Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Adding a separator line between your posts

This article shows how to put a horizontal separator line between posts in your blog, using either HTML's line command, or CSS rules.  It also has suggestions about ways of formatting these lines using different colours and line-styles.



There are at least four approaches to choose from if you want to put a divider between your posts in Blogger.  These days, I prefer the CSS-rule approach, because it's so easy and flexible.  But I've shown details of a few other methods too:
  • Manually add a horizontal line command to each post
  • Use the post-footer colour block as a line (in Designer templates only)
  • Add the HTML command for a line to the main section of your template, in one of the post-footers
  • Add a top or bottom-border to the CSS rule that formats the body of your posts.
The following sections give more detail about each option, including how to apply them to your blog, and their advantages and disadvantages.


Manually add a line to each post:

When you are editing a post, you can put a horizontal line anywhere in the contents.

If Compose Settings (under Post Options) is set to  Interpret typed HTML, then you can just type <hr />, and Blogger will place a line like this in your post.


If your Compose Settings (under Post Options) is set to  Show HTML literally, then you need to switch to the Edit HTML tab before you type <hr />.

Disadvantage: If your post is set to display comments, or the blog is set to show the author, labels etc under the post, these items will be underneath any line that you add manually to a post.


Designer Template - post footer colour

If your blog has a designer template (ref, What sort of template have I got), then the Template Designer > Advanced tab may have an option for setting the background colour of the post-footer (depending on which template you are using).



If you use a dark colour (or have a dark background and use a light color), this makes the post-footer look like a line.

Disadvantage:  The "line" might be a bit thicker than you like.   And if your post is set to display comments, or the blog is set to show the author, labels etc under the post, these items are shown right inside the footer line.





Add a line-command to your template

If you don't like the other two approaches, you can change your template to add a horizontal line.  To do this:

1  Edit your template:

In Sept-2011-Blogger (ie the new interface) go to Template > Edit HTML > Proceed
In pre-Sept-2011-Blogger (ie the old interface) go to Design > Edit HTML.

Download a full copy of your template, and put it somewhere safe (in case things go wrong, and you need to go back to where you were).

3  Click on Expand Widget Templates.

4  Most templates have three footer lines:  what is in each one depends on the template, and how you have arranged the items in the Layout > Blog Posts editor.

Look at the template for code like the following,
       <div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'><span class='post-labels'>
        <b:if cond='data:post.labels'>
          <data:postLabelsLabel/>
          <b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'>
            <a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'><data:label.name/></a><b:if cond='data:label.isLast != &quot;true&quot;'>,</b:if>
          </b:loop>
        </b:if>
      </span> </div>
OR
 <div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'/>
    </div>

and add the <hr /> command to which ever one you want, for example
 <div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'/>
<hr />

    </div>

Advantage:  you can easily place the divider line anywhere you want it, relative to the other items in your post-footer.


Disadvantage:  you need to modify your template, and this does have some risks.  And it does use the <hr /> tag which some people (CSS purists) suggest is not a good idea.



Enhancements to the basic <hr /> command:

There are lots of ways you can modify the <hr / > code.   For example

<hr style="text-align: left;" /> -  to left-align it

<hr style="color: red;" /> -  to change the colour
<hr style="width: 50%;" /> -  to make it narrower

See w3c.schools <hr /> tag for more information. 



Add a border to the CSS rule that formats your posts:

The cascading-style-sheet rules in your template control most aspects of how your blog looks.   They can be a very powerful way to control how your blog looks.

Quick option:

If you have a designer template, then the quick way to make this change is to add a CSS rule to your template.  The rule code to add is:
.post-body
{
border-bottom:1px dotted #666666;
}

or this one if you want the border at the top of each post:
.post-body
{
border-top:1px dotted #666666;
}

In-depth:

The specific CSS rule that controls how the "body" of your posts look is .post-body.   To make changes to it:

1 Go to Design > Edit HTML

2 Download a full copy of your template, and put it somewhere safe (in case things go wrong, and you need to go back to where you were).

3 Look for .post-body in the rules section of your template. It will look something like this, but  the exact lines and values may be different:
.post-body {
margin-top: 0;
margin-$endSide: 2px;
margin-bottom: 0;
margin-$startSide: 3px;
}
 4  If you can find a .post-body rule, then add this line, just before the } character.
border-bottom:1px dotted #666666;
5    If you cannot find a  .post-body statement in the rules section of your template, then you need to add it.

