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

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

Adding a Google Custom Map to your blog

Adding 3rd party HTML to your blog

Read more > Introducing Maps Engine Lite - a better tool for customizing maps

What happens to your blog if your Google account becomes inactive?

This article describes Google's Inactive Account Manager, a new tool that gives you control over what happens to your Google account if you don't log on to it for a period of time.

Ages ago, I read a thought-provoking article on ProBlogger about making a "blogging will". His main aim was to ensure that his family could access his business assets (ie his blogs etc) if something untoward happened to him.

Now, Google's Data Liberation Front have annnounced a new tool called the Inactive Account Manager, which lets Google account owners say what should happen if they ever stop using their account.

This tool lets you decide

1. If and when your account should be treated as inactive
2. What happens with your data if it becomes inactive, and
3. Who else is notified, and what is said to them.

At the moment, it covers these Google tools - which are attached to your Google account:

• +1s
• Blogger
• Contacts and Circles
• Drive (which I guess means Docs too)
• Gmail
• Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams
• Picasa Web Albums
• Google Voice
• YouTube.

AdSense is a notable exception: I don't know what happens to your outstanding balance and income if your AdSense account becomes inactive.   But I suspect that it might be managed in the same way as a bank account or book royalties - and because each country will have different laws about managing estates and the like, it's not possible to let you "opt-out" in the same way as it is for regular data.

What situations is this for

There are a few scenarios that the IAM ("Inactive Account Manager" is such a mouthful) might be useful for.

Death / Serious illness or injury

The most obvious thing that you could use the IAM to provide for is if you unexpectedly die, or become so sick/injured that you cannot log in any more.

In this case, if your blog and other Google content (eg YouTube videos) is personal, you may or may not want family or friends to access it - and you may or may not want it to be deleted.

But if your blog belongs to an organisation or a business, it's quite a different scenario:   you will almost certainly want someone else to have access.

And if it contains material about a hobby or public interest topic, you may well want to have it transferred to some kind of "data steward" - or you may want your estate to manage it as an asset, if it is profitable.

Losing access to your account

Some people lose access to their Google account because they:

1. Set them up with an external email address
2. Lose access to that email address
3. Forget the Google account password
4. Cannot remember enough details to regain access via the forgotten-password wizard.

The IAM will only help these people if they have set it up, and if they (or a friend) still has access to the alternative email address they entered.   So it's not a universal cure for this problem, but may help a little.

Losing interest in your account

People's lives and priorities change over time.   The blog that was all-important ten years ago may now be a distant memory.   In this case, if IAM is set up, people will at least get a chance to think about whether they want to maintain what was there, or not

The best approach?

There is no "one right way" to use the IAM to look after your blog when you stop updating it.   It's a very private decision, and depends on what risks you think you want to cover off, and how you are using your Google account.

Personally, I don't think that losing interest or losing access are likely to happen.    So I've set up my IAM information to cover the first case, ie death or incapacity, and used it to send messages to carefully selected friends and relatives.  I could do more, eg include details about selling a couple of blogs that would be "assets" in the right hands, and send messages to the firm who would be looking after my affairs.   But it's a start - and as with so many "death and taxes" type of issues making a start is half the battle.

How to set up your inactive account information

Once you have thought about what sort of situations you want to deal with, then setting up your inactive-account information is pretty easy.

To start with, go to the Account Management option your Google account settings page.   Once you're there, there is an easy set-up wizard, which covers the following points.

Warning that you're in danger of becoming inactive

Google doesn't want your account to suddenly become inactive.   So they collect details are used to warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to an alternative address, saying that your account is close to becoming inactive. The current definition of "close" is one-month. Basically, this is your chance to stop the account becoming inactive by logging in.  

They ask for:

• A mobile phone number (which needs to be verified - so it must be one that you can access now)
• An alternative email address (which isn't verified - yet!)

Setting the timeout period

You need to choose how much time needs to go by without you logging in before your account is considered to be inactive. The default is three months, and other options are six, nine and 12 months.

Who else to tell

You can nominate one or more trusted contacts - ie email addresses that receive notification, and (if you choose, access to your data), once your account actually becomes inactive.

For each trusted contact, you need to give some message-text and also say which specific Google products they should get access too.

You can also set up an auto-reply to messages to your Gmail account, which is sent in response to all incoming messages after your account becomes inactive - or at most once every 4 days if one account sends you lots of messages.

