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This article is about how to change internal cross-reference links in your blog, if you change your blog's URL or web-address. Blog Name vs Blog Address Your blog has two "names". The blog title  is what you type into the Title field when you create a new blog.   It is displayed in your header (unless you've replaced it with a picture), and in the title-bar of the browser window when someone reads your blog.  It does not need to be unique:  you can make a blog with the same name that anyone else has already used. The  web-address,  also called the  URL or just address is quite different. You select in the Address field when you create a new blog - but it's not just a matter of typing in what you want.   Web-addresses must be unique, so as you type in a possible URL Blogger says "checking availability" - and if someone else already has what you have entered, it says Sorry, this blog address is not available. and you have to kee...

This article shows how to put pictures side-by-side in Blogger (or any other website) using HTML, in a way that works for visitors using mobiles (smartphones and tables) as well as larger screens. Previously I've explained how to use a table to force photos (and other things) to all show into a line, even if the user's screen is too small to display them all at once.   And I've looked at putting text and pictures side-by-side - assuming you're only working with one picture. Tables are great if you are showing data and need rigid alignment, or if you don't mind your mobile device visitors having to either scroll, or to pinch their screen so much that they cannot read the text. But there is a way to lay out pictures so that they display side by side if there's room on the screen, or start on a new line if there's not. I've done this recently on a blog where really wanted to make a display for last / next week and last / next year on two dif...

This article explains a quick way to find the widget that you are looking for in the list that Blogger displays when you use the Add a Gadget tool. When you start to add a gadget to your blog, Blogger opens a new window listing all the existing page-elements that are available (in two tabs) and allowing you to upload a widget of your own (in a third tab.) Currently, the first tab (called Basics) has 28 gadgets listed, while the second one (called More gadgets) has 899, displayed in pages of 30. There is a search-for-gadgets feature available on the second tab - but it doesn't return gadgets that are listed on the first tab.   And even when it did, I didn't recommend it, because sometimes 3rd party gadgets with similar names were listed before the official widgets developed by Blogger. So, to find a gadget that's listed in the Basics tab, you have to scroll down the list until you see the gadget you want.   However there are some problems with this. Gi...

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. Google+ Photos, 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 program that you use through your web-browser  and some accompanying space on the internet where your pictures can be stored. Google+ Photos is another Google program that you use through a web-browser (Chrome, FireFox, Internnet Explorer, Safari, etc), and a space on the space on the internet where you can keep pictures.    Both Picasa-web-albums and Google+ Photos use the same space on the internet to store photos fo...

This article is a fast-and-furious guide to starting a blog - with a focus on getting started rather than researching to the nth degree. Months ago, I started a properly researched article about "how to started with blogging". It's still a work in progress, and when it eventually gets finished it will have some great advice about researching blog-concepts and choosing great names. But today I needed a quick-and-dirty version, for someone who doesn't need SEO or a fancy name. Here's what I shared with them. How to get started with making a blog Know your objectives Think about what you want to do, what you want to write about, and what you want to achieve from it.  Write this down. Be prepared to revisit these objectives every time you need to make a decision about something.  Imagine you need to choose between a girly-pink looking template or rugged-outdoors one.  Simple - just look at your objectives and see who you're writing for. Choose...

This is a quick guide to searching for other blogs to read, now that Google's blog-search tool has been retired . If you write a blog, then reading other blogs "in your niche" (ie about similar topics) is a really good idea. This lets you keep up with what's going on and what other people are saying, and helps you to think up new blog-post ideas. An RSS-reader is a great tool for managing everything you need to read:  it's basically a folder with links to all the blogs and websites you want to follow, which shows when they have been updated.   To make best use of it. as soon as you see an interesting website, go to your RSS reader software and subscribe to the website's RSS-feed there-and-then: otherwise you will almost certainly forget.   Alternatively you can subscribe-by-email - provided the site offers that option - but many bloggers find that their email gets overwhelmed if they do this with more than a few sites. Some RSS software sugge...