Put it somewhere:
After    <b:skin><![CDATA[/*

Before  ]]></b:skin>

But not in the middle of any other rules: look at how the rest of that section of your template is laid out for clues.

The statement to add is something like the following, though you may want to try out different values for parts of it.:
.post-body {
border-bottom:1px dotted #666666;
margin-top: 0;
margin-$endSide: 2px;
margin-bottom: 0;
margin-$startSide: 3px;
padding-top:10px;
margin-top:20px;
}


Alternative formats:

The #666666 means draw the line in black - you may like to use a different colour, or use the word "solid" instead of "dotted" to make a firmer looking line.

As an alternative, you can say border-top:1px dotted #666666; - this puts a line at the top of the body of each post, just underneath the title.



Related Articles: 




What sort of template have I got

Disadvantages of editing your blog's template.

Adding a new CSS rules to your template

Centering the Post-title or Page-title

Putting HTML from elsewhere into your blog.
Read more > Adding a separator line between your posts

Hiding "Subscribe to Post (Atom)" at the bottom of your blog

This article explains how to remove the "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" item that appears at the bottom of Blogger blogs with Layout or Designer templates.


Where does "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" come from?


By default, Blogger puts the "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" item on at the bottom of every screen of posts in blogs with Layout or Designer templates (ref What type of template does my blog have?).

This is useful for readers who understand what it means:  it lets them subscribe to an RSS feed of your blog - and even if you don't personally use it, RSS is important for bloggers.  However:
  • Some readers won't understand what it means,
  • If you're showing a "blog-site" (ie a website created with blogging tools, rather than a classic blog), the command doesn't make sense, even though the idea of RSS subscription does
  • It looks ugly, and
  • RSS-savvy readers who aren't Blogger users generally look for the little orange square with radar bars, rather than an obscure, Blogger-specific, description of the link.

So you may want to remove it from your blog and replace it with a nicer-looking RSS-subscription button.


How to remove "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" from your blog:



2  Turn the Expand Widgets checkbox to ON (ie ticked)

3  Find this code in your template:
<!-- feed links-->
<b:include name='feedLinks'/>
4  Replace it with this code:
<!-- feed links
<b:include name='feedLinks'/>   -->

What you have done is to comment-out the code:  the "-->" is the "end of comment" command in HTML.

This approach is better than "hiding" the link by making it the same colour as your background (which could be seen as trying to hide things from the search-engines).  It won't have any negative effect on your blog's performance, and you can undo it very easily by moving the end-of-comment text back again.



Related Articles: 




Read more > Hiding "Subscribe to Post (Atom)" at the bottom of your blog

Ford Fiesta RoCam 2012

FiestaE as marcas veteranas já estão começando a se sentir ameaçadas pela chegada dos chineses. A Ford, por exemplo, finalmente resolveu admitir que seu Fiesta antigo já passou da idade, e o fez entrar para o time dos que se apoiam no custo/benefício. Ou seja, usou a clássica estratégia no país para tentar continuar vendendo bem um modelo já defasado, enquanto o New Fiesta passa a disputar outro segmento por vir mais sofisticado, logo mais caro.

O contra-ataque aos JAC J3 e J3 Turin é tão gritante que Fiesta hatch e sedã vão ser vendidos pelos mesmos preços, respectivamente R$ 37.900 e R$ 39.900 durante o mês de maio. O lado bom é que eles também foram copiados no pacote de equipamentos interessante: ar-condicionado, airbag duplo, direção hidráulica, freios ABS, vidros e travas elétricos, faróis de neblina e computador de bordo. Os preços serão praticados inicialmente em RJ e SP.

Read more > Ford Fiesta RoCam 2012

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

The "follow by email" gadget: an easy way to add an email subscription to your blog

Blogger have made it very simple to offer an email-subscription to your blog, with the new "Follow by Email" gadget.  This article describes adding it to your blog, and how it works for your readers.


Previously, I've explained why RSS is important for your blog, and how to give your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner.

The Follow by Email gadget that Blogger provide makes this even easier:  you can add an email subscription option to your blog by following these steps:

How to add the Follow by Email Gadget

  1. Log in to Blogger
    Use a Google account with admin rights to the blog, and which you want to use to get statistics about your email subscribers.
  2. Go to the Design tab
  3. Select Add a Gadget in the area where you want to put the email subscription option
  4. Choose Follow by Email (it's current at the top of the list)
  5. Enter the title that you want displayed on your blog (initially it's "Follow by email")
  6. Press Save.
This puts the gadget onto your blog.  But there are two more things that you should do:
  • Check that your blog's RSS feed is enabled: it should be either "Full" or "Until Jump Break", not "None".  You need to do this because the Follow-by-email tool will only send out emails if your feed is turned on.   
  • Subscribe to it yourself- by entering your own email. 
    This isn't absolutely essential - the tool works even if you're not signed up to it.   But it's a good idea to try to see your blog from the reader's perspective.  
    And some items in your posts (eg slideshows or PowerPoint presentations) may not work as expected in the emailed version - and you won't know about it unless you're getting the emails.

