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Showing posts from January, 2016

How to use your own icons in Google My Maps

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This article shows how to use your own icons to label places in maps that you make with the My Maps' feature in   Google Maps . My Maps is a tool provided by Google Maps that lets you make a map showing a specific collection of places. Why is this helpful?   Well, you can search for a collection of places in regular Google Maps, and share the maps you can see - but if you do this, other people will see different places that are marked on the version of the maps that Google shows them, not the same as the places that are marked for you.    To guarantee what set of places other people see, you need to make a map in My Maps, and then you can share this specific map. My Maps provides a standard set of icons that can be used for labelling places - and these days it's a pretty impressive standard set.   But it still doesn't include numbers, letters or other labels - and the icons provided may not be styled the way you would like. Luckily Google have provided a ...

Making someone an author on your blog

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This article shows you how to set up another person (ie another Google account) as an author for your blog. Google, Blog-Authors and Blogger Setting someone up as an "author" in Blogger is one way that you can let other people post to your blog. It's easy to do: you tell blogger to create an invitation, which sends the person an email saying you would like to be an author, they click a link in the email and then sign in with a Google account to accept the invitation. And once it is done, the person can write and edit their own posts. All you need to know is the person's email address: it doesn't matter if it's a gmail address or not.  You can send invitations to people with hotmail, yahoo, and indeed any email address where your invitee can read their email.  However the other person will need to use a Google account  (which doesn't necessarily include Gmail) to accept the invitation: don't waste time inviting people who are allergic to Google and...

Turning the RSS feed off or on again

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By default, public Blogger sites offer an RSS feed.  But there may be times when you need to turn it off, either for good or temporarily. Previously I've explained what RSS is and why it's important for bloggers . But there may be times when you want to turn off your RSS feed , either because you don't want to offer one at all, or because you want to make some posts, or changes to existing posts that are not notified to  your RSS subscribers. Or you may need to turn it back on again - for example, if you want to use a dynamic template , to offer a subscribe-by-email option , or to enable automatic posting to Google +. How turn off your blog's RSS feed Go to the Settings > Other tab. Under " Site Feed ", use the drop-down to change Allow Blog Feed to "None".   (This is the only option that totally turns your feed off:  the others, including Custom, leave some aspects of the feed on.) How turn on your RSS feed This is just the same as turning t...