What happens to your account:

Finally, you choose whether to delete your data once your account is inactive - the default value is "no", but you should change it to "yes" if you want to be sure that your blog etc are removed.

Confirmation

After you have saved your settings, you will get an email confirming that you entered.    (In my case, this message took several days to arrive - possibly because I get up my IAM settings fairly shortly after it had been introduced.   Hopefully it's got quicker now.

Limitations of the IAM

At the moment, IAM lets you set thresholds, notifications and actions for a whole Google account - there is no way to say that some blogs should be kept, and some deleted.

And there are still lots of things that we don't know about how IAM will work in practise.

• Do you get only one reminder - or one every time you reach the inactive-account threshold again  (ie every 3, 6, 9 or 12 months)?

• What happens if you're one administrator of a team blog, and your account becomes inactive with instructions to delete it - but there are other member or administrators who are still actively contributing?   (I would hope that the presence of these people means that your "delete" instruction is ignores, at least for the blog.   But I suspect that this won't be an easy scenario to provide for - and it's possible that Google haven't worked through all the options here.
  
  Ditto other shared resources (YouTube Channels, Shared folder/documents in Drive, etc)?  The dimensions will be different in each product, but the underlying problem is the same.

So while I think that IAM is a great idea, I'm also a little nervous about what problems it could cause if people choose to delete things without thinking through all the consequences.

And if you are going to set it up for your own personal blogs, then maybe now is a good time to transfer ownership of blogs that you made for clubs / societies / organisations / businesses to generic accounts being managed for them.


What other issues do you see?

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Related Posts

Understanding Google accounts

Team blogs:  letting other people write to your blog

Transferring blog ownership

Understanding how Blogger and Picasa-web-albums work together

Setting up AdSense for your blog

Read more > What happens to your blog if your Google account becomes inactive?

Introducing Google's tools for measuring how fast your blog loads

This quick-tip describes some tools that I've recently discovered that measure page-load speed and make suggestions about how to improve it.

Google have said a number of times that page-load-speed (ie how quickly a visitor to your blog sees it load onto the screen) is one of the factors in SEO.

And even if SEO isn't important to your blog in terms of getting visitors, page-load speed is important for making your visitors happy: even your mother isn't going to be happy if your blog takes five minutes to show her the pictures of your new baby.

So Google's tools for measuring and improving page-load speed are valuable tools for most bloggers.

Where to find them:

The tools are available at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

The most important one for Bloggers is in the Analyze section, called Insights, found under the "Analyze your site online" link.

There are other tools there, too (eg an API, the Page-speed service, extensions for certain browsers), but they are well outside what Bloggers need to know.

How to use the Pagespeed tool

To find out what Google thinks of your blog's page-load speed, simply type your web-address into the box in the middle of the Pagespeed  Insights screen, and click the Analyse button.

In a few moments, the screen refreshes with the results.

At the top of the results, there is your site's score out of 100.

Then there is a list of suggestions, broken down by priority (high, medlium, low) based on their "potential performance wins" (how much difference they make) and amount of "development effort" ie how hard they are to do).

Not all of these suggestions are relevant for Blogger users, because we don't have total control over how our posts are converted into website pages. However ones that are relevant include:

• Optimize images
• Serve scaled images,
• Putting CSS into the document head  (in our case, putting it into the template rather than into individual posts)

If you go into the details of the particular suggestions (using the entries in the left hand sidebar), you can see how much impact they will have, and get information about what  you need to change to implement the suggestion.

Why bother

Given that so many of the suggestions aren't relevant for Blogger why use the tool at all?

One reason is that it gives you a way of looking at the effect of gadgets that you add to your blog:  looking at the page load score before and after adding the gadget shows if it makes much difference to your load time.   Based on this, you may decide to only show certain gadgets on a particular page.

Read more > Introducing Google's tools for measuring how fast your blog loads

Getting started with SEO, for Bloggers

This article introduces Google Webmaster central's first-steps-SEO cheatsheat, and explains how the points in it apply to Blogger.

Google have produced a "first steps cheat sheet" for people who've got a blog or website, "but never gave search much thought". They describe it as a "short how-to list with basic tips on search engine-friendly design".

It lists things you can do which may "help Google and others better understand the content and increase your site’s visibility".

You can find it here. (It's a one-page PDF file, ).

