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This article is about centering gadgets from 3rd parties that you install onto your blog. Previously, I've described how to put HTML code from a 3rd party into your blog . When code like this is put into a gadget , one common question is "how do I center it?" There are (at least) three options for doing this, ie for putting a gadget into the middle (horizontally) of the area it is located in.   These are described below. Option 1: Centre all the gadgets in your blog To center-align every single gadget in your blog, just, add a CSS rule to your blog .  The rule to add is: .widget {   text-align: center; }  This will centre the contents and title of every gadget on your blog. Option 2: Only center-align the specific gadget To only centre-align one gadget, which is made from HTML/Javascript code, you can just put the gadget-code from the 3rd party (eg PayPal, Amazon, etc) inside a centering statement, like this: <div style="text

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 the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog. If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory .   They may even tell you to use an FTP  tool to do this. Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog  , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger. Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking you to change the website code itself. How to add a file to your blog's root directory The short answer for Blogger users is "sorry, you cannot d

This article describes making a Facebook badge to promote your page, and putting it onto your blog. What is a Facebook page This article is about how to make a badge to promote a Facebook  Page . This is an example of the "follow me" approach to linking your blog and the social networks , although for Facebook pages your reader becomes a Fan rather than a Friend. Many people are confused about when they should use each of the types of "thing" in Facebook, ie Profiles - accounts for flesh-and-blood, living, breathing, individual people Pages - for websites, brands, and organisations that don't want to approve all their Facebook members Groups -  for organisations that want to approve individual members who join (and in return, group-owners can send private messages to individual members. The most common "thing" for blogs to have is a Page - and a Badge is the tool which Facebook provides to help you to promote a Page on your blog or

This article discusses some things to keep in mind when you are putting advertising on your blog. If you are considering putting advertising onto your blog, there are some basic things that you need to think about.  These include broader philosophical questions, right down to nuts-and-bolts technical concerns. This article is not a definitive guide - see somewhere like ProBlogger for that.   Rather it's a collections of thoughts about the issues specifically related to Google's Blogger and its relationship with advertisers.   And it may include some thoughts about philosophical and policy issues, if I do any deep research or thinkng about these in the future. Terms and Conditions There are lots and lots of possible advertising and affiliate marketing programmes . Staying within the programme of terms and conditions (often called T&C's) for every programme that you participate in is important.   Every advertising programme has terms and conditions.   Y

This article is about how you can save a  post even if Blogger's Publish button won't let you save your work. Imagine you've been working on a Blogger post for several hours.    It's finally ready: you've got the wording exactly right, everything is formatted with bold, italics and bullet-points, your pictures and links are all correct, etc.    But then your internet connection stops working.   Or you click the Publish button - and get a message like  "Post cannot be saved due to HTML errors".   You can't work out how fix the problem, and you need to stop working on it now ! This may seem like a disaster - hours of work wasted. But luckily there's a very easy way to save your work, and tools to help you diagnose problems. Saving your work and recovering it later How to save the post that you have written Switch to HTML mode (this is a tab at the top left corner of the editing window.  Select all the text in the win

This article describes how to get the URL or internet address of a picture in Google Photos, and the difference between Google's shareable links and URLs. Google Photos is a tool that help bloggers (and everyone else) to manage their picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here . In Google Photos, there are two different types of web-address for a photo. One is the URL , and this can be used to refer to pictures from Blogger, or from other tools that want a link that just shows the photo, eg Twitter, Google Maps.  This is the traditional style of internet-address for a photo. The other is the shareable link.   This is what Google Photos provides from the Share function.   Shareable links can be used in Facebook, and other places where the photo that is being shared is displayed within a web-display, rather than just as a picture.   (Ref:   How to make and manage shareable links in Google Ph

This article is about how to set up a gadget / widget in Blogger so that it is only visible on the first place that a reader sees when they visit your blog (often called the "home page").   It is one of a series of articles about controlling what goes on the homepage of your blogspot blog. Front Page Bob By Paginator (Own work)  [ CC-BY-3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons There are a number of reasons why you might want to put a gadget only the screen that shows when a visitor first navigates to your blog's home page. You may want to show a welcome message, or a topic-index page, or to give a view of your recent tweets or some other RSS feed.     No matter what the reason, the process is very similar: How to make a gadget only appear on the first page Note:  in Blogger, the words "gadget", "widget", and even "page-element" all mean the same thing.  I generally use "gadget", because the Page Elements tab currently s

This article is about how to add a badge that someone else gives you to a blog made with Blogger. Sometimes, blog-owners run a blog-a-thon or a similar circle-of-blogs event. One aspect of taking part is by showing a badge for the event on your own blog , so that your visitors are invited to take part and to view other participants' blogs too. Usually who-ever is hosting the event gives you the code for the badge, and tells you to install it into your own blog.   Sometimes they even tell you how to install it to your Wordpress blog - like this . Fortunately, installing a badge to a blog made with Blogger is equally easy. Installing a badge to Blogger Decide where you want to put the badge.   Traditionally badges go into the sidebar, but you could choose to put it into the header or footer, into the space above or below your posts, or even into an individual post. Get the">How to make a Button for your Own Blog .   But 99.99% of the time, they pr

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:  

In some Blogger templates, there is a big gap between the bottom of the header and the start of the first post, and this means that the posts and the sidebar are not aligned.  This article explains how to adjust the gap, and so remove that problem . In the templates that Blogger provides , as well as all third-party templates, the amount of space between elements on the screen is not accidental:   designers put a lot of effort into working out what spacing will look good, and then finding ways to put CSS code into the template so that the spacing they want is shown in any browser software that Blogger supports. But there are times when you may want to change this spacing, and this is easy to do, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your template , and if  you can work out exactly which part of the template code to change. The pre-Header gap A pet-hate of mine is the blank space above the first post, which looks strange unless you put somethi

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