What your readers see:


On Your Blog:

The Follow by Email gadget looks like this:

The title was set when you were adding the gadget:  you can change it by editing the gadget in the usual way.

The background colour, button colour, title underline and font are based on the settings for your template:  you can only control them by editing the gadget colours in your template.

You cannot put text immediately before our after the place where people can enter an email address:   though you could put a text-gadget before or after the Follow-by-email gadget.


When they enter an email address:

When your visitor enters an email address and presses Submit, a new window opens:


This window:
  • Welcomes them to Feedburner
  • Acknowledges their Google account, if they are logged in at the time - remember, not all your visitors will be Google users
  • Tells them about the feed that they are asking to subscribe to
  • Warns them that a confirmation message will be sent to the email address they entered 
    "will receive a verification message once you submit this form" and that "FeedBurner activates your subscription to ... once you respond to this verification message"
  • Asks them to solve a text-catpcha puzzle, to prove it's a real person (not a computer) setting up the subscription.
The colours, design and content of this window are totally controlled by Feedburner.  You can't influence them in any way.

After the anti-spam-test is successfully completed, a second screen opens.   This tells the reader that
Your request has been accepted! Please check your inbox for a verification message from “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions”, the service that delivers email subscriptions for <<your-blog-name>>. You will need to click a link listed in this message to activate your subscription. If you dont see a confirmation e-mail in a reasonable amount of time please check your bulk/spam folder.
Again, you have no control over the color, format or placement of this window, it is totally up to Feedburner.    You also don't control the message text, which many people are likely to ignore.


In their email in-box, today:

Your potential subscriber gets an email from Feedburner, usually within 2-10 minutes, asking them to click a link to complete the subscription process.
  • If they click the link, they become a verified subscriber.
  • If they don't click the link, then they stay on the subscribers list as unverified.
You can customize the "click the link to subscribe" message, using some fairly simply settings in Feedburner.  


In their email in-box, when you post:

On days when you have posted to your blog, every verified subscriber is sent one email message, with all your posts during the day.

The message may include the full post or just a summary, depending on what settings you have for your blog's RSS feed  (Settings > Site Feed > Blog Posts feed).

Feedburner provides a number of options for controling how this email looks, and when it is sent:  see the Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email branding tab in Feedburner for these.    (full article coming soon).


More information about the gadget:

This new gadget has been widely requested, and is an exciting addition to Blogger.  But there are some challenges with it, which are discussed in Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget.


Related Articles:




Why RSS is important for your blog,

An alternative to "Follow-by-email":  giving your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner.

Customizing Feedburners verification message

Putting a Picasa slideshow into a blog-post

Showing a PowerPoint presentation in your blog, as a slideshow

Read more > The "follow by email" gadget: an easy way to add an email subscription to your blog

Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget and Feedburner

The Follow-by-email gadget is built on top of Feedburner's email-subscription service.   It's very easy to add to your blog, but there are some things that you need to think about if you are using it to deliver posts to your followers by email.

Adding the "Follow by Email" gadget
Australia Post box The Follow-by-Email gadget is a very simple way to give your readers access to blog-updates by email: it delivers a message in their inbox every day that you post.

But to decide if it's a good thing to use, to get good value from it, and to troubleshoot any problems, you need to understand a little more about how it works.

And, since it uses Feedburner, this means understanding how Feedburner works.

What is Feedburner:

The Follow by Email gadget uses a product called Feedburner to manage the list of subscribers. 
This started as a tool to enhance the RSS subscribtions that website-owners delivered - see Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog  for info about RSS.   Very roughly speaking, every time a website publishes a new item, Feedburner adds that item to a "feed" or summary of the site, and tells all the subscribers about it, without the subscribers having to visit the website.

One option that Feedburner added was subscribe-by-email:  website owners who use Feedburner for this have to turn the service on, and then put "something" on their website that offers the service to people who want to get emailed updates.   To start with, Feedburner just kept a list of emails addresses, but now it's more sophisticated and checking with addresses that they really do want to be subscribed before adding them to the list, and offers un-subscribe option with each subscription email.

