Thursday, July 25, 2013
If you want to change the Google account you've used with your Blogger hosted blog to point to a new email address there's really only one proper way to do it. You need to export your blog, use a text editor to change the author in the exported blog, delete all your existing posts, then import the newly edited file.
You may want to do this if you've changed your email address after getting a custom domain name. Or if you've previously been using different email addresses for each blog and now want to consolidate all your posts under one account that is linked to your Google+ profile so you can get the SEO benefits of having a Google+ account and authorship.
There are some hacks that only change the author in the template but since blogs can be accessed in multiple ways, including RSS feeds, it's important to actually change the author of the post, and not just what is displayed in the browser. In this post I'll walk you through the steps of how to change the author of each blog post.
Tuesday, July 09, 2013
Dear Blogger Team,
I'd like to share some of my thoughts about some of the things you've been doing lately and my concerns over the general direction you're heading in.
You've created a great service and I appreciate the effort you've put into both making it freely available and making it better. You understand that there was a serious need to enhance Blogger reader's presentation and have done something really cool with Dynamic Views.
Dynamic Views are a great leap forward. My issue is, it might be too big of a leap and I don't think the current Internet ecosystem is ready for it.
You seem to have favored Dynamic Views rather than making minor yet significant enhancements to the current templating system which is in major need of updates.
Updating the current template system to provide more options to template designers first, and building Dynamic Views on top of it by allowing the new Dynamic Views components to reuse the old Blogger tags would have been a better course IMO.
Below I've tried to explain why I disagree with the current direction and give suggestions on how to improve the current Layout system.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Blogging is a cheap and easy way for people who don't know how to build their own website to start making money online. All you have to be able to do is write interesting articles. Two popular free blogging platforms are Blogger and WordPress.
If you're just starting out and plan to make money blogging you should choose Blogger even though I think WordPress is a more powerful blogging platform.
It seems a little strange to not pick the best tool but I also believe in picking the right tool for the right job. As I'll explain, Blogger is better than WordPress if you're just starting out.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
When AdSense does not have advertisers to fill your ad slot it displays a blank space by default which doesn't exactly maximize your revenue potential. A better solution is to display alternate ads. In this post I'll show you how to easily set up your AdSense Backup Ads to display either Commission Junction Smart Zones or Amazon Affiliate ads.
Both Amazon and Commission Junction run large, well-respected affiliate programs that can help you earn money from space that would otherwise be left blank. The process is very simple and you only need to know some basic HTML and CSS as well as have the ability to upload files to your website.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Over the years more and more people have been looking for ways to make money online. Many have turned to blogging. But how much money can you expect to make from a blog?
I addressed this topic back in 2008 in How Much Money Do Bloggers Make (analysis of a poll from Darren Rowse) and it turns out to be not that much for most. Now I'd like to address the same topic by looking at the stats of 7 of the 10 last blogs in tecnorati's top 100 blog list.
They're not the top of the list but also nothing to sneeze at either. Being in the top 100 when there are hundreds of millions of blogs out there is a very big accomplishment!
So let's look at what it takes to make the least, most popular blog and what type of success it has.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Blogs have been around for quite some time now and are used in many different ways by different types of people. They're not just for teenage girls to write about what boys they like at school. Many companies have blogs these days, including Fortune 500 companies. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, was the
first Fortune 500 blogger. Even the new White House website has blogs.
Blogging is a very effective way to strengthen and grow your business. If you don't currently have a blog for your small business, you should seriously consider it.
In this post, I'll discuss everything you need to know about why and how to start a small business blog as well as plenty of examples of topics you should consider for your small business blog posts.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
In the past few years, you've likely noticed that a lot of blogs and websites have there content on the left and their ads on their right. Some even go so far to use that sort of two column layout and push their content below the fold and
only display ads above the fold.
I never understood why this became popular. Before this, many websites used to have navigation on the left side of their content, and many users still expect to see it there. Google even indicates that the left side of the page does well as illustrated in this heat map they released. The darker the color, the better the performance.
Even on my own sites, testing ad placements, I've found the left side of the page performs very well. Especially for AdSense link units.
But still many people are using and designing templates with ads on the right and I think it has to do with an SEO Myth I've seen many times.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Some popular services that bloggers use, use Java. Two of them are
Blogger and
FeedBurner.
This may not be big news to some, but it's not something that has been publicized much. There's a lot of buzz on other web programming languages such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, Perl, etc. So I thought I'd take the time to highlight these sites and others that use Java.
You'd think that anything related to Web 2.0 would be about RoR, LAMP, etc. Not Java, which has been around since mid 90's and has been used on many popular sites.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Blogger.com is one of the largest and most popular blogging services. While it has many great features and makes blogging easy, there are some features that aren't available, or at least aren't able to be implemented by pointing and clicking.
One of these features is the ability to have a post summary instead of the full post appear on the blog's home page, and other index type pages.
In Blogger's help section they show you how to accomplish this, but I wasn't completely happy with the implementation because it didn't bring the reader to the spot where they left off. They head to start scanning through the page to find out where they last read. I find this annoying so I made a slight change to make it easier for readers.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
For years now people have been suggesting that you make sure to put your ads above the fold. Above the fold means that users won't have to scroll down the page to view the ads.
People have been taking this advice to heart. Too much so in many cases. It's an ordinary day, you have a question and you turn to your trusty friend Google to help answer it. You click on the links in the search results and page after page all you see are ads, until you scroll down a bit. Then maybe you find your answer or maybe not.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
You're likely familiar with the famous bubbles in recent history, the housing bubble, the tech stock bubble and the beanie baby bubble. They all have similar characteristics. It seems like a quick and easy way to make money and it creates interest in others to jump on board. The increased level of speculators in the market helps fuel demand, prices and revenue. It seems like we might be having the same thing going on and there might be a blog bubble. Quite possibly a bubble in making money online in general.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
I'm writing this as I just created the blog and I haven't even begun to promote it. I may never get a comment but the issue of spam always comes up on sites I've worked on or created so I wanted to clearly define how I will be handling comments.
Everyone is welcome and
encouraged to contribute to discussions by leaving comments. I know a lot but I'm not so full of myself that I think I'm always right or that I can cover topics completely so the more people participate the better for everyone.
Unless it becomes a problem, I will leave comments open to anonymous users.
I will read every comment and respond to as many as I can that need a reply. I may not be able to reply to everyone but hopefully others can answer any questions I can't get to.
You are free to link to other sites and provide a link to your own site(s) along with your identity but comments with links will be under greater scrutiny.
If you're leaving a comment that has a link, either in the comment or attributed to your identity please be aware of the following guidelines:
- Make sure your comment is on topic. This is the most important.
- If you have a website or blog, feel free to come back and leave a comment indicating that you have replied through your own site and leave a link to it.
- Your comment should contribute something to the discussion. Comments that contain links that don't will be removed. While, like most people I enjoy recognition, a comment that just gives some sort of generic praise in order to include a link is not appropriate.
- Private information should be kept private.
- No posts or links to illegal content.
- While some discussions can get heated, please try and be civil to each other.
- Do not be obscene in your language, at least not excessively so.
- Do not be repetitive or redundant. Don't post the same comment multiple times and comments that are very similar to other comments may be removed.
- Do not post affiliate or similar links.
Ultimately, I use my judgment on what I consider to be spam and the above guidelines are what I use as a benchmark.
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