Thepipbuzz

This is a quick guide to searching for other blogs to read, now that Google's blog-search tool has been retired . If you write a blog, then reading other blogs "in your niche" (ie about similar topics) is a really good idea. This lets you keep up with what's going on and what other people are saying, and helps you to think up new blog-post ideas. An RSS-reader is a great tool for managing everything you need to read:  it's basically a folder with links to all the blogs and websites you want to follow, which shows when they have been updated.   To make best use of it. as soon as you see an interesting website, go to your RSS reader software and subscribe to the website's RSS-feed there-and-then: otherwise you will almost certainly forget.   Alternatively you can subscribe-by-email - provided the site offers that option - but many bloggers find that their email gets overwhelmed if they do this with more than a few sites. Some RSS software suggests website...

This article introduces the Free High Quality Picture Search tool which has been added to this website . Today I've added a new feature to Blogger-Hints-and-Tips . The Free High Quality Image Search tool is available from the menu bar. It is a tool to help you locate free, high-quality pictures to use in your blog posts or other website projects. It is based on a Google-custom-search engine , and a carefully selected set of websites that offer images you can use for free on your blog, even if it is "commercial" (ie you have advertising or any other way of making money from it). The difference between this and the images that you can get from a general-purpose search using the Creative Commons image and multi-media search tool is the resolution of the images that are found and/or their photographic quality. How to use the Free-image-search tool Choose it from the menu bar on this blog, or navigate directly to it at   http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.ie/p/free-i...

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...

This article describes the Creative Commons search tool, which you can use to look for pictures, videos, music etc that are available for other people to use under a Creative Commons license. What is Creative Commons Previously I've described how copyright applies to bloggers , how you can protect your blog-content from copyright theives , and what you can do if they take you work anyway . The focus in that series was looking after your own rights. But rights always come with responsibilities. The details vary by country, but in general you cannot just copy other people's recent work without their permission - in the same way that they cannot copy yours. Some people, though, are happy to give other people permission to use their work , often with certain conditions (eg you must including an attribution link to the creator). Creative Commons is an easy, legal way for creators to give permission for things they create to be used by other people. It is a framework which offer...