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

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

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.

Read more > Google Buzz's last-gasp addition to your Google Drive

AdSense now allow changes to their advertisement code

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

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.

Read more > AdSense now allow changes to their advertisement code

Newer AdSense ad-unit sizes are now available inside Blogger

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

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

This gives:

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

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

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

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

Like they say in Tesco - every little helps!


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

Read more > Newer AdSense ad-unit sizes are now available inside Blogger

How to tick the "expand widgets" checkbox in Blogger's new template editor

This QuickTip is about finding the "expand widgets" option in Blogger's template editor.

Today, Blogger Buzz announced a new version of the template editor.

This is exciting in all sorts of ways, including that it implies that Blogger will continue to support template editing:   some people suspected that Dynamic Templates, which don't allow template editing, might be the way of the future.

But there's one immediate issue: many of the existing "How to do XXXX in Blogger" tutorials include statements like

Open your template for editing, and tick the "Expand widgets" checkbox

or

Open your template for editing, and make sure that "Expand widgets" isn't ticked

However today's changes have deleted the Expand Widgets checkbox.

So - what do you do if you need to expand the widgets?   Luckily, this is one of the things that has been made easier, once you find out where the option has moved to.

How to see expanded code for a gadget / widget

The equivalent of ticking the "expand" check-box is to:


1)    Find the gadgetID in the usual way.


2)   Open the template for editing, and find the reference to the widget / gadgetID in the code
(Either using the browser's find feature - or  the "Jump to Widget" feature that is now in the post editor.)


3)    Click on the fold marker for that gadget.
This is the horizontal arrow ( ? ) which is in the very left side of the editing window on the same line as the gadget name.

Clicking it turns the sideways arrow into a down-arrow, and shows you the code that's included in that gadget - or at least as much of it as Blogger is going to let you see.

To un-tick the expand check-widgets checkbox, just make sure that all the fold-arrows are horizontal. (they work as toggles - clicking them changes them from one expanded to contracted, or vice versa).

What else has changed?

I'll be updating Blogger-HAT's main "How to edit your Blogger template" article soon - this is just a quick heads-up to start with.

If you've found any more features of the new template editor that you like (or don't) or which need more explanation then drop a comment below and I'll see what I can do.

Read more > How to tick the "expand widgets" checkbox in Blogger's new template editor

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

Accessing Pinterest Analytics, and verifying your website with Pinterest

This Quick-tip is about how you can verify the website (or blog) associated with your Pinterest account - and solving a small problem with the meta-tag that Pinterest give you.

Pinterest have recently announced Pinterest Web Analytics, which will show you "how many people have pinned content from your site, what content is most popular with pinners, and more."   (From their announcement email.

To register to Pinterest Web Analytics, you need to

1. Get early access to Pinterest’s new look.
2. Verify your website, using the tools listed here.

After your website is verified, there will be an Analytics option on the top-right menu whenever you are using Pinterest.

Verifying your blog with Pinterest:

There is one slight twitch to the verification process:  As I've explained previously, Bloggers don't have access to load files to their site's root directory.   Instead we need to use the meta-tag option, currently on the bottom left of the box which opens when you choose "Verify your website" from Pinterest's settings.

The meta-tag that Pinterest gives you looks like this

<meta name="p:domain_verify" content="a-weird-collection-of-letters-and-numbers" >

Add it to your blog's template the same way you would add any other meta-tag.

If you see a message like this when you try to Preview or Save the change:

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure that all XML elements are closed properly. <br/> XML error message: The element type "meta" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</meta>".
Error 500

then it means is that the meta tag that Pinterest gave you has not been closed properly.   To fix it, you just need to add a "close tag" command  ( </meta> ), so that the code looks like:

<meta name="p:domain_verify" content="a-weird-collection-of-letters-and-numbers" >
</meta>

After the tag is added and you have saved your template, click the Complete Verification button in the Pinterest window, to tell Pinterest to look at your website and make the connection.

Read more > Accessing Pinterest Analytics, and verifying your website with Pinterest

New resources and help-options for Google AdSense publishers

This Quick-tip is about some new help resources and options that Google has recently introduced for AdSense publishers - including ones who use AdSense through Blogger.

If you put AdSense ads into your blog or website, you are known as a "publisher", because you "publish" materials where advertisements, placed by people known as advertisers, can be placed.

Recently Google announced a simplified, personalized contact options page for AdSense publishers, backed by an an email-based "help" service.

