Thepipbuzz

This article is about putting a "tooltip" (text that is shown when you hover over) into something (eg text, a web-address or even a picture) in a Blogger post or gadget. What are tooltips? Tooltips are a feature found in many websites and modern computer based software:  when a viewer hovers their mouse over an item, a small piece of text is shown, generally formatted in a box which is highlighted in some way. They can be used for all sorts of things, to provide definitions of technical or foreign-language words, additional information about particularly interesting concepts - or as an incentive or invitation to take an action  eg you could tool-tip "click here to enter" with a description of the prize or benefits of entering.) You can see them in Blogger's Post Editor when you put your mouse over an item in the toolbar. But tool-tips can be used on other things too, including pictures and text: put your mouse over This Text to see one. They can be particularly...

This article is about how you can stop Google from automatically "enhancing" pictures that are loaded in Blogger - even if you do not have a Google+ account. Google has started automatically "fixing" new pictures as they are added to your blog In May 2013 Google added the Auto-Enhance and Auto-Awesome features to Google+ Photos. These are meant to make your pictures look better, ie more like those which are taken by professional photographers. These features are turned "on" by default. And because: Photos loaded using Blogger are stored in Picasa-web-albums, and Picasa-web-albums and as Google+ Photos actually have the same collection of photos - yes, even for accounts that do not use G+, the effect is that auto-enhance and auto-awesome are applied to all images loaded through Blogger's post-editor, header-picture loading tool and gadget-picture loading too;. Why is this a problem In many cases, these features work as they are intended to, and the...

This article shows how to let another person (Google account) upload pictures to your Picasa-web-albums:   this is one possible way to work around the issues with Google's photo auto-enhance feature. Picasa-web-albums and your Google account Previously I've described Picasa desktop vs Picasa-web-albums , and noted that you can upload pictures to your PWA folders using either of the two pieces of software. Each album and folder in Picasa-web-albums belongs to one Google account (which may or may not have an associated Google+ account ). Google now provide a tool to transfer Picasa-web albums from one account to another - but only once ever in the life-time of the album.   You cannot transfer ownership to one person now, and to another person in  a year's time (which is quite different to the way you can easily transfer other aspects of your blog to a new owners ). And Google also provide a way for an account owner to let another Google account add photos to the owners ...

This article is about how to set up a Google Plus profile for a Blogger account which already exists.  It looks at the history of Blogger and Google accounts, how to make a Google+ profile for a Blogger account, and what the consequences of this might be. Google+ and Blogger accounts Once upon a time, you could sign up to use Blogger without using Google at all. Then Google purchased Blogger, and over time the two types of accounts were slowly combined - and everyone who had an old "Blogger-only" account was asked to convert it to a Google account , which also gave them access to other features like Picasa-web-albums, Analytics, etc. People who signed up to Gmail first found that this made them a Google account that had access to email (via a gmail address), and Blogger, PWA, etc. More recently, Google introduced Google+. Today, people who sign-up to use Blogger are asked for their real name during the registration process, and are automatically set up with a Google+ ac...

Blogger have made it very simple to offer an email-subscription to your blog, with the "Follow by Email" gadget.  This article describes adding it to your blog, and how it works for your readers. Previously, I've explained why RSS is important for your blog , and how to give your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner . The Follow by Email gadget that Blogger provide makes this even easier:  you can add an email subscription option to your blog by following these steps: How to add the Follow by Email Gadget Log in to Blogger Use a Google account with admin rights to the blog, and which you want to use to get statistics about your email subscribers. Go to the Design tab Select Add a Gadget in the area where you want to put the email subscription option Choose Follow by Email (it's current at the top of the list) Enter the title that you want displayed on your blog (initially it's "Follow by email") Press Save . This puts the gadget onto y...

This article explains why the proportion of "keyword not provided" visits to most websites is increasing, and gives you options for finding out what keywords people are searching for when they reach your blog. Why the percentage of not-provided search visits to your blog has increased If SEO is important for your blog , and if you therefore watch the Stats > Traffic Sources tab in your Blogger dashboard or your Google Analytics results, you'll probably have seen that proportion of your search-visitors whose keyword is "not provided" has gone up a lot recently, to be more-or-less 100% of your Google search traffic.   (In the Blogger Stats tab "not provided" isn't shown - but the number of visits per keyword is now massively less than the vists from Google.) This is no accident: Google is now witholding the keywords that people use, and (says that) this to protect your visitor's privacy. The issue has been widely discussed in sites like Search...