Thepipbuzz

This article is about how to edit pictures in Picasa web albums, and how to use Picasa-destop to edit pictures in your Google+ Photos. Picasa-web-albums vs Google+ Photos Picasa-web-albums is a on-line photo storage and management tool, now owned by Google.   It is the on-line version of Picasa, a desktop-tool.   (Learn more about PWA and Picasa here .). Google would ideally  like everyone to use Google+ Photos. But there are many people who store pictures in albums that are not associated with their personal Google+ accounts:  these may be for businesses, schools, clubs, etc. So it is likely PWA will continue to exist for a good while yet.   And I am sure that Google appreciate this:  they have made a number of changes to Picasa-web-albums to make it work better both with Google+ and without it. Options for editing pictures that are are uploaded to Google If you have a Google+ account, then there are two ways of editing photos that you have loaded to Goog...

This article describes Creative Kit, which was a photo-editing tool for enhancing pictures in your Picasa-web and Google+ albums. A little history: Picasa, Picnik and Creative Kit In 2002, a company called Lifescape created a program called Picasa, which people could use to manage photos on their PC. Google purchased this in 2004 and then integrated it with web-storage, linked to a person's Google account, to make Picasa-web-albums: see Understanding Picasa and Picasa-web-albums for more information about how they work together with Blogger. Picasa has some photo-editing functions (cropping, red-eye removal, sharpening, lightening, making collages, etc).  Useful, far easier to use than Photoshop - but without features that some people wanted. So in 2010, Google integrated a photo-editing tool from Picnik, a small company that was offering a subscription-based photo hosting and editing service. Picnik's editor did some cooler things than Picasa, (applying visual effects, water...

This article shows how to install Twitter Cards into Blogger - and explains why you might do this if Twitter could be an important source of visitors for your blog. What are Twitter Cards Recently, Neil Patel explained why having social sharing tags installed into your blog can be important, and I've written a little more about it specifically for Facebook and Blogger  here . Twitter, for reasons best known to themselves, have developed their own version of social media meta-tags, called "Twitter Cards".    (Apparently they do make some use of Open Graph tags - but not for Twitter cards displays.) Two things happen inside Twitter when someone tweets a message including a link to a website or blog that has Twitter-cards installed.   Firstly, the message has the words "View Summary" under it, instead of just "Expand". Secondly, when someone in Twitter clicks the View Summary link, more information (ie a "Twitter Card") is shown about the cont...

This quick-tip is about Google's new feature for automagically sharing every Blogger post to Google+ This post explains how to do it: (How did I do that? Using Google+'s new embed feature. Do you like it? Should I make more quick-tips like this?) Something I haven't been able to figure out yet is whether this happens for all posts (including edits of existing posts) or just for newly published posts. If it's the former, then getting your posts right before you publish them is probably more important than ever.

This article explains how you can put a Google+ post (your own or someone else's) into your blog or website, provide the post was shared publicly on Google+. Recently, Google+ announced a couple of new features.   One of them, embeddable posts, has a lot of potential for bloggers. Look what s/he said on Google+ Embedding a Google+ post into a blog post is an example of the "look what he/she/I said over there" approach to linking blogs and social-networking sites . It gives people who are reading your blog up-to-date information about how many other people have plus-1'd the linked content, and an easy way to interact with it "over there" themselves - without leaving your blog. Why would you want to do this? The short answer:  Because you want to write about a Google+ post, and give your readers an easy way to +1 it or comment on it without leaving your blog. The long answer:  Because blogs are better than social-networking sites for developing ideas your id...

This article shows how to use a Google Drive form to put a survey questionnaire into your blog or website. How to make simple questionnaire forms in Blogger Blogger's Poll gadget is a tool for putting a question onto your blog, which you visitors can answer. The gadget collects the answers for you, and shows the results. This is very easy to do: you just add a gadget in the usual way , and set up the question and answer options, and the expiry date (ie the date after which you won't accept any more answers). And with some template editing, you can arrange to put this gadget either above or below your blog-post gadget and only show it on certain posts or pages - so it's an easy way of running a very simple survey on your blog. But it has a lot of limits: you can only ask one question, answers must be from a pre-defined list of possible answers, there is no other way for you to collate the results, etc. Google Drive Forms are a better way to build a poll or survey There a...