This is a single source for many commonly used AdSense troubleshooting tools and articles, which often help you to resolve problems very quickly.

Some troubleshooters lead to "issue-specific contact forms that generate emails to our team". These are backed by automated tools, that help to fix problems very quickly.

Google say that "The new contact options page, troubleshooters, and specialized contact forms are available to all publishers with an approved AdSense account".

Also, publishers who usually earn $US25 or more a week are now eligible for consultations via email, to help with

• Managing your AdSense account
• Discussing strategies to grow more business.

Account-holders who qualify see an alert about this on the contact options page. Google target a 2-day response time, although they note it may be slower during peak times.

It's not clear whether publishers who were signed up quickly via a publishing partner (like Blogger) will qualify or not.  I cannot test this, because I signed up using the older full-sign-up process - but I'd suspect that they won't.

Read more > New resources and help-options for Google AdSense publishers

A simple time-management tool for bloggers

This QuickTip shares a template that I used to help me be productive when I was working as a free-lance blogger (and a other things besides).

Blogging can seem overwhelming: there just is so much to learn, to do, to read

And if you don't have a boss, official work-hours or school-pickup-times to structure the day, it can be easy to get to the end of the week and discover that you've done lots of research, but nothing has actually been finished and published..

I had a few months between jobs, and found that it really helped to plan my week, by:

• setting very small, achievable goals for each of my blogs, 
• allocating my time in two hour blocks.
• writing this all down on old-fashioned pen-and-paper on a one-page-at-a-glance sheet that I could hang on the wall, tick of my achievements and keep track of the progress.

A week-planner template

Here's the template that I used to do my planning every Sunday night.  

 It's licensed under Creative Commons, so you are free to copy, adapt and share it.

My tips for being productive:

• Choose a set time to review your plan each week.   Mine was Sunday night - but any time is fine, so long as it's consistent.

• If your blog is not your Number One priority, then allocate time, before you set goals. There's no point getting six goals for your blog if you can only spend two hours working on it this week!

• Make sure that there are some small, totally-achievable-in-one-hour goals, and some that are simply steps toward doing a bigger project.

• If you need to be flexible, fill it in using a pencil and adapt as the week goes on:  this is a tool to make life better, not a way to overburden yourself.

• Make sure you allow time for meals, housework, exercise, socialising and relaxation - and even sleeping in sometimes (but not every day).

• Give yourself some weekends and "annual leave" days: ones when you choose not to schedule all your time, or any of it.

What has worked for you?

Read more > A simple time-management tool for bloggers

Custom-search-engine adds an "overlay" results layout

This quick-tip is about a new overlay results format which Google Custom Search Engines have just introduced - and which looks like it will be their new standard. 

Custom Search Engines have announced a new layout - which appears to have become their new standard option.

Search-engine creation is much the same as it was, but at the end you only get one piece of code to install, and it can just go in the place where you want it (no more messing with editing the <header> in your template).

The search results page is shown as an overlay on top of your regular page.  As always with custom-search-engines, there are ads-by-Google at the top of the page, and if you have already become an AdSense publisher you can use your custom-search-engine to share the revenue.

The big question is - will this new layout approach work in Blogger?    If I was writing an article, I'd test it out somewhere else first, and have some advice about the options, likely problems etc.   But since this is only a quick-tip, this post is my research!   Below, you should see a search-engine, which is set up to search inside Blogger-HAT.   Search for something in it, and you will hopefully see how the overlay search results work.    (If not, I'll come back and change this post as soon as I know more about the problem and how to solve it.)

See an example of custom-search-engine overlay results format

Try it out here:

Is this layout better?

If the layout works, my next decision is whether I should switch the overall Blogger-Helper-Search tool over to use it.

 What do you think?   Like the overlay search results approach, or hate it?

Read more > Custom-search-engine adds an "overlay" results layout

A quick way to keep an eye on what is posted to interesting YouTube channels

This quick-tip is about subscribing to a YouTube channel using an RSS feed-reader, like Google Reader

Most bloggers know about other blogs and websites in their niche that they want to keep an eye on, to either know what's going on, or as inspiration for their own posts.

Previously I've explained that RSS was invented to make this simpler: you can get a summary of changes on all interesting websites in the one place (called a feed-reader), rather than having to regularly visit each site individually.

Video is increasingly popular: many bloggers are putting videos in their posts or their posts into videos, and some have even abandoned their blogs and are only publishing new content to a YouTube channel.