The Webmaster Central post where it was announced said to "read it, print it, share it, copy and distribute it" ... so I'm going to tell you how the points listed apply to Blogger users.

One caveat:  I've explained previously, SEO (aka search engine-friendly design) is totally irrelevant for some bloggers.  Unless you know that being found in search-engines is important for your blog, then  please don't waste any more time on this.

But if you do depend on Google (or Yahoo, Bing, etc) to bring visitors to your blog, read on, then these are the first things that Google suggest you should think about:

Looking good in the search results

Blog address

Make sure that your blog's URL is "descriptive and easy-to-read".

The URL is the blog's website address:  you choose it when you first set the blog up, but you can change it again later if you need to, using  Settings > Basic > Publishing in the Blogger dashboard

Many people recommend using a custom domain because it look more professional and like a real website.   But the same "descriptive and easy to read" guideline matters even if you use a blogspot.com address.

An example search-engine results page

Overall blog title and description

Your blog Title should "Describe your ... [blog very] concise[ly]."
Your blog's Description should "Describe your ... [blog] in a concise, informative phrase."

You can edit these under Settings > Basic > Basic in the Blogger dashboard.

I usually make the title match the blog's URL  (viz http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/ /  Blogger-hints-and-tips) - but it can be a little longer, maybe about five words.

Blogger lets you make the description up to 500 characters long, but I usually recommend less than this - a maximum of 160 is better.

Post title and descriptions

Each post and page needs a title that is concise and informative. 

You set the title in the Post-editor, when you are first writing a post.   And you can change then later by editing the post again after it has been published.

Some people suggest using a catchy phrase that people are likely to share on Facebook, Twitter etc for the first week after you publish a post, and then changing it to a more descriptive phrase (which looks better in search results) after that.

Post descriptions

Meta descriptions are page summaries which are often used by search engines to describe your blog on the search-result listings.

Turn on descriptions in Blogger by

• Going to Settings > Search preferences > Meta-tags in the blogger dashboard.    
• Choosing the choosing "yes" radio button
• Putting the overall summary for the whole blog into the text field.   (I recommend the same one from Settings > Basic > Basic) into the text field
• Clicking Save changes

Once Descriptions are turned on, there will be a Search Description entry in the right-hand Post-settings area each time you edit a post.  Write a short (160 characters or less) unique description for each post into this.

Help Google understand images

File names

Before you load a picture to your blog (or to a photo-hosting service like Picasa-web-albums or Google+ Photos), give it a short, descriptive file name.  

For example, I just made the screen shot that I used in the previous section, and called the file  "seo-basics-meta-description-field-blogger-post-editor.png"

Tagging

Google's sheet just says to Use an “alt” and "title" tag to describes the picture.   I've described this in detail previously - see Telling Google, and visually impaired people, about your pictures

You can also use the "add caption" feature (on the tool-bar when you hover over the picture in the post-editor) to add a short caption describing the picture.

Put information in text, not just pictures

Look again at the picture that I used in the previous section.   When I was making it, I put the 160-characters-long suggestion right inside the picture.   This is useful for readers who see more detail in the photos than the text.   But it's no good for search engines:   Google is clever, but it's still not clever enough to extract reliably the meaning from text you have photographed.

So I made sure that the 160-character advice was in the text, as well as in the picture.

Update and keep going

Lots of people start a blog, and then get discouraged because it's not successful straight away.

This is a mistake: "domain age", AKA how long you have had the website address for, is one of the factors that search-engines take account of. Even if you don't get many visitors in the first year, the fact that your blog has been going for a year and you are still posting to it makes it attractive to Google.

So Google's final piece of advice is to keep going, and to publish new posts on your blog on an on-going basis.  

A final word from me

Google's advice is a good starting point.   The bottom of their cheat-sheet links to various other good sources too:

• Google SEO Getting Started guide   (a much longer and more detailed version of the cheatsheet)
• Webmaster Academy (a series of instructional videos)
• Webmaster Tools - an online utility that you can use to measure and diagnose SEO issues with your site.

These resources are all good - but they aren't targeted to Blogger users, so sometimes they recommend changes to things we cannot change (eg URL-structrue), or they simply explain things in non-Blogger ways.

There are about a zillion websites offering SEO advice too - just google and you will find them.

In particular, you may see lots of SEO advice about keyword research etc - but my advice is to ignore this for a very long time in your blogging:  focus on writing content that your blog-visitors will want to read, describe it in interesting ways, and the keywords will look after themselves.

