Thepipbuzz

This article is about how to you can start Picasa-web-albums in way that stops you being immediately re-directed to Google+ Photos. Update - August 2016 The article below was written in 2013, and has remained correct until very recently.   But changes which Google started rolling out from 1 August 2016 mean that it is now obsolete.    See the article Picasa-web redirects, August 2016 update for more information. The following article is kept here for historic purposes only. What happens when you start Picasa-web-albums? If you have a Google+ account, either because you only signed up for Google recently, or you had a Blogger account first and then linked your blog to Google+, then you will know that if you go to Picasa-web-albums ), you are immediately re-directed to Google+ photos . When this happens, at the top of the screen, for a few seconds, there is a message saying:  " Click  here  to go back to Picasa Web Albums. " But if you do something in Googl...

This quick-tip is about how to find the current version of Blogger's support forum. 27 July update:   I noticed yesterday that Google have changed the process back, and that Blogger's help link now leads directly to the summary page which includes a Community button.   I guess this means they listened - if not to me, then at least to everyone else who complained. For as long as I have been using Blogger, Google have provided two types of support: A set of support articles - some of which aren't up to date - that describe how to do standard things A support forum , where people can ask questions, which are answered by other Blogger users. This forum has some people who are tagged as "Top Contributors" who have special rights, like being able to send questions to the Google staff who are also using the foru - but who obviously don't have the time to read all the posts. Unlike some people, I don't have any problems with the peer-support model. It's 24...

This article is about a new, faster, type of AdSense code which is available, and how you can add it to your blog. AdSense have announced that they are now providing a new, faster, type of code for their ads. This code is "asynchronous", which means that other content on the page will still keep on loading, even if the advertisement is delayed. This a good thing, because it lets your blog's visitors see your posts more quickly.  Also, if SEO matters for your blog , then having it load as quickly as possible is important, because Google likes pages that load quickly. How to put asynchronous Adsense ads into your blog Blogger have not commented, but I am 99.99999% certain that the new asynchronous ad-code has not be implemented into the AdSense gadgets that are available from Blogger's Add-a-gadget tool . So to put it into your blog, you need to: Follow the standard instructions for getting AdSense code for a website. When you reach the Ad code box, choose 'Async...

This article describes Google Friend Connect, and how it can be used at the moment. Google Friend Connect (GFC) was one of Google's earlier social-networking attempts, introduced in 2008. Originally (you can still see the full description here ), GFC promised a range of social features that website-owners, including bloggers, could include on their sites. including: Add GFC features to a website by installing snippets of HTML code onto the site, or or using the  API. Users sign in to your website, using GFC with an existing account (e.g. Google, Yahoo, AOL) Users can create or import profiles (e.g. Twitter), discover other users, and send private messages to each other. Social gadgets, eg for posting comments and links, rating and reviews, that you could add to your site, which your visitor could use once they had logged in with GFC. Website owners can set up questions to be asked when a user used GFC to join their site. The idea was for them to find out their member's intere...

This quick article shares an observation about the likelihood that Google's free Keywords Research Tool is being turned off. Most SEO advice says that  if SEO is important for your blog , then you should use a keyword research tool to find out the words and phrases that people are actually searching for, and then use these words (so-called "keywords") a lot, because they are most likely to get more visitors for your blog. There are many tools that can be used to look for keywords, but Google's own keywords research tool is often recommended:  it's free, and no one knows more about key-words than Google does. The tool is provided as part of the AdWords product (ref AdSense vs AdWords what's the difference ). Usually, you need to sign in to an AdWords account to use their tools.   An AdWords account may be based on your usual Google account, but because it can be used to buy advertising, Google ask you to put a small amount of money into it, so you can use it to...

This Quick-tip introduces the new Google+ plugins that Google released in late June 2013 Recently, Google+ Developers blog announced a vastly improved set of Google+ plugins for use with websites. Most (all?) of them are not yet available as Blogger gadgets, so you have to get the code from the Google+ resources site , and add it to your blog like you would add any 3rd party code. The new options include a more "industry-standard" follow on Google+ button, and new badges for Pages, Communities and Hangouts, as seen here. (I've previously explained why you might like to have a G+ community alongside your blog .) They are configurable (size, dark/light, style, etc) - but  you need to work out how to apply the configuration settings to the code.   That said, I've added them to this site without any configuration (see the top of the sidebar), and the default options appear to work well. And it's not actually as hard as it looks: in general you just follow the pat...