Adding the follow-by-email option to your blog sets this up for you:  it sets up a feed, turns the email service "on", and puts an email-capturing box onto your blog.   


What is set up when you add the gadget:

You put the Follow-by-email gadget onto your blog the same way you would add any other gadget.

This means that, you are logged in to a Google account at the time.

If that Google account already owns an entry (ie a "feed") in Feedburner for the blog you're adding the gadget to, then the gadget just uses this feed.

But if the Google account doesn't currently have an entry from the blog, then a new feed is created, and the email service is turned on for it.:
  • The Feed Title is based on the blog's name.  
  • The feed address appears to be fairly random (eg I created one for a blog called "Another test blog", and the feed name is    http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/meaUW


Advantages of the Follow-by-email gadget:

This gadget makes it a lot easier to offer a follow-by-email option:  you don't have to set up the feed yourself, or use a HTML-gadget to provide a subscribe-by-email form.

And because it uses Feedburner, you have full access to Feedburner's statistics, and a number of other things that are included in Feedburner's features, including:

Disadvantages of the Follow-by-email gadget:

There are some disadvantages of both the gadget, and the approach that Blogger has used to implement it:
  • Google / Blogger have mixed up the words "subscribers" and "followers".  It used to be that subscribers used RSS gadgets (from Feedburner or other feed-providers), and followers used Blogger's own following-tools.   But this new gadget is called "follow-by-email", and it's possible that mixing up the ideas will make some people very confused.
  • Using the gadget, you have very little control over the look and feel of the  follow-by-email option on your blog.  

    Compare this to the "Get updates by email" option which is in the top of the sidebar on this blog:  I've put a lot of effort into getting the wording "just right" so potential subscribers know that they will be getting a please-confirm email.   This on-screen wording means that even if they don't act on the email immediately, they get another reminder about if they come back to the blog again in the future.
  • You have no control over the message that potential follow-by-emailers are shown to tell them to verify their subscription.  It looks like this

    While this message is fine for the tech-minded people who are likely subscribe to an RSS feed, it will probably bring a glazed look to those of your visitors who need a very simple subscribe-by-email option!  
  • People who subscribe to your blog by email don't see any of the widgets on your blog, or any advertisements.   (Unlike regular RSS-feed subscribers for whom you can set up AdSense for feeds).  Despite the options mentioned above, ou have very little control over how they see your messages, especially if they happen to be using email software that shows your messages in plain text.

Related Articles: 



Customizing the "click the link to subscribe" message
 
Getting a list of all your email subscribers

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog

The Follow-by-Email gadget:  a very simple way to give your readers access to blog-updates by email
Read more > Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget and Feedburner

Customising Feedburner's email subscription messages

You can control the email-messages that Feedburner sends to people who have signed up for your blog's "subscribe by email" option.

Overview

I heart FeedBurnerPreviously I've described how to make a Feedburner feed and how to add the subscribe by email option to your blog.  

If you have added a subscribe-by-email feature, and a reader (who's not already subscribed to the email feed) enters their email address, then Feedburner will show a catpcha-text screen (to check that you're not a computer, maliciously submitting other people's addresses), and sent an email to the address, asking the recipient to confirm that they really do want to subscribe to your blog.

The 2nd email stops other people from signing you up as a subscriber to blogs that you're not interested in. 

But it means that some people who are interested in subscribing to your feed don't actually complete the process, because they don't understand what's going on, or miss the email (eg it goes to their spam folder).

You can deal with this by
  • Telling new subscribers that they are going to get an email, and what to do with it
    (see the "subscribe by email" option on this site for one way to do this), AND
  • Configuring the details of the email that is sent:  sender-address and message-text are both important for maintaining your blog's image, and ensuring that people click the link and complete their subscription.
The rest of this article is about the configuration options that are available.


Customising the subscription-link email message:

Log in to Feedburner, using the Google account that owns the feed you want to customise (remember, may not be the same Google account that owns the blog, especially if you are using AdSense to monetize your feed.)

Choose the Publicize tab

Choose Email Subscriptions from the menu on the left.