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Related Articles:

Telling Google, and visually impaired people, about your pictures

Using Blogger to make a real website

Editing a blog-post that you have already published

How to put a picture into a blog-post

Introduction to Picasa and Picasa-web-albums

Read more > Getting started with SEO, for Bloggers

Stop Blogger offering to share your posts to Google+

This article describes Blogger's share-to-Google+ feature, and shows how to stop Blogger offering to share to your Google + circles every time you publish a new post, and what you cannot (yet) do with the feature.

Automatically updating Google + from your blog

If you have linked your blogger-account to your Google+ profile, then by default you are shown a pre-filled Google+ share box with details of your post in it, every time that you publish a post, including times when you edit a post that has already been published.

The share box has a snippet and thumbnail picture  based on your post, and section where you can add a comment, remove the description, choose the circle(s) to share it with, and say to also email people who are not in your circles.

You can change the picture associated with the shared post using the arrows (hover over the top left of the suggested picture - the arrows circle through the other available pictures. Or you can remove it using the cross button (hover over the top-right of the suggested picture).

The top right corner shows whether the post is being shared to your personal profile to the the Google+ Page that you previously linked with the blog.

This is one of the easiest ways of sharing your blog posts with any of the social networks: it lets you customise the content of the message and target it carefully, without having to leave Blogger to do so.

Don't bother me: stop Blogger offering to share to Google-plus

If you don't want to see the "share on Google+" option every time post, you can turn the feature off for individual blogs. To do this:

1   Go to the Google + tab.

2   Untick the "Prompt to share after posting" button, currently found underneath your list of Pages

(Unlike some tabs, changes on this tab are automatically saved.)

Why would you want to do this?   After all, if your accounts are linked, then surely you want to share your posts to Google+?

Actually there are a number of reasons why you might want to disable this feature.   Some that I can think of are:

• If you make frequent edits to existing posts it would probably annoy the people in your circles if you shared all of them - and it slows you down, because the share screen takes a few seconds to load every time you publish.

• If you use a private blog to prepare your posts before publishing them - obviously there's no need to share these posts with yourself! 

• You might just want to do the share, but at a later time than the initial post, to spread out the new-post impact.

Even if you've turned off the "offer to share" option, you can still Google+ share individual posts by selecting "share" from underneath the title in the Blogger Dashboard > Posts tab.

Troubleshooting the Google + share option:

You only see this option if when you publish a post, if:

• You have connected any of the blogs owned by your blogger account to Google+

• You have not previously turned it off for this particular blog

• Your blog is not private.
  If you try it on a blog with restricted readership, instead of an error message you are given the not-very-helpful option to share the Blogger sign in screen, like this:

Doing more with the Blogger / Google-Plus share feature

Currently there is no way to:

• Totally automate the share, so it happens without you pressing Ok in the "Share this on ..." box.

• Show the labels from your post in your shared item

• Schedule the share

• Automatically share posts published with mail2Post or which are scheduled to Publish in the future.

• Change whether the post is shared to a selected Google+ page or your personal circles
  This is controlled by a global setting that you can edit on the Blogger Dashbaord > Google + tab, but you cannot alter it on the fly.

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Related Articles:

Post-snippet and post-thumbnail: where do they come from

Linking your blog to the social networks

Prepare Posts in Private, so you can Publish when they're Perfect

How to edit posts that you have already published

Mail2Post: post to your blog without using Blogger

Using Labels to categorize blog-posts

Read more > Stop Blogger offering to share your posts to Google+

How to find free pictures for your blog, using Creative-Commons search

This article describes the Creative Commons search tool, which you can use to look for pictures, videos, music etc that are available for other people to use under a Creative Commons license.

What is Creative Commons

Previously I've described how copyright applies to bloggers, how you can protect your blog-content from copyright theives, and what you can do if they take you work anyway.

The focus in that series was looking after your own rights.

But rights always come with responsibilities. The details vary by country, but in general you cannot just copy other people's recent work without their permission - in the same way that they cannot copy yours.

Some people, though, are happy to give other people permission to use their work, often with certain conditions (eg you must including an attribution link to the creator).

Creative Commons is an easy, legal way for creators to give permission for things they create to be used by other people. It is a framework which offers "licenses" that creators (writers, artists, composers, poets, etc) can apply to their work to say that other people can make copies, and what conditions apply  (eg non-commercial use, only if you attribute me, etc)

To use it, authors, artists, etc don't need to register their work. Instead, they go to the Creative Commons website and get code / text to put with their published work to show what rules apply.