This article explains the relationship between your blog and "the cloud", and other ways that you might be using the cloud without even realising it. A few days ago, I received an email from Sam who works for "SingleHop, a company that specializes in cloud computing." He explained that "Due to recent events like Heartbleed, the Target breach and the leaking of celebrity photos to the public, the world is abuzz about "the cloud." However, you may be wondering what exactly it is and what it does. We are hoping you would be interested in sharing a post with your readers about cloud computing in everyday life. In a nutshell, the cloud is a way to store data remotely, rather than on your home computer. This gives you easy access to your photos, documents, and other files from anywhere at any time. We are hoping that by spreading awareness about how the cloud works, we can help others make smarter decisions about what they post/share online. ...

This article is about how to copy some of the posts from one Blogger blog to another . Previously, I've written about moving individual posts, or pages, from one blog to another and  moving all posts from one blog to another .    They are in separate articles because the techniques used are quite different in each case. If you only want to transfer some posts between two blogs, then you need to choose between: Moving each post individually,or Moving all the posts then and deleting the ones you don't want from the "new" blog. Before you start, decide what should happen to any posts that are already in the destination blog:  if you want to delete them, you need to do it from the Posting / Edit Posts tab (press the delete link beside each one).  Don't just delete the enter blog (from the Settings / Basics tab), because that will remove your access to the URL. How to decide Choosing whether to most post individually, or moving all of them is fir...

This article is about Google accounts:  what they are- and aren't, how to access them, and what the account-names look like.   Blogger, Google and Google+ accounts Once upon a time (pre 2006), there was a website on the internet called Blogger.   People created an account on Blogger, and then used it to make a blog - which was owned by their Blogger account. Then Google (the company that made the search engine) purchased Blogger.   They wanted to integrate their products, so Blogger users had to change their original Blogger accounts to "Google accounts", which still had a Blogger profile.  Google were pretty nice about this:   they kept support old, unconverted Blogger accounts up til 2011, but eventually said that no more conversions were possible. At the time, very few people understood the difference between Google-the-company and Google-the-search-engine , so most didn't have any idea of the power and importance of thes...

This article explains how you can control who can send mail on your behalf if you have a gmail account, why you might want to do that, and how to stop people from sending email messages on your behalf. If you have given other people rights to publish to your blog  , then you may also want to let them send emails on your blog's behalf - particularly if you are using an "organisational" email account.   I do this for several blogs - eg the one for the choir that I'm currently doing public relations for. This is a way to let the the other people use their current email client, ie what looks to them like their "normal email", but still to send official-looking messages from your organisation or blog. Note that this is not the same as spoofing , which is a way that people with malicious intentions create email messages which appear to come from your account, even though you didn't send them and did give anyone else permission to send them. Spoof...

In a social-media world, deciduous blog posts have an enormous advantage of both ever-green and ephemeral content - find out what they are, and how to use them to best advantage. Introducing deciduous blog posts In botany and horticulture, deciduous plants ... are those that lose all of their leaves for part of the year. ( Wikipedia ) In blogging, deciduous posts are ones that your readers lose all interest in at certain times - eg posts about Christmas carols during January, or winter gardening tips during spring. Which sounds bad. Until you realise that deciduous posts are also ones that your readers (both current and new ones) gain renewed interest in at certain times. That means it's quite reasonable for you - and everyone else  - to mention them on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ each time that the new "season" starts.   If your posts are good, you might even get more new visits from social media in the subsequent seasons than in the first time aroun...

This article shows how to make that the description is correctly shown when one of your blog-posts is shared on Facebook. When you share one of your blog-posts using either the via the "what's on your mind" space on Facebook or the Facebook share button on your blog, you may find that the only information automatically shown is: A picture (hopefully, but not always from the post) The post title The blog URL or the post URL But many people want the post-description to be included too. There are two things which you need to do to make sure that this happens correctly. Step 1: Add search descriptions to your blog-posts If a post does not have a description, Facebook will sometimes try to estimate one based on the contents. But this is not reliable, and it depends on the blog template you have used, and possibly even on other factors, eg at one stage, Facebook just looked for the the first (paragraph) tag with at least 120 characters in it - which gave very ...