I've just found that it's very easy to subscribe to a YouTube user or channel in RSS / Google reader, meaning you can see a list of new videos from you reader, without having to go to the channel in YouTube.

Follow these steps:

• Find the channel or person you want to subscribe to in YouTube

• Right-click on their name or icon, and copy the URL / web-address / link location (the precise name depends on the browser you are using - you want the place that clicking the link takes you to, not the location of the image-file used to make the link)

• Go into your feed-reader, and subscribe to that link (in Google Reader, this is done using a red button near top left corner of the screen labelled "subscribe" - just click it, paste in the link and click the Add button).

The link will be something like  

http://www.youtube.com/user/MariahIsTheQueen  or http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX9_dIohJBxlizx14AozTng

If it has something else after the name (eg   ?feature=watch), then delete that part before you subscribe  you just need a link saying whether it points to a user or channel, and the name of that user channel.

Example of subscribing to a channel about rocket-science in YouTube

Read more > A quick way to keep an eye on what is posted to interesting YouTube channels

Remove sidebar background in the Travel template

This quick-tip is about removing the coloured section that is in the background in Blogger's Travel template.

Recently, I've been using the Travel template a lot:  it just seems to line things up more sharply on the page.

Today I noticed that there is an option for setting the Sidebar background colour under the Template Designer > Customize > Advanced tool.  However it doesn't seem to work.

Investigating the template shows that as well as this sidebar background colour (which is correctly set by the option above), the template also specifies a background image (ie not a colour) to use in the sidebars.    This isn't removed when the overall background image for the template is removed, and cannot be controlled from the template designer.

But it's simple enough to get rid of it, by following these steps:

1   Edit the template in the usual way.

2   Tick the expand widgets checkbox.

3   Find this code:

background: $(widget.outer.background.color) $(widget.outer.background.gradient) repeat scroll top left;

4   And either replace it with this code, or delete the line entirely.

/*  background: $(widget.outer.background.color) $(widget.outer.background.gradient) repeat scroll top left;  */

The first option just comment its out, meaning you could re-instate it again by removing the /* and  */. But if you are certain that you never want it back, just delete the whole line instead.

Depending on the sidebar layout chosen, there may be one or more places where the background image is.   Make sure that you do all of them that you want the background removed from.

Also, if you later choose a different layout, you make need to remove the background image again even though you haven't actually changed templates.

Read more > Remove sidebar background in the Travel template

Teach Google-search about your blog with the Data Validator

This quick-tip is about the Webmaster Tools Tool Data Validator tool - which is an easier way to "teach" Google about the way things are described on your blog or website.

Recently, Google announced a new feature in Webmaster Tools called the Data Validator.

This is like a simpler way for website-owners (which is what bloggers really are) to tell Blogger about structured information that they put onto their sites - by point-and-clicking at the information on screen, rather than by learning the intricacies of Rich Snippets and the snippet testing tool.

What they've released so far is just an English-language tool for events - "such as concerts, sporting events, exhibitions, shows, and festivals".

To use it you need to

visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter".

And obviously you need to have verified the blog in Webmaster Tools before you start, and to do the "learning" with the same account.   NB   Some blogs will be automatically verified, but some won't:  if yours isn't, then the best way to do this is to choose Alternate Methods and choose HTML Tag - then add the meta-tag to your blog.

The bottom line is that for this to work, you need to put the information into your blog the same way every time (aka in a "consistent format"). What will be interesting to see is exactly how "consistent" it needs to be - I suspect that the tool will probably get smarter over time.

I haven't had a chance to try it yest,  /But I am using a Blogger to manage the website for a small choir which has a concert in January.   So I think I'll start by structuring the announcement of the last concert in June 2012, and then see how well it applies the learning to the next one.

Read more > Teach Google-search about your blog with the Data Validator

Google product cancellations for December 2012

This quick-tip is about Google's winter 2012 product cancellations, which
appear to have less impact on most Blogger users than their recent seasonal purges.

Today, Google have announced their next round of discontinued products - they used to call it "spring cleaning", but this time around have at least acknowledged that it's winter for half the world, and summer for the other half!

Some Google Calendar features are to be discontinued, specifically:

• Creating new reservable times on a Calendar using Appointments Smart Rescheduler
• Add gadget by URL.
• Check your calendar via SMS/text message
• Create event via SMS/text message (GVENT).

My guess is that this may affect some Blogger users, who have integrated a calendar with a blog. It's a fairly specialist area, so likely to be a small number.