Then they can publish or upload their pictures, writing etc anywhere they want, and by linking to the licence the work is as protected as anything on the internet can be.

How to find pictures & music that are Creative Commons licensed

Creative Commons have a very useful search tool, found at http://search.creativecommons.org

This is not a search engine. Instead it is a front-end-tool that lets you choose:

• The keywords you want to search for (the search words)
• The type of license that you need (use for commercial purposes - yes or no, modify, adapt, build upon - yes/no)
• Which of the file host/search services to use (eg flickr, Google, Open clip art library - etc)

Once you have entered the search options, click on the source that you want to look in, and you are  taken to that site and shown the results of the search-query and options you entered.

For example, when I entered:

• "Christmas"
• Commercial allowed (because I wanted to make a picture to use in Blogger-HAT, where I have advertising)
• Changes allowed (because I wanted an image that I could use as the basis for another one, rather than exactly as it is now)

and clicked on Fotopedia, I was shown:

From here I could use the search tools in Fotopedia to refine my image-search and find just the right picture that I could use to represent a Christmas carol worksheet on my blog.

What sources are included

Today, the sources that are linked to from Creative Commons search are:

• Eurpoeana - media
• Flickr - pictures
• Fotopedia - pictures
• Google web - web search results
• Google images - pictures
• Jamenda - music
• Open Clip Art Library - images
• SpinXpress - media
• Wikimedia Commons - media
• YouTube - video
• Pixabay - images
• ccMixter - music
• SoundCloud - music

It wouldn't surprise me if this list grow/shrinks, as sites become more or less useful as sources of public-domain or creative-commons-licensed materials.

Things to watch out for

Creative Commons cannot guarantee that the results of searches that start in their tools will always be available for re-use: source systems may change their approach, items may be mis-tagged, content owners may change their mind, etc. So they recommend that you should always click-through to the original image in the source site, and double-check the license and attribution requirements there.

Also, some sites may allow you to link directly to the copy of the image on their site. this can be a lot quicker than making your own copy, uploading it and included it in your blog.  But doing this means that the image will not be used as the thumbnail-image for your post. And if the picture is ever removed from the original site - or its web-site address there changes - then the link in your blog will not work any more.

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Related Articles:

Bloggers and Copyright - an overview

Protecting your blog-contents from copyright theft

Taking action when someone has used your copyright materials

Thumbnail images - a picture to summarise each post

Adding a picture to Blogger

Read more > How to find free pictures for your blog, using Creative-Commons search

Blog home-pages and mobile-templates: Do they work together?

This article discusses the issues of giving your blog a home page, and how this works for people using mobile devices.

Previously I've described the options for giving your blog a "home page", and also how and why to enable a mobile template for your blog.

The home page (aka landing page) issue was a challenge with no good solution for a long time - until someone cleverer than me spotted the potential offered by the custom-redirect feature.   With this, you can put the content for a "home page" into a post or page, and then redirect your blog's "landing page URL" (www.yourBlog.blogspot.com) to it.

However, I have found that if you have enabled a mobile template for your blog, then this approach does not work for visitors using mobile devices.

Instead of the home page that non-mobile visitors see, mobile-using visitors are shown a mobile-specific page with:

• Your header,
• The page gadget (if you've used one - it's not used in this example) as a drop-down list
• A list of tiles - one post each (more about these below)
• An older posts / home / newer posts navigation tool
• A link to view the web-version
• A mobile attribution gadget (unless you've removed it)
• An AdSense ad-unit, if you have put AdSense into your blog using the AdSense gadget(*).

There may be some different things too, if you have chosen the "custom" mobile template option and added other gadgets to be shown on mobile.

But a key point is that any home-page custom-redirect that you have set up does not work - even though other custom-redirects (ie not involving your home page) do work.



(*) The rules for whether this is shown or not are actually a little more complex - but that's a topic for another day!

What do mobile users see on their post-tiles.

The landing page for a mobile user includes a vertical "tiled" list of posts.

 In this, each tile has:

• The date and post title,
• The post-thumbnail photo and
• The first few words for the post (less than the whole snippet though) for a post.

They are sorted by descending-date - meaning that your most recent post is at the top of the list.

The applies if  you are using a standard (ie designer) or custom mobile template.

