Thepipbuzz

This article explains how to make new categories for listing and organizing feeds in The Old Reader. Recently I migrated from Google Reader to The Old Reader , in readiness for Google Reader's upcoming retirement . (If you're not sure why I bothered, you might like this simple explanation of RSS and why it matters for Bloggers , in particular ones who want to research things). I used Google Takeout to migrate my existing subscriptions from Reader to The Old Reader. (And yes, I did carefully file that exported file away, just in case I want to migrate to some other service.) Because my subscriptions in Google Reader were organized into categories, these categories were automagically imported into my The Old Reader account. But today I wanted to change my categories - and it wasn't obvious how to do this from either my settings or profile. How to make a new category AKA folder in your The Old Reader subscriptions list To add a new grouping to the subscriptions in a The Old ...

This QuickTip explains some recent announcements from Google  about SEO and mobile devices, and what they mean for Blogger users. If SEO matters for your blog , and your blog is relevant for users with moble devices, then you pretty much need to enable a mobile template . Why?   In short, because this recent post from Webmaster Central says that for Google the ranking of search results on mobile devices is now impacted by how well sites are optimized for mobile devices. This means that if you haven't set up your blog for mobile, then it won't come up so highly in the search results seen by mobile users. As well as the template, there are a range of other factors that affect how well your site works for mobile. Blogger users cannot control a lot of them, though we can think about: Page load speed  Using the Pages gadget as the top menu bar , rather than a linked-list or labels gadget, - because it converts into a drop-down menu in when a mobile template is applied. Also,...

This article shows how to install Facebook's Open Graph tags into Blogger Why Open Graph  Neil Patel recently explained on Quick Sprout why having Facebook and Twitter tags installed into your blog is important . To cut his long story short, if you install them, then when someone shares your blog-post, the shared item looks better . This means that more people are likely to follow the link and/or share it themselves - so your blog gets more traffic, and people think you're more professional and thus credible. Neil also stated that if you don't use Wordpress, " you�ll need to manually generate meta tags for each page on your site " - but fortunately for Blogger users who are brave enough to edit their template  that's not true.   Blogger provides lots of SEO-supportive features these days, and you can easily use them to make OG-tags work on your blog - even if you haven't quite got your head around what OG is - personally it took me months to understand wha...

This post tells the story of my choosing a replacement for Google reader. Every so often, I do a post here on Blogger-HAT which is a little "different". Today, I'm starting the quest to choose a replacement for Google Reader (yes, the turn-off was announced back in March , but there's no point in starting these things too soon - I expect that a few options have improved considerably since then. One way that this post is different is that I'm going to hit publish very soon, with the post just started not just finished.    So if you're a subscriber and want to see what I end up with, you might like to sign up on Facebook or somewhere, so you get a notification when I've finished. So let's get started: First stop:  google.com   [google reader replacement] A cool 66-million results.   Yeah, I'll zip through those in no time. Scanning down the list, I don't recognise some of the top placegetters: The first three are from Google News.   No, don't...

This QuickTip is about the new types of "things" which the Data Highlighter tool knows about. In December 2012, Google introduced the Data Highlighter (DH) - this is a tool that lets you point to items in your blog posts LINK and use them to teach Google how you write about certain things. Now they have announced that this tool has been extended to cover schema.org definitions of seven new types of things: Products Local businesses Articles Software applications Movies Restaurants TV episodes The basic instructions for using the DH tool have not changed: visit Webmaster Tools , select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter". Google now advise that " The tagging process takes about 5 minutes for a single page, or about 15 minutes for a pattern of consistently formatted pages. " After you have done some tagging, you can verify Google's understanding of your structured data. If Google has und...

This QuickTip is about how to access your existing Google Custom Maps, once you have started using the new Google Maps interface being introduced in mid 2013. Google is now offering the opportunity to migrate to new Google maps.  (ref: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-new-google-maps-now-available.html ) However one disadvantage is that "My Places", which includes Google Custom Maps, is not part of the new Google Maps interface. At the moment, you can temporarily switch to the old interface by clicking the "options" icon in the black navigation bar and Selecting "My Places" OR Clicking the "classic maps" link. Or you can get to them by navigating to https://www.google.com/maps/myplaces From here you can see and edit your existing Google Custom Maps, but you cannot create new ones. To do that, you need to use Google Maps Engine Lite - which was announced recently.

This QuickTip introduces a useful post about password management from Google. Giving computer or password-management advice to people who don't have lot of experience with IT has always been challenging: there is a lot of background information that you need to know before it all starts to make sense. And eaching colleagues to use a mouse back in the 1990s was a lot easier than explaining on-line services and security is in the twenty-teens!  I know that I'm not the only person who struggled to explain the difference between email and gmail to someone who just didn't understand " gmail is one type of software for doing emails " - he just kept asking "so what does fmail do?" To help with this challenge, Google have released a very carefully written article with advice about managing passwords. My guess is that lots of research went into working out exactly how much someone who uses a few on-line services needs to know, and how to explain it simply. Th...