There are a few other discontinued features, but I suspect they won't affect bloggers to much extent:

• Google Sync a tool giving access to Google Mail, Calendar and Contacts via Microsoft Exchange's ActiveSync protocol - discontinued, except for Google Apps for Business, Government and Education.
• Google Calendar Sync
• Google Sync for Nokia S60
• SyncML, a contacts sync service used by some older mobile devices.

• Issue Tracker Data API: a tool that lets client applications view and update issues on Project Hosting on Google Code via API feeds.

• Punchd an app that keeps loyalty cards on smartphones

Read more > Google product cancellations for December 2012

New rule for how many AdSense ads per page - from Jan-2013

This Quick Tip describes a new rule that AdSense is introducing to their terms and conditions, about how often the new 300x600 ad unit can be used on a single page.

Recently AdSense introduced two new sizes of ad-unit, the 300x600 Large Skyscraper and the 300x50 mobile-banner.

These aren't available from the AdSense add-a-gadget or ads-between-posts options in Blogger - but once you've been fully approved for AdSense, it's easy enough to add them to your blog by getting the code from AdSense, and installing it to Blogger the same way you install any other 3rd party code.

Personally, I like the 300x600 - it looks much more natural in several of my blogs, because it's more like the other things in the sidebar. Many of the ads it is showing at the moment are text-ads, because advertisers are still developing image-ads in the new size.  But even the text ads look better, especially in sites where I am trying to blend ads with other content. (Believe it or not, I have one niche where many of the ads work the way Google originally thought of them, providing additional information that is genuinely useful to my readers.)

But you can have too much of a good thing.

AdSense have always had a rule that each screen should have no more than

• 3 ad-units and
• 3 link-units.

Now they have announced that from 10 January 2013, the rule is that each screen can have no more than

• 1 300x600 ad unit
• 3 ad-units
• 3 link-units.

This isn't a big issue for me, but obviously there are some publishers who have taken the p*** and devoted "too much" of their screen-real-estate to ads.

Notice that there are no changes to the rules about how many ads you can show from other advertisers and affiliate programmes.

Read more > New rule for how many AdSense ads per page - from Jan-2013

Google+ communities - another way to grow your blog's influence

This Quick Tip is about Google+ Communities, and the ways you could use them to promote  your blog.

Google+ has launched Communities - their equivalent of Facebook's Groups.

If you  want to be a market-leader in your field then you might want to create:

• A page for your blog
  (eg like I have with Blogger Hints-and-Tips' G_ Page), and

• A community about some aspect of your niche. (eg How to Use Blogger). 

Or,  if your blog is more like a newsletter for a club or group, you may want to create a community for your members instead, with less focus on the niche and more on the people.

Why bother

"Fantastic - yet another social media channel to grow and keep up to date.   Just what we all need.   Not!"

I sympathize ... but  this time around, I suspect it will be worth the effort.

Firstly, if building communication and relationships between people who are interested in your niche is one of your blog's goals, there are strong reasons to move away from Facebook Groups and onto Google+Groups:   On Facebook, Facebook's rules choose which posts are shown to your members.  And people have been complaining that Facebook is showing non-paid updates to fewer people than before.   In Google+, everything shows up in your members stream.

Second, unlike Facebook groups, everything that is posted to a Google+ community is indexed and so might be returned in Google search.

If enough people join the community - which you own and can therefore influence the direction of - then your blog may increase its authority in the niche area, because you are acknowledged as the founder / thought-leader.    You can use this technique this on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc too.   But Google+ communities are new, the best names aren't gone - and there will almost certainly be better SEO benefits from doing this inside a Google product than doing it elsewhere, even though people aren't 100% sure how it will all work yet.   (Assuming that SEO matters for your blog - remember that it's irrelevant for some blogs.)

How to get community members

So far, there don't appear to be any gadgets, badges etc.   I suspect they'll come.   (Although the relative relationship between blog-commenters and community-members could be interesting to work out.)

But you can invite circles, or individual email addresses from within Google+ Communities

And you can put an invitation on your blog, like this

"Click here to join the How to Use Blogger community now, to see how communities work - you are free to leave at any time, and I promise not to spam you."

Read more > Google+ communities - another way to grow your blog's influence

Limiting AdSense ad types for individual websites is now available

This quick tip is about a new feature that AdSense have just announced, which lets you control the types of ads that are banned - by website, instead of just for your entire AdSense account.

