How to put pictures into unusual shapes, using PowerPoint

This article explains how to put a picture that is one shape (a "square peg") inside an image of another shape (a "round hole" - or star, elipse, octagon, etc) - using Microsoft PowerPoint.

Original title:   How to put a square peg into a round hole - in pictures

Recently, I've been using PowerPoint to turn into the thumbnail image in support of my posts. This capital so as to I own the copyright of the pictures, so can share them lacking worrying almost copyright issues.

Get notified about changes in popularity of pages on your blog/site.

This Quick-Tip describes the alerts that Webmaster Tools are now offering for changes in search popularity of particular pages.

Google Webmaster Tools allow added to their alerts skin texture.

Basically, this capital so as to they try to notice the changes "that possibly will be on the whole attractive in support of you", and dispatch the website landlord a message whilst they smudge something.

Takeout now lets you download your own YouTube videos

This Quick-Tip is about accessing your own YouTube videos, using Google's Takeout / Data-liberation service.

If you upload a cartridge using the Blogger Post Editor's cartridge icon, afterward it's stored in Google Videos - which is at the moment retired except for in support of the part so as to hosts vids uploaded thru Blogger.   (This was anywhere they were being deposit  the keep up instant I checked, which was a only some months ago)

Google Groups now has a "My Discussions" view

This Quick-Tip is about how to see the posts you made in Google Groups - in particular in the Blogger Product Forum.

I used to be quite practicing in the prior Blogger Help Forum.   But since they switched to the new-fangled Google Groups based Blogger Product Forum, I've been with a reduction of enthusiastic:

Google product cancellations for October 2012

This Quick-Tip is about the products that Google is dropping, or making changes to, from October 2012.

Google's latest announcement about retiring products came out yesterday (Saturday).   Seems odd that they're calling it "spring cleaning", since it's autumn / fall in most of the countries where major Google products are based.

So what's on the list that will affect Blogger-users?

Making custom domains work without the www at the start

This Quick-Tip is about an issue that some people have had with their "naked" custom domain not re-directing to the www-at-the-start version, and how to fix it using a feature in your Google Apps account.

Since Blogger released their initial fix towards the custom-domain mapping problem of mid-September 2012, a lot of people have found that it's unattainable to setup the custom domain so that my-domain.xxx works in addition to www.my-domain.xxx does.

It has an choice for this in Blogger's Settings > Publishing area. But last night, after i set up a "subdomain" style entry for news.my-domain.xxx and directed my latest-updates blog from my-domain.blogspot.com to news.my-domain.com, learned that this didn't work.

Creative Kit photo editor works in Google+, if not in Picasa

This Quick-Tip is about using the Creative Kit, which has been giving me grief recently when I tried to use it from Picasa-web-albums.

For ages, I've occasionally used the photo-editor in Picasa-web-albums (the online version of Picasa) to edit photos so as to I've already uploaded, and care for to amend lacking changing the URL.   This editor was originally Picnik - until Google sold so as to upshot and replaced it with Creative Kit a while in the past.