Friday, January 15, 2010

Rules for using Amazon Associates on Blogger

This article has links to the official Amazon Associates terms and conditions, and has some brief guidelines about complying with them. are available on Amazon's site, currently here.

Always refer to the official version for definitive answers about any programme's Terms and Conditions.

Amazon Associates Terms and conditions:

Each Amazon site (remember, Amazon has different sites for different markets) has its own set of terms and conditions, usually called its Operating Agreement. They are similar, but there are subtle differences between each one, and in how each of the Amazons interprets things.

You always need to make your own decisions about whether a particular approach meets their rules.

You can find the operating agreement for each of the sites, as at the time of writing, at:

Amazon Europe: UK and Ireland, Germany, France and Italy. (The English language one is definitive, accourding to Amazon at Sept 2011).
Amazon Canada
Amazon.com - ie USA and rest of the world - except for China and Japan

In Summary:

I prepared the following guide for myself when I first signed up with Amazon.com, using to help me make 100% sure that I meet the terms and conditions. It is not definitive, and not up to date (new T&Cs have come out several times, and while I've read the change summaries, I haven't updated the following.. Also, it's only for Amazon.com, not the others (which Blogger did not integrate with).

Associates must:

Use any data, images, text, or other information obtained from Amazon in connection with the agreement, only in a lawful manner and only in accordance with the terms of this Agreement.

Promptly delete any Content that is no longer displayed on the Amazon Site or that Amazon notify is no longer available for use.

Display a logo (a small graphic image that identifies the site as a Program participant, provided by Amazon ) or the phrase "In association with Amazon" somewhere on their site.

Use the graphic images and text provided by Amazon to identify their site as a Program participant and to generate Product sales.

Comply with laws, regulations, licenses, etc - ie any requirements of any governmental authority that has jurisdiction over them. This means pay tax (among other things!)

Stop participating in the Amazon Associates programme if any change to the terms and conditions is unacceptable to them.

Associates may:

Buy paid search advertisements to send users to their own site and then, when the user affirmatively clicks on a Special Link on the site, direct the user to the Amazon Site.

Associates must not:

Buy products during sessions initiated through the links on their own site (for personal or commercial use, or re-sale) [it is ok to click on links - just not to purchase thru them? double check this]
Offer incentives (ie rewards) to people for using links on their site.
Read or change how the user interacts with the Amazon site [I guess Google Analytics use is ok ... surely it records an exit to Amazon?]

Change how anything on the Amazon site works.

Do any transactions on Amazon on behalf of any third party, or help anyone else to do any.

Do anything that could reasonably cause customer confusion about their relationship with Amazon or about the site on which things (e.g., search, order, browse) are happening on.

Show advertisements or material promoting Amazon around or in conjunction with the display of the Amazon Site (e.g., through"framing" or pop-up or pop-under windows), or assist, authorize, or encourage any third party to take any such action; - except for displaying advertisements provided by Amazon.

Try to get around the referral fee schedule or artificially increase their referral fees.
This could include encouraging people to buy low-price items in order to exceeding any referral fee threshold or causing any page of the Amazon Site to open in a customer's browser other than as a result of the customer clicking on a Special Link on their site)
[so no referral links in emails, Facebook, Twitter, etc - some of the stuff on the AA discussion forum seems to say differently]

Try to intercept or re-direct traffic from or on, or divert referral fees from, any web site that participates in the Program;

Use any Content or Special Link in connection with any handheld, mobile, or mobile phone application without our prior written approval; [BUT HERE WILL BE SOME MOBILE USERS - ESP OF BLOGGER SITES ...hmmm]

Try to purchase or register any keywords, search terms or other identifiers that include the words "amazon," "endless," "kindle," "javari" or any other trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates, (inlcuding variations or misspellings)

If they bid on or purchase keywords ib keyword auctions on (eg on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, or any site in their respective search networks (e.g., AOL, Ask.com, etc.), - then the paid search advertisements they purchase may not send users to Amazon without a click by the user on that intermediate site. [NEEDS BETTER WORDING]

Show or refer to a trademark/logo of a 3rd party seller on the Amazon Site;

Obscure or change a “Privacy Information” link or Amazon trademark (logo or text that's is a Special Link which Amazon provide

Use Content relating to any Excluded Merchant or any product sold by any Excluded Merchant;

Change any graphic provided by Amazon, except to resize it;

Change any text link provided by Amazon, except to shorten it;
[LAST TWO CONTRADICT ONE FURTHER DOWN?]

