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The Follow-by-email gadget uses 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 blog-posts to your followers by email. 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, too. What is Feedburner The Follow by Email gadget uses a product called Feedburner to manage the list of people who have followed, ie subscribed to your blog.  Feedburner was originally a tool to enhance the RSS subscriptions that website-owners delivered - see Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog   for gosip about RSS.   Very roughly speaking, ev

Feedburner's chicklets are used to add the standard "orange radar" button to your blog.  This lets readers to subscribe the RSS feed of your choice.   The information is targeted to Blogger users, but most of it applies to anyone who uses Feedburner. What is a Chicklet, and why you need one: Previously I've explained how to remove the (ugly and confusing) "Subscribe to Posts (atom)" link from your blog , and why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important to your blog and how to create a Feedburner feed for it . But an RSS feed is useless unless people subscribe to it.  So as well as making the feed, you also need to put something in your blog that lets your readers sign up for it . A standard option for this is the orange square with "radar" markings on it, which many people call a " chicklet " (since it lets your viewer - the chicken? - have access to the feed you are providing). Feedburner also has options for: Using a cus

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 keep tryin

This article explains how to use Labels to categorise the Posts in your Blog, and how you can get around some of the limitations in Blogger's categorising tools. Why categorise your Posts Grouping your blog's contents makes it easier for people who have reached your blog via Search to find other posts that they may be interested in - provided you add tools to your blog that let them navigate using labels. It's essential if you want to make it look like you have put your Posts into Pages . And it helps you to find posts yourself. Blogger's tools for working with categories The only tool that Blogger provides for categorising or grouping Posts is Labels . In short, Labels are tags that you apply to posts . Each post can have as many Labels as you want (there is an upper limit of 5000 labels-per-blog, but most people don't get near it). And you can use labels for different purposes.  For example, a post titled "Photographing Long-haired Bla

This article is about how to edit your theme in Blogger. It supports many other articles on this site, which suggest specific theme changes needed to solve particular problems.    Note that until early 2017, themes were called templates.   In practise, "edit your template" and "edit your theme" mean the same thing. In Blogger, a theme is a file which controls how your blog are displayed on the screen when someone reads it using a browser or a mobile device.   Themes used to be called templates, but were renamed "themes" in early 2017. Previously, I've looked at whether it's a good idea to edit your Blogger theme / template or not.   Because themes are the same thing as templates, the same principles apply to editing your theme. For many people, editing the theme is simply something which they need to do, because it's the only way to do what they want ( remove the attribution , show a gadget on the homeppage only , add a Faceb

This article shows how to add a button that takes a user straight to Google Contacts to your blog or website.   It also distributes a picture that you can use in other places (eg your PC desktop) to make your own Google Contacts icon. Most people have a button on their computer or smartphone, which they use to start their email.  For some, this goes straight to their Gmail account in a web-browser, while others use an system like Thunderbird or Outlook to look at their email messages in a Gmail account and/or in email accounts they have with other services. If you use Gmail as your email system, then Google also gives you an address book, which they call Contacts. This is not the same as the address book in Thunderbird or Outlook etc, which is saved on your local computer.   Instead, the Google address book is saved on the internet, in your Google account. Google Contacts is tightly linked to your Gmail account, and the way that most people access it is by: Going t

This article explains how to use Blogger's Post Editor to get the HTML code that you need to put a picture into your sidebar (or header or footer, or anywhere else a gadget can go). adding a picture to your blog's sidebar . But sometimes you want more control over the picture size or behaviour.  Eg, you may want to have two pictures very close to each other and guarantee that they're the same size. To do this, you need to get the HTML code for the picture, and then put it into your blog as an HTML-gadget.  Fortunately, Blogger's Post-editor make it very easy to do this without writing the code yourself. Using the Post Editor to generate the HTML for a picture 1  Start a new Post   (you're not ever going to publish this:  it's just a work-area) 2  Don't enter any text:   just use the Picture icon on the toolbar to add a picture .   Blogger will prompt you to upload the picture, or to choose it from a Google-album-archive or to enter its URL:  

If you use AdSense to make money on your blog, and have a mobile template enabled (which should, unless the blog is about something that makes no sense on a mobile device),  then it's an extremely good idea to have at least one AdSense ad-unit that was made with Blogger's official AdSense widget rather than by getting the code from AdSense and installing it manually. This is because the a majority of gadgets don't show up on the screen when a visitor using a mobile device (cellphone or tablet) looks at a blog which has a mobile template set up for it - and by default this includes AdSense gadgets.   When a mobile visitor looks at a blog, Blogger does check to see if AdSense is used on it, and if so it shows one or two ad-units to them.  But unfortunately these checks only detect AdSense gadgets, not AdSense code in HTML/Javascript gadgets or added directly to the template.   So the net effect is that unless you have one of the official AdSense gadgets, mob