Forusi

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 article explains the problems with getting valid, SEO-friendly links to images that are in Google Photos - and shows a way of doing this using Google products.   Previously I've explained how to get a URL for a picture stored in Google Photos - and the difference between Photo's "shareable links" and real photo URLs. The sort of link you get with this procedure looks like this: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinnOmUFsy_QSKM6n1fFLDAZ7oEsJP0c0n-E3Kt-Jq1ECEkC96F9IrHWB0ox85kO1zbqlorNMf7imLFrt-BiBCeB2aCWZ0XpqmCpdgYINy_MZ5OGikNBU7-xJBMRkporJJLTFyGU5StYFsG/w1006-h566-no/ There are some issues with using URLs (aka web-addresses) obtained like this: They aren't recognised as valid image file links by many online tools which ask for the URL for an image (eg phpBB, Blogger - and many others) Sometimes they stop working (I've not been able to track down exactly when, but there are reports around the internet from people wh

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 these "Google accounts".