Sell, redistribute, sublicense or transfer any Content;

Use Content provided by Amazon to send sales to any other site

Use any Content, including any name or likeness embodied therein, in a way that implies endorsement, sponsorship, commercial tie-in or other association with, any product, service, party or cause.(e.g., placing it close to unrelated 3rd party materials)

Issue a press release about the Amazon Agreement or their participation in the Program.

Misrepresent or embellish the relationship between themselves and Amazon, or between Amazon and anyone else.

Use images or text supplied by Amazon in any offline way manner (e.g., in any printed material, mailing or other document).

Change graphic images or text, or any of Amazon's images.

Penalties may include:

withhold referral fees (from permitted and non-permitted activities) and/or
terminating the Agreement.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Finding a picture's location (URL) in Picasa-web-albums

This article is about how to find the URL (web-address) of a picture that is stored in Picasa web albums. It is written for Blogger users, but the same technique can be used by anyone who uses Picasa-web-albums.

Picasa-web-albums and your PC

An Introduction to Picasa. describes the relationship between Picasa and Picasa-web-albums. A key difference between is that :

Picasa is a program, written by Google, which runs on your PC even when it's not connected to the internet, and
Picasa-web-albums is a Google application on the internet that runs on the internet, and some accompanying space on the internet where your pictures can be stored.

Each and every picture that you store in your Piscasa-web-albums has a unique URL, ie web-address, where it can be found.

To find the URL of a picture in Picasa-web-albums:

Sign in to Picasa-web-albums, using the google account that owns the album that has the picture you want. (If you are already signed in to Blogger you may not have to log in again.)

Find the album that has the picture you want to use
Click on the album to open it.

Note: each album has one picture, usually the first one loaded, set as the cover. Be careful to actually open the album, and not just work with the album cover, because the URL for it is not the same as the URL for the picture.
Click on the picture you want: it will open in a "photo" view.
Click on "Link to this Photo" in the right-hand bar.
This opens two fields: Link, which has the URL, and Embedded Image which has the HTML to put the photo into a web-page.
Copy the contents of the Link field: this is the URL of the picture.

Note: in some browsers (eg Firefox, Chrome) you may just be able to right-click on the picture once you're in "photo" view, and choose "copy link location".

Linking to a Picasa web-album in a blogger post

This article shows how to put an album link into your sidebar (or anywhere that you can put a gadget on your template) in Blogger.

Make your album

Previously I've introduced Picasa and Picasa-web-albums (PWA), and listed some ways that you can link PWA to your blog.

Go to Picasa Web Albums
Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
(and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now) - and that you are allowed to publish all of the pictures
Choose an album by clicking on it.
The album view opens, showing you a thumbnail of all the photos in it on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen, there is a sidebar of useful tools. One of these is "Link to this Album".
Click on "Link to this Album".
This opens two options, showing the code to use to link to the album in an email, and one with the HTML to embed in a website.
Copy the entry under "HTML to embed in website".

Put it into your blog:

The HTML code that you copied from PWA is just like HTML code from and other 3rd party source, so it can be in stalled the same way: option 2 in this article shows you how to put it into a post.

Once it's there, you can use any of the regular options for formatting items in the Post Editor - though you will probably need to use HTML mode to this, because the code from PWA puts the album inside a table, which is something that the Post Editor doesn't handle well.

Amazon recommendations

What your readers see:

This puts a picture-link to your album into your sidebar (or wherever you chose to put the gadget): it will have a white border (like the one beside this paragraph) - though you may want to edit the HTML to make it look different.

