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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 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 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 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...

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 explains why mobile mattes for some blogs (but not all), what tools Blogger has provided to help with this, and how to set up a mobile theme (aka template) for your blog.  It also links to Google's mobile testing tool, which shows you how your blog looks on a mobile device. By default, when someone uses a smartphone, tablet or other mobile device to look at your blog, they see the "full site" just like they would if they were using a PC.   The pages aren't set up to work well on their small screen, but they have access to all the features and gadgets you've installed. In some cases, this is fine.  For example, when I first wrote this article, I looked at the statistics for this site  and hardly any of the visitors were mobile.   However now, a couple of years later things have changed and I've implemented a mobile theme for this blog. But for other blogs, especially ones that have maps and other location-information or which people...

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 conditio...

This article explains how to stop more than one person providing a response to a questionnaire that you have made using Google Forms. use Google Forms to put a survey or questionnaire into your blog . Sometimes when you put a form into a blog-post, it is OK for people to respond more than once - and Forms even has an option to submit another entry immediately. But sometimes it's not. For example, if you are researching a particular topic, you probably want each person's opinion to count once, rather than having an enthusiastic person (effectively a human bot) enter their responses many times and so bias your results. Google Forms has now a feature which lets you require everyone who wants to submit results to your survey to be logged in to a Google account , and then only lets each Google Account submit the form once . How to stop people submitting a Google Form more than once Follow these steps to stop the same user entering a form multiple times: Edit ...

This article explains how to change the author of a post that has already been published in Blogger. Blogger posts and changing post-authors When you Publish a post in Blogger, a number of features are set up for the post, as well as the contents.  These include: The URL / web-addresss where the post can be found The post date/time when it was published The post-author (which is now set the first time that the post is Saved , ie even before it is published.) The labels that apply to it. Some of these can be changed by editing the published post . But there are some features that cannot be altered after they are set. In particular, Author is not changed even if a different Google account  is used to edit the post - or if the original author has their permission to write to the blog  removed. This can lead to interesting situations on multi-author blogs, especially when one writer leaves the team and perhaps even deletes their Google account. ...