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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 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:  

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 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 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 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 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 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 the options for setting the home page for blogs made with Google's Blogger. Blogs don't have a "home page", main page or "landing page" in the same way that regular web-sites do.  Instead, they show the newest post first, since (hopefully!) most readers will be return visitors, coming back to see what's new. But there may be blogs/websites where you want a welcome message or a particular post to appear first whenever someone visits your blog, or where you want to put all your posts in reverse order. This article is about options for giving your Blogger blog a "home page". It lists four options, and gives advantages/disadvantages of each approach, and links to articles with details about implementing each case. If you can think of any more approaches, please leave a comment below. Options for giving your blog a home page include: Static page combined with a custom re-direct - as discovered by Nitecruz

This article shows how to use the Permalink options to control the URL (ie website address) used for a post in your blog. When you first publish a post in blogger, an URL (called a permalink in blogger) is automatically generated for that post. It looks like: www.yourDomain/yyyy/mm/WORDS-ABOUT-MY-POST In this URL: yourDomain is either your custom domain / third-party URL   (eg fred-fish.com) or your blogspot domain if you aren't using a custom domain at the time (eg www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com) yyyy/mm is the year and month of the post's original publication date. Initially, Blogger choses the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-MY based on the title, or the first words in the post if the title was blank. They use some rules eg leaving out "the" and other common words, and putting numbers on the end so that every post has a unique URL (called a "permalink" in Blogger). However Blogger also has a tool that lets you choose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOU

This article is about options for showing the contents of a PowerPoint file inside your blog. Previously I've described how to load content from MS Word to your blog . But some people have material in PowerPoint (or other presentation software) files, that they want to show in their blog.   So far, I've identified three options for doing this. These approaches should work on any PowerPoint formatted presentation, no matter what tool it was prepared with - except of course if it was Google Docs in which case you go straight to option 2. Option 1: Each slide as an image Follow these steps: In PowerPoint, choose Save-as , and choose an image format (eg .png).    When the system asks if you want all slides or just the current one, choose All. Upload all the image files that were created to your blog - it's your choice whether you put them all in the same post, or one-per-post. I usually upload them firstly to Picasa web albums  or another picture-host

This article looks at the numbers that are in web-page addresses created by Blogger, what they mean and how you can influence them. When you first publish a post, Blogger assigns a permanent web-address (aka an URL or a permalink) to the post.  I've previously explained how you can control the words used in this hyperlink . A common question from people who are researching SEO for their blog is "how do I get rid of the numbers in the post-URL?". Unfortunately the answer is not as straighforward as most people hope for. Numbers near the start of Blogger URLS As described in setting the content of your post's permalink , the URL given to posts published in Blogger shows the year and month of the original publication date for the post. I think this is because Blogger was originally set up as an on-line diary, with a lot of the features organised around the post-date. Today, there are ways of giving your blog a home page , showing your posts in