The recently-introduced dynamic mobile template is different again - in it, the tiled post looks more like the "before the jump" summary shown on your regular blog - but even so, it is still a list of posts sorted in reverse-date order, not a custom home-page.

What this means for bloggers who care about their home page

There are main things that you need to think about:

• Using a mobile template gives you far less control over your mobile landing page - although it can be set up to work well if you understand how it operates, and if you don't mind your blog looking like a blog, not a webpage..

• If you have a mobile template enabled, and you want mobile visitors to your blog to always see one post first, then you need to make sure that this post always has the most recent post-date.

• With a non-dynamic mobile template enabled, visitors won't see whole posts or before the jump post-summaries initially: instead they see even more abbreviated summary tiles.

• With a dynamic mobile template enabled, visitors will see post-tiles that are more like the post-summary from the main blog (even if it's using a non-dynamic template) - but they still won't see your custom landing page.

If you are not happy with mobile visitors to your blog being shown a tiled-list of posts, then you should not enable a mobile template - and you should disable it if you've already enabled one

This will mean that people using a mobile device to look at your blog will see a full-featured version, that they will most likely have to scroll around to view, ie they won't see the whole screen at one glance.   Though this sounds painful, in two of my blogs, I've decided that this is actually the best approach.

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Related Articles:

Enabling a mobile template for Blogger

Deleting "Powered by Blogger" from mobile-template blogs

Making one post always come up first

How to give your blog a fixed landing page

Understanding post.thumbnail and post.snippet

Using Blogger to build a "real" website

Read more > Blog home-pages and mobile-templates: Do they work together?

How to make a blog into a real website

This article explains how you can use Blogger to make a site that looks just like any other website and why you might, sometimes, want to do this.

Blogs vs Websites

Some people are very happy to use Blogger to make a blog, that is, website that looks like a diary or journal that they write in regularly.

But a common question is "how to I make my blog into a real website, just like "someone" has done over at "this website"?

This isn't easy to answer:  Not everyone means the same thing when they say "real website".  "Someone" might have just changed the background image, installed a third-party template, changed a few settings - or re-written the entire Blogger template!  They may have just made the blog look more professional than the basic templates do - or maybe they've removing all "blog" features so that the site is like a regular brochure website.

The bottom-line is that, even with no changes a blog is a "real website", because it's got:

• An url (www.your-blog-name.blogspot.com)
• A space on the internet that's dedicated just to it. (For Blogger users, that space is inside Google's servers - we don't have to pay for our own hosting).
• Web-pages, made in HTML, which visitors can look at using a web-browser (eg Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc)

And there are some sites which are large, very popular and not at all ashamed to look like blogs, for example:

• www.IkeaHackers.net/ - a site for sharing clever ways of repurposing kitset furniture
• www.DarkRoastedBlend.com - a site about coffee - notice their About page is really just a post from 2005!
• www.HowAboutOrange.blogspot.com - a very stylish crafts website
• www.RUStling.org - a site listing all the songs in a large folk-song book

This article from Blogger Buster lists a 100 others - and I'm sure that there are plenty of popular non-English language sites that look like blogs, too.


But there are many other sites that have had some or all of their Blogger features hidden, for example

• www.GalwayTransport.info - a local public transport information site
• www.ConcentricsRestaurants.com/ - a promotional site for a company that builds restaurants
• www.RenewPilates.com - the site for a Pilates studio

You need to do more work to make the second type of site - and even then, if a knowledgeable visitor looks at the source-code for a page, they can still tell that you're using Blogger.   So, usually, I'd recommend that you focus on what you want to achieve with the site, rather than "getting rid of blogger".

That said, here is a lit of things that you may want to to do to "turn your blog into a website".   They are in, roughly, the order that I recommend doing them to have the maximum effect.

Initial steps to reduce the "bloggy" feeling

1)   Get a custom domain

This is a website address like  www.mySite.com  or  www.yourBlog.org - or whatever available name that you choose.

Using a custom domain means that your address will not have "blogspot.com" in it.

You can do this either:

• Using Blogger's  Settings > Basic > Blog Address > Add a Custom Domain function, or 
• By using an URL that you buy directly from a domain registrar - you might need to do this if the address you want isn't available through the Blogger function (eg I recently needed a co.nz address for a site) or if you do not have a credit card.