Choose the Communication Preferences option.   This opens options in the main window where you can edit:

The sender-address
  • The default value is the email address associated with the Google account that owns the feed.  But you can change it to any valid email address (and I suspect an invalid one too, if you like - I haven't tested this). 
  • It may be tricky to choose what email address to use:  the same one is used for both the subscription-activation email and for every other post-notification email that is sent by your feed.   An address that looks like a real person (eg mary@gmail.com) is less likely to end up in your potential subscribers junk folder.   But you may not want your personal email address to appear to your email-subscribers every time you post, especially if the blog is written by a team or belongs to a club or business.
  • If you change the sender-address sometime after your email-feed is set up, then some of your subscribers may stop getting messages because they only have the previous address, not the new one, on their friends list (whitelist).  If you're going to do this, be certain that the benefit of changing is worth losing a few subscribers over.
The text for the confirmation email.   
  • Google (or perhaps Feedburners original owners) have provided some standard text, which is used unless you change it.   
  • The tone of this is very informal, eg starting with"hello there" and (IMHO) irritating "we can't wait to send you updates".  You may want to change it to match the style and tone of your blog.
Press Save in the bottom left corner of the screen to save your changes.


Important:  Don't forget to press Save.   Currently you are not warned that changes will be lost if you navigate away (even just to the email branding sub-option) - but they are.


fyi, the Email Branding and Delivery Options links lead to other controls, which control the email messages that Feedburner sends when you send an items to your blog's feed.  They will be discussed in another article, because they're too complicated to go into here.


Related Articles: 




Understanding your Google account

Getting a list of your Feedburner email subscribers

How to make feed using Feedburner

Using the Feedcount widget to encourage new subscribers with social proof

Putting email-links into your blog
Read more > Customising Feedburner's email subscription messages

Monday, May 2, 2011

Blogger Helpers' Search Tool - a customized search of Google Blogger experts

This article introduces the "Blogger Helpers Search Tool", which lets you search of a select list of blogs and websites that are known to provide excellent advice about using Google Blogger.  


Icon search updates 96x96
The "Blogger Helpers Search Tool" (BHST) lets you search within a selected group of English-language websites that give excellent help and advice about Google Blogger.

You can find it by choosing "Search Blogger Helpers" from the menu at the top of this page.

Why?

There are over a dozen "blogger tutorial" websites and blogs that I regularly follow using RSS - because they're a good way to hear about new ways to use Blogger, and what's happening with other related products.

And even though Blogger-Hints-and-Tips is also about Blogger, the sheer range of
  • Features in Blogger
  • Ways to combine Blogger and other tools (eg Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, etc etc)
  • Levels of experience and ability to understand "how to" articles
means that no one can possibly know enough to help with everything that can be done with Blogger.   So I see the people writing these other blogs as colleagues, not competitors.

Also, when I'm solving a problem in my own blogs, I often think "Ahh, yes, I read something about that".   But often I can't remember if it was Chuck in The Real Blogger Status, or GreenLava in Blogger Sentral, etc, etc.

Putting these ideas together, I created a Google Custom Search that applies all the power of Google Search to a select list of blog-sites that I've chosen because of the quality advice that they give.   I set the custom-search up yesterday, then applied the advice in Blogger Sentral's recent article about putting the search results in a page, which looks far better than the old way of showing them in a standalone page hosted by Google.


Who's on "The List"

To start with, I've put in BHAT and the helper blogs listed under "Recommended Blogger help sites" on my sidebar, because these are the ones I consult most often.

I plan to add more helper blogs to the list over time.  I haven't written down all the guidelines for what's included yet, but to start with, I'm looking for sites that:
  • Show the date when an article was published or last updated   
  • Are in good-enough English  (some helpers speak other languages too)
  • Explain things well enough that I want to subscribe to see what they're going to write next.
Of course I cannot guarantee that the search-results are all correct and up-to-date:   as with any Google search, you must carefully assess the results and judge if they are good enough for you.


To see if a particular site is included:

Use the tool to search for
site:YOUR-SUGGESTED-URL
Because there are no keywords, the results will list all pages on the site that that Google's index currently  knows about - if the site is on the list.

If the results say "Your search - site:YOUR-SUGGESTED-URL - did not match any documents", then YOUR-SUGGESTED-URL is not currently in the search-list (or Google hasn't indexed it - this is unlikely, except if Google has banned a helper-site).   


To suggest a site to include:

Leave a comment below, giving the name and URL of the site, and a few words about why you think it should be included.  



Related Articles:



Blogger Helpers Search Tool

Setting up a custom-search for your blog.

RSS:  why it matters

Giving your blog a search-box

Linking blogs and websites
Read more > Blogger Helpers' Search Tool - a customized search of Google Blogger experts
 
 
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