When a reader clicks on the picture-link they are taken to the Picasa-web-album, where they can view, but not edit, the album you've linked to.

Targeting AdSense ads to a subset of page content

There are some websites where contextual targetting is not a good idea, because they attract the wrong sort of advertisements. For AdSense, one work-around is to target your ad-content to a certain sub-section of the overall post..

Contextal Advertising

Google's AdSense is perhaps one of the best known contextual advertising programmes.

It works by looking at the page that and advert is to be shown on, and choosing a suitable ad for that page based on the key words shown on the page.

In many cases, this works well: a page about losing weight will have lots of words that attract ads from a weight loss company, for example.

But there are cases when it doesn't work so well: a blog exposing the "myths" of conventional medicine, and suggesting natural remedies for many problems may well target advertisements from mainstream practitioners and companies.

To avoid this, use section targetting.

Section targeing tells Google what sections to take more (and less) notice of when matching ads to page content.

It can be particularly useful to get some parts of sites ignored. For example, if you have a paragraph like

"my site shows blah, blah, blah, excluding foo1, foo2 and foo3"

and foo1, foo2 and foo3 are things that there are a lot of irrelevant ads for, then using targeting to say "ignore the bit starting with excluding" might be a good idea.

For instructions how to do section targeting that works with AdSense, see: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23168

What your readers see

Ideally, the only difference that your readers will see is more relevant advertising.

Inserting a picture into a blog post

This article about integrating Picasa and Blogger has instructions for inserting a picture into a blog post or page.

It applies no matter whether the picture comes from, but has particular information about pictures that are already in Picasa.

Pictures and blog posts

When you want to put a picture into a blog post, you can either upload it through Blogger's editor, or upload it to somewhere on the internet first, and then just link to that location from Blogger.

I recommend uploading pictures outside Blogger because you can control the size and picture quality of the uploaded files: if you do the upload through Blogger, then the resolution is often reduced and this can make your pictures look fuzzy. However I do recommend using Picasa-web-albums as the "somewhere else on the internet, because only pictures stored in Picasa can be used as thumbnail images for your post.

How to put a picture into a post

1 Make sure you know where the original picture is and that you have copyright permission to use it.

2 If the photo is not already on the internet, upload it to Picasa-web-albums, or another tool (eg Flickr, Photobox, etc) that will give you the link to the picture.

3 Copy the internet-location (ie the URL) of the picture file, (This article tells you how to find the location of a picture that's stored in-Picasa web-albums.)

4 Click the picture icon on the toolbar:

4 Enter the picture location into the box that opens.

If the picture is on your computer use the "Upload an image" dialog, or if it is on the internet, use the "Web address(URL" option.

5 Click Ok.

6 The picture you have chosen appears in your Edit Posts window.

Controlling the pictures in your post:

Size and alignment:
When you click on a picture, a small menu opens (generally beside or under the picture), with options to:

choose the size (small, medium, large, extra-large),
align it (left, centre or right)
remove it

If you want the picture to sit in the middle of a paragraph of text, rather than underneath it,

Go in to Edit HTML mode
Locate the picture you want
Delete the line before it that says

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">

Delete the first line after it that says

</div>

Picture Position:
Quite often, pictures that you add through the toolbar are put at the start of the post, or perhaps the start of the current paragraph, instead of exactly where you want them.

You can often move a picture around by drag-and-drop (click the picture, drag it, and drop it where you want it to go) - though sometimes this doesn't work as well as it should.