This step is essential if you don't want the site to be perceived as blog, because the address is what people see when they first find the site in search-engine results.

If you are going to get a custom-domain, then I strongly recommend doing it at the very beginning of setting up your blog, so all the later steps are based on the custom-domain name rather than re-directions.  This is is A Good Thing for SEO - and even if SEO doesn't matter for your blog initially it may become important later on.


2)    Turn off the navBar, and remove the space where it used to be


3)   Show only 1 post on the main page.


4)   Hide the "blog-specific" values from posts, on the Layout > Blog post (edit) tab.  

At a minimum the things to turn off are:

• Post-date
• Posted-by
• Post-time
• Comments
• Links to this post
• Labels
• Reactions
• Email post links
• Post sharing

5)    Make a home page - ideally using the custom-redirect option


6)    Remove the attribution gadget (the bit where it says "Powered by Blogger")


7)    Remove the "subscribe to posts (atom)" link


8)    Add an RSS-subscription gadget using Feedburner.
Some people say this is optional - but I believe that all "proper" websites offer an RSS feed and show that they do so by using a feedburner-style RSS chiclet.   If you just add Blogger's Subscribe gadget instead, it gives the Atom - ie blog-style feed.

Banishing the Blogger look for good

These next steps really go together: if you do one, you need to do the others too. They are needed if you totally want to remove the blog-ish-ness:

9)     Remove all gadgets that show a list of posts. These include the Archive, Labels.  This is simply the reverse of the add-a-gadget procedure - edit the existing gadget, and click Remove.


10)   Remove the "older posts / home / newer posts" links.

11)   Set up your own navigation system: every post or page needs to be able to be accessed from either a button or a link that is in either a gadget or another post/page.

It's temping to think about navigation from the home page. But first-time visitors who come to your site from search-results will not arrive at the home page. They might not even think to look at the home page. Ideally your navigation system should offer several routes to get to every piece of information, and should include both logical links between posts and a search-based option.


Tools that you might use to help with this:

• Summary posts, with links to detail pages about the topic. (Eg my public-transport site has a "city buses details" page, which links to individual route maps)
• A menu bar with links to the most-important summary posts.
  NB  If you use the Pages gadget for this, it is automatically included if you give the site a mobile template which is an important step if you want the site to be responsive.
• Linked-List gadgets to show summary posts, or lists of related detail posts, in the sidebar or footer.

An alternative to your own navigation system is to use categories to put your posts into pages. This doesn't fully reduce the bloggy feeling, since someone who looks at a page sees a list of posts (with just post-summaries if you've used jump-links).   However changing the the status message (the grey box that says "showing all posts with label whatever") can make this acceptable in some sites (ie ones where the line between blog and website is blurred).

What you (currently) cannot do

You cannot remove the post-date values from the URL of blog posts.
If your entire site could be done with 20 or fewer screens, you could use Pages for everything - but IMHO this isn't necessary, visitors don't seem to be overly spooked by URLs with numbers in them.

You cannot use a dynamic template 
If you want your site to look like a website, not a blog: you need to use a Designer, or possibly a Layout, template.

Other things that you might do

You might want your blog tostand out in the seach results in order to get more visitors - see Getting Started with SEO.

You might want to link it to the social networks - remember that there are wide range of possible links, and you need a strategy about how the site relates to each social medium that you use.

Have I missed anything?

I wrote this article  while I was setting up a site on which I want to minimise the "blog" look-and-feel, and I've tried to capture all the steps that I did.  

But maybe I've missed some things?   Maybe there are features that work differently on other templates.

What else would you do?

Read more > How to make a blog into a real website

Using an URL from domainDiscount24 for a blog

This article shows Blogger users, who have purchased a domain through Google Apps using domainDiscount24 (dd24.com), how to set up the 2nd CNAME statement that is needed by  Blogger's custom-domain verification step. 

Most of the information also applies to any who purchased a domain from Key Systems / DomainDiscount24 / dd24 and wants to use it for a Blogger blog.

Why buy a custom domain from Google Apps

A while ago, I noted that Google Apps now provide the ability to buy a range of domains not available via Blogger - for example co.nz (New Zealand), .com.es (Spain), .in (India), .de (Germany) -and many more.

Although they advertising that pricing is "from $US8", when I finally used Apps to buy my co.nz domain, the actual cost was $US20. C'est la vie.   And besides, anything to make the setup-process easier is welcome - and this is a feature of domains purchased using Google Apps.

