levels, so the home page and every individual post/page are all redirected correctly.

To move your blog from from www.yourCustomDomain.com to www.newCustomDomain.com, you simply tell Blogger to

1. Stop publishing your blog to www.oldCustomDomain.com and then to
2. Start publishing it to www.newCustomDomain.com

(See Switching your blog to a different custom domain for more information about this.)

Once you have done this (and afer a little bit of transition time), Blogger handles the re-direction from www.yourBlog.blogspot.com to www.newCustomdomain.com for you - as before, this works at all levels, so the home page and every individual post/page are redirected correctly.

One point that many people mis-understand, is that after you have done this, there is no connection between Blogger and your old custom domain. You have various options (listed below) for what to do with www.oldCustomDomain.com - and you aren't limited to the features that Blogger offers. The only limits are based on what your domain registrar allows, and what tools you can (learn to) use.

Options for re-directing your old custom domain

Option 1: Registrar re-direction

Once you have stopped publishing your blog to www.yourCustomDomain.com, Blogger has no connection with it at all.

How you manage re-directions from it is totally up to the tools provided by the domain registrar. The simplest approach is to set up a "301 redirect" on the domain, which simply sends all traffic to it to another domain of your choice.

The method for setting this up depends on the tools used by your domain registrar - search their help files for terms like "301 redirect" to find out what is possible with tools.

See Using a custom domain for something other than your blog for advice about accessing your domain registrar account for the domain.

Advantages

• This is the easiest approach, and doesn't require you to make a website of any type.
• Visitors are automatically re-directed.

Disadvantages

• Depending on how the registrar's tools work, visitors may be automatically redirected to your new home page, not the the post that they specifically followed a link to.

Option 2: Another website tool

If you know how to use another website development tool that does provide access to the .htaccess file for the site, then you could make a "site" that just contains page-and-post level redirections for all your existing posts and pages.

Advantages

• This approach sends people to the exact content that they followed a link to.

Disadvantages

• It could be tedious setting this up for every post and page, if you have a lot of them at the time when you change domains.
• You need to choose and learn a very different type of website building tool to do this.

Option 3: use Blogger to make a site-level re-direction message

Make a totally new blog (eg    www.myBlogHasMoved.blogspot.com),

Publish it to your old custom domain

Give it one post that says

"www.oldCustomDomain.com has moved to www.newCustomDomain.com please update your links"

Use the Settings > Search preferences > Errors and redirections > Custom Redirect Custom Page Not Found  option to explain that your blog has moved, and send any traffic to that one post.

Advantages

• This is a simple approach, using tools that you already know.
• It will work forever (because blogspot domains don't expire).

Disadvantages

• Visitors will not be automatically redirected: the best you can do is show a link which goes to a selected post or page in your blog, which the visitor needs to click to go to the blog.
• The re-direction link is only to one specific page, not to the exact content that was linked to iniitially.  This is quite different from what many people want to achieve - blogger simply does not have that functionality.

A non-option: Blogger's custom redirect tool

Blogger has a function under Settings > Search preferences > Errors and redirections > Custom Redirects  that lets you set up custom redirects for individual pages.

However this isn't suitable when you change your custom-domain totally, because it only supports re-direction within the same blog, not to an external URL.

(And anyway, if you have a significant number of posts, it would not be practical.)

Other options?

Have you found any other ways around this? Or any good tool for setting up .htaccess redirects on a domain that you used to use for a blog?  Share your experience in the comments area below.

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Related Articles:

Using a custom domain for something other than your blog

Linking your blog and your website.

How to make a real website using Blogger

Switching your blog to a different custom domain

SEO Basics for Bloggers

read more...

Introducing Maps Engine Lite - a better tool for customizing maps

This article is an introduction to Google's Maps Engine Lite, which is a tool for creating custom maps.

What is Google Maps Engine Lite

In late March 2013, Google announced a beta (ie late-stage test) of Maps Engine Lite - and now it is available from the main Google Maps interface, without the word "beta" in sight.

This is a web application to let you "Create powerful custom maps", and it has more features than the current  "My Maps" custom-map editor in Google Maps, which I've used until now to put certain maps into one of my blogs.

You can access it at: https://mapsengine.google.com/

Once you have signed in to a Google account, you can either view/edit an existing map that you have make with Maps Engine Lite or which has been shared with you in MEL, or create a new one.

How to create a custom map using Maps Engine Lite

Click on the New Map button from the front screen, or the New map link from the manage-files folder (top left side of the screen).

Use the arrow beside Base Map to choose the style that you want applied: this covers both what is shown, and the colour scheme. At the moment the options are:

• Map (ie ordinary - like regular Google maps)
• Satellite
• Terrain
• Light Political
• Mono City
• Simple Atlas
• Light Landmass
• Dark Landmass
• Whitewater

Add places to the map by:

Drawing them - You add things to the map with the Placemark and line or shape-drawing tools.  These are similar to those for Google Custom Maps, though they're now separate into two items.

or

Importing them - from either CSV/Excel files or you existing Google Custom Maps - see http://support.google.com/mapsengine/?p=lite_addplaces for details about what is possible.

You can separate the map into multiple layers, and you have access to Google Maps regular search feature: search-results are placed on non-permanent "search" layer, and you can select a result, right click on it and Save it to the map you are currently editing.


While editing the map, you have these options

• Style - lets you choose whether to show individual markers, or a sequence of letters/colours
• Table - Edit the list of placemarkers and lines - giving each a name or description
• Labels - lets you choose whether to show marker labels on the map or not - and whether to use the name or description field.

Sharing maps you have made

The map can be shared using the green Share button in the top right corner, via gmail, G+, Facebook, Twitter or anything else which lets you use a link like this:

Putting Custom Maps on your website or blog

In Maps Engine Lite, the "embed on my website" option is available under the Save icon (currently at the top left, with options New map, Open and  Embed)

This gives you a simple iframe statement like this:

<iframe height="480" src="http://mapsengine.google.com/map/view?mid=zV9FBQ3J7L1o.kzRGlAso0tmU" width="640"></iframe>

You can easily change the size via the height and width options, but there is no zoom level option - and I assume that the centre of the displayed map is represented in the coding  (this doesn't always work so well for Custom Maps - I usually recommend that people use the customization option).

And once you have the code, you can put it into your blog in the same way you would add any other 3rd party HTML.   The code above gives a map like this:

Notice that the map itself tells you that it was made with Maps Engine, and that it says it is for non-commercial use:   commercial users can buy access to a far more powerful version of the Maps Engine.

Advantages and disadvantages of Maps Engine Lite

So far I've only done a quick test, but initial impressions are:

Advantages:

Richer interface than custom maps - you can do more things.

Layers are a particularly good addition - it would be great if individual layers could be turned on/off from embedded version of the map.

Alternative colour scheme - will make it easier to create maps that are more suitable for certain circumstances, eg with a faded background.

Sequential markers - I don't have to use my own set of custom markers any more.

Uses the same base data as regular Google Maps - so the Follow Your World service can be used to get you updates about changes to the image-data.

Disadvantages:

No access to Google Streetview while you are editing the map.

Currently if you choose sequential markers, the labels and colours in the key on the left are not always the same as the ones used inside the map.

No Snap-to-roads option for lines

No custom map markers:  if you import a map from My Maps (aka Google Custom Maps), then any custom markers that you have are retained, and you can choose to use them again, but there is no way to add new custom markers.


What else have you found?

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Related Articles:

Creating a Google Custom Map

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read more...