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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 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 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 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. ...

This article shows how to use Google's Takeout service to make a copy of the contents of all your blogs at the same time. A backup is a copy that you can use to restore from if something goes wrong.  For your personal compter, you may have a backup copy of the files on your hard-drive, so that if you lose the machine, you can get the files back, usually with a little work. In blogging terms, a backup of your blog is a copy that you can use if you accidentally delete a post, or lose control of your blog, or perhaps even a copy of a blog that you have deleted but still want some last-chance access to. Unfortunately Blogger does not offer a complete solution for backing up our blogs .    Instead, we need to take separate actions to back up our gadget settings , our template when it is being edited , and our post-contents. You can back up the posts from one content from the Settings > Other > Blog Tools  tab.  If you choose the Export Blog ...

This article gives a brief introduction to Google Photos, and how it relates to both Blogger and Google+ Photos. Google's recent announcement  of Google Photos opens the door for Blogger to make some improvements to how it works with pictures. Why? Well Google+Photos simply wasn't a way forward.   Too many Blogger users chose not to "upgrade" their Google accounts to Google+ accounts, so it wasn't possible for Blogger to force Google+ features on everyone. And that was even after they removed the rule about one G+ account per person, and allowed Google+ Pages to be turned into stand alone accounts with their own passwords. However Google Photos is basically Google+ Photos, without the need to have a "plus" account, and with some other nice features, like Free picture and video storage (any number of pictures, provided they aren't "too big"),  Image recognition and search Sorting pictures by date, but giving optio...

This article is about how you can use a custom domain that was purchased through Google / Blogger for something other than a Blogger blog. Blogger makes it very easy for you to buy a "custom" domain name (ie URL) for your blog.   Instead of being www.fred-fish.blogspot.com, you can easily be www.fred-fish.com - which is more appealing for all sorts of reasons. Blogger tells you which domain registrar they're going to use and lets you change to the other one if you want to.  Apart from this, Google hides most of the "technical" domain registration details from you:  you are invited to set up a domain direktur account (in Google Apps) , but even this is optional.   But there may come a time when you want to use your domain for more than just a blog:  eg, Fred may want to use www.fred-fish.com to sell fishing trips or as the public gateway to a massive database of fishing achievements, neither of which are functions that Blogger (easily) provides...

This article describes a way to tell Google about problems with activity on your AdSense account. I noticed a link to an Invalid Clicks Contact form in a recent blog-post from Google. You can find the form here . Basically, this is a way to tell Google if you think that something has gone wrong with your AdSense account, for example if you are being click-bombed or similarly targeted by malicious people or activity. This caught my attention because exactly that happened recently here on Blogger-hints-and-tops: from reading the AdSense help forums, it seems that bots (or something) were attacking Link Units, and suddenly lots of people were getting huge increases in both click-through rates and revenue-per-click. At the time, I followed the advice given there: Remove the Link Units,  Remove the site from the approved list   Post a "me too" message on the support lembaga thread,  Wait for Google to act against the bad guys.  But it still felt w...