One good thing that I noticed about buying a domain via Apps is that you set up a domain-administrator account as part of the process.  Though it's a bit more "technical" than many Bloggers are used to, it's better to have the admin account set up to start with, instead of having to try to find it when you want to check the settings, access the email that comes with your domain, or use the URL for some other type of website.

Also, after the domain administrator account was set up, the details for logging on to my registrar account were emailed to me.   This is a nice touch - it's possible to get the details from the domain-administrator account, but having them at hand during the setup process was handy.

What happens when you buy a domain through Google Apps for your blog

Google are partnering with several domain registrars for domains registered via Apps, and my one came from domainDiscount24 (dd24.com) - which is actually the brand-name of a German company called Key Systems.   I was a little concerned at first, about whether this would work with Blogger - but my fears were soon put to rest.

Once you have purchased a domain through Google Apps, the domain settings that are automatically configured for you are aimed at having the domain used with Google Sites.
(Does anyone actually build websites using Sites? I'm reluctant to, out of concern that Google are going to "spring clean" it out of existence!)

This isn't exactly what you need, but it's a good start:

• The CNAME for the www "sub-domain" was pointed to  ghs.google.com - which is what Blogger needs.
• The ANAME records that were set up had the correct values, as per Blogger's requirements.

So the only challenge is setting up the second CNAME record that is now part of the security verification for switching to a custom domain.

How to set up a 2nd CNAME record for a domain from domainDiscount24

In domainDicsount24 term, this is done by creating another sub-domain that is named after the host-value from Blogger's instrutions, and giving it a txt record with the 2nd value.  
(NB  I think that technically  you are not actually creating a "real" subdomain - but that's the phrase that DD24 used to describe what needs to be done.)

Follow these steps

1   Log on to the dd24.com website with the account information (get this from the Google Apps> Domains> Advanced Settings tab - or from the email that they sent you after you set up the administrator account.)


2  Click on the domain name


3  In the upper right is a drop down menu where you can access and create all sub-domains for your domain name (I was using a netbook so had to scroll to see it)


4  Choose Create New Subdomain from this menu,


5  Enter the "Name, Label or Host" field value from Blogger.  
(See Using a domain purchased from another registrar if you're unsure where to get this information from Blogger - remember that it's specific to your blog, and each pair of values is valid for around 24 hours.)


6  Click Create Subdomain.


7  In the window that opens, specify the settings:

• Put the "Destination, Target or Point to" value from Blogger into the field called CName.
• Under DNS settings, leave Source set to "Not in use"
• Under Mail settings, leave Source set to "Not in use"

8  Save the dns settings, by clicking Verify Changes.


Job done - at this point, your second CNAME has been created, and you can log out from the domainDiscount24 site and go back to Blogger to continue he custom domain setup there, as described in Using a domain purchased from another registrar.

domainDiscount24 warn that, as always, may take several hours until DNS changes take effect - however recently I was able to re-direct my blog to the custom domain within Blogger almost immediately.

The only additional step that I needed to do was use the Apps dashboard to make the web-address work without having www at the front (Blogger has this option to tick, but it appeared not to be working.)

And I was pleased to notice that, after the domain purchase had verified properly, I did not have to enable  accounts from my custom domain to use Blogger - it was turned on by default.   (This didn't happen immediately, there was a time delay while the Google Apps purchase was verified.   But it did work eventually).

About domainDiscount24

Of course I didn't work this out myself - I had to get help from domainDiscount24 to figure out how to do the 2nd CNAME record, since the word "cname" wasn't on the front of the domain management tool for my domain.

They don't seem to have on-line help articles.

But when I clicked their Help button:

• I was sent to a nice web-form where I could submit my question. 
• An answer arrived within 3-4 hours (even though I'd sent my query at 1am, German time).
• The answer was correct - and it showed that they clearly understood the question, had checked what was set up so far.

So overall, I'm a happy customer, and now I just need to work on building my new site.

And I think I'll keep domainDiscount24 in mind if I'm looking to buy more domains in the future, including some of the ones that Google Apps doesn't provide access to as yet.

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Related Articles:

Google Apps now provide the ability to buy a range of domains not available via Blogger

Using a domain from another registrar for your blog

Making custom domains work without having www at the front

Allowing custom domain users to access Google's Blogger - the website making tool for the rest of us

Read more > Using an URL from domainDiscount24 for a blog