For a long time, I've recommended that Blogger-users who use AdSense should:

• Protect their account from malicious use, and 
• Stop sexual-content ads from showing to be sure that they meet Blogger's Terms and Conditions.

The second of these steps is basically about telling AdSense not to show certain categories of ads on your blog. One of the bug-bears with this is that, until now, it's been all-or-nothing:  you could ban ad-categories from either all your sites or none of them.     For example, one of my sites is likely to be visited by people who are unhappy with the idea of dating agencies using suggestive photos of young women in the ads.   Until now, I've had to ban this category from all my sites, to be certain that they weren't show on the sensitive site. But now AdSense have announced that they support site-level blocking:  this means that you can tell them not to show particular categories of ads on certain sites, but leave them on others. To use the feature, you will need to

• Tell AdSense what URL / domains / web-addresses you manage (if you haven't done it already) and then 
• Set up blocking for individual sites as required.

The good news is that you can still choose "all sites" - and you can block by category from just sub-domains if you want to. It maybe that you cannot use the website-level blocking yet:  Google started rolling it out in AdSense accounts late last week, and it will get to everyone eventually - I don't have it yet myself, but am looking forward to it eagerly.

Read more > Limiting AdSense ad types for individual websites is now available

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

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

New simpler AdSense application process

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

They say that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to sign up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;">
<a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/document/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGa88qmJAGWZRH2jaBDy7fEjzvCQKQOZyhOg04DAoXJKU3SvBhFO1FGZZAHuWm9Ars8YU9zZcJT0hocT-eBiRxk56u8pWmQN9bCtTuvQrmv4GoQd9jVPv2zXf6faix1Lbkk-T3wLSrcNjO/s80/made-new-word-processing-document-google-drive.png" /><br />
Document</a></div>
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;">
<a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXJcgk_P1eORNuZWhT9m5fyoP3wMyL7QmDximpDBuPNgO2dFgxH0oTO-y0zgOOxD1X_j1OYbhGDk6ZAou1l9beXEfcwS7M1leITWaitWTKJIW-b1mIThnE8X-RBlY0H5fV5eT_nsgYdiCH/s80/made-new-spreadsheet-google-drive.png" /><br />
Spreadsheet</a></div>
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 0;">
<a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWsWeAW8A-GYZzJzI-Y57IADhkTIRjQSZ7z7q4NL7VEiGcIeDlxmDJLaK6l4S1dhxfEqmfwCeY2eHJEpal0WE1KoDBZDOCwK7siIWBOlpMZ_Tdq8M_jH-y5Z9hWAdyj6E5yclNJ4svI_NP/s80/made-new-slideshow-google-drive.png" /><br />
Presentation</a></div>
</div>
<!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

Features

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

Code for just one type of document

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

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

To make a new word-processing document:

<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;"><a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/document/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGa88qmJAGWZRH2jaBDy7fEjzvCQKQOZyhOg04DAoXJKU3SvBhFO1FGZZAHuWm9Ars8YU9zZcJT0hocT-eBiRxk56u8pWmQN9bCtTuvQrmv4GoQd9jVPv2zXf6faix1Lbkk-T3wLSrcNjO/s80/made-new-word-processing-document-google-drive.png" /><br />Document</a></div></div><!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

To make a new spreadsheet file:

<div style="text-align: center;"><div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 1em;"><a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXJcgk_P1eORNuZWhT9m5fyoP3wMyL7QmDximpDBuPNgO2dFgxH0oTO-y0zgOOxD1X_j1OYbhGDk6ZAou1l9beXEfcwS7M1leITWaitWTKJIW-b1mIThnE8X-RBlY0H5fV5eT_nsgYdiCH/s80/made-new-spreadsheet-google-drive.png" /><br />Spreadsheet</a></div></div><!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

To make a new Google Docs / Drive presentation:

<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="display: inline-block; margin-right: 0;"><a target="_blank" href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/create"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWsWeAW8A-GYZzJzI-Y57IADhkTIRjQSZ7z7q4NL7VEiGcIeDlxmDJLaK6l4S1dhxfEqmfwCeY2eHJEpal0WE1KoDBZDOCwK7siIWBOlpMZ_Tdq8M_jH-y5Z9hWAdyj6E5yclNJ4svI_NP/s80/made-new-slideshow-google-drive.png" /><br />Presentation</a></div></div><!-- Google drive new file icons gadget, via www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.   Share and enjoy!  -->

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