You may need to edit the HTML to move the picture around: to do this, go into Edit HTML mode, and find the code for your picture relative to the other text in your post. Every case is a little different, but in general the code for a picture looks like:

<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/tkoGx2454hA/s1600-h/Inserting+a+picture.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-ufFKAr0d1qmq9aW1KZfNNsv-AbPNBP0y739vGFE5k_qh3d0L2VvpYad99hacIJ43NVQtcwTW5ABdd4rba9DLBlzz0RABme-IMzdy28SvaiCwDB_-1EG6oqf4kDwZfgylWifcOKtc5it5/s400/Inserting+a+picture.gif" /> </a>

If you want to move a picture by editing the HTML, make sure that you take all the code between the opening <a href .... and the closing </a>

For more information about how picture code is structured and how you can change it, see stopping pictures in your blog from being "clickable". and putting text and pictures side by side.

Jaguar XFR

A marca inglesa aumenta sua oferta no Brasil, oferecendo agora o sedã esportivo XFR. Custando 450 mil reais, ele chega num nível alto, fazendo oposição aos consagrados BMW M5, Audi RS6 e Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG.

A letra R traz variadas melhorias ao XF comum. Por fora, os quatro canos de escapamento e as tomadas de ar no capô e na frente das portas dianteiras denunciam que se trata de um Jaguar mais “nervoso”. No interior, a esportividade é sinalizada pelo painel com detalhes em alumínio, e pelo couro perfurado que reveste volante e bancos, estes na cor vermelha, e ambos ostentando a inicial de Racing.

O pacote de equipamentos condiz com o luxo exterior ao unir a eletrônica com a sofisticação, resultando no computador de bordo com touchscreen, e que regula funções como o ajuste eletrônico do diferencial e o controle de tração. Comandado pelo câmbio de seis marchas, seu excelente desempenho é garantido pelo 5.0 V8 de 510 cv, resultando em 0 a 100 km/h em 5 segundos e velocidade máxima de 250 km/h, limitados eletronicamente.

Putting a Picasa slideshow into your sidebar

This article shows how to put a slideshow from Picasa-web-albums into a gadget on your blog.

Overview

Previously I've described the options for linking your blog and Picasa-web-albums, and noted that putting a slideshow into a gadget is one option.

A slideshow is a set of photos that automatically advance from one to the next - it's a little different from an album, which is just a collection of photos with no auto-advance feature.

There are two approaches you can take to putting a PWA slideshow into your blog:

Getting the code from Picasa and using a HTML/Javascript gadget.
Using Blogger's slideshow gadget.

The 2nd option is easier, but the first (usually) gives you more control over how the slideshow works.

HTML/Javascript Gadget Approach:

(NB a similar approach will work for other blogging tools, eg Wordpress, thought the details will vary slightly)

Go to Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/home).
Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
(and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now)
Choose an album by clicking on it.

The album view opens, showing you a thumbnail of all the photos in it on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen, there is a sidebar of useful tools. One of these is "Link to this Album".
Click on "Link to this Album"
Click on "Embed Slideshow"
This opens a new dialog box, over the top of your current browser window.
Fill in the option details you want (slideshow size, whether or not to show captions and to autoplay the slides, etc)
Copy the HTML from the box at the bottom of the left hand-side (the one labelled "Copy and paste ..."
You can now put this HTML into your blog, the same way you would add any other 3rd party HTML : option 1 in this article describes how to put it into a gadget.

Alternative:

You may be able to use the slideshow gadget instead. To do this, follow steps 1 and 2, and then:

Go to Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/home).
Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
(and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now)
Return to Blogger, and:
In pre-Sept-2011 Blogger, go to Design / Page Elements in Blogger, or
In post-Sept-211 Blogger, to do the Layout tab
Click "Add a gadget" in the area where you want to put the slideshow.
Choose the Slideshow gadget,
Choose these options - in the order shown (ie work down the page - some of the bottom options won't have the right values availabl until the earlier ones are set)

Source = Picasa web albums
Option = Album
Username = the name of the google account where the album is stored. (eg, mine is maryc.fromnz)
Album = which ever album your photos are in.

Save the gadget, and check that the position is correct.

Some people advise against saying that Picasa-web-albums is the source: they suggest choosing Other, and just pasting in the album's URL. I haven't yet found any reasons for this, but it's worth trying if using Picasa as a source doesn't work for you.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

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