Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Adding meta-tags to your blog

This article describes meta-tags: why and how to add them to your blog.  

It applies to any type of meta-tag except the description-tag:  Blogger introduced special editing tools for them in late March 2012, so they are covered separately.


What is a meta-tag, and why would you use one

A meta-tag is a piece of HTML code that is found inside a webpage, and contains information about the page.

Putting files into Blogger's root directory

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog.


Turnips (Brassica rapa) 
from Wikimedia commons 
Originally posted to Flickr 
by thebittenword.com.   
Licensed under the terms of 
the cc-by-2.0.
If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory.   They may even tell you to use an FTP  tool to do this.

Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger.
Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking you to change the website code itself.


How to add a file to your blog's root directory:

The short answer for Blogger users is "sorry, you cannot do this".

 The long answer is still no:  "there is no way to do this, but see the rest of this article for an explanation of why, and some suggested work-arounds."

Test HTML rich-text post snippets before publishing them



quick-tips logo
Rich snippets. Area tool so as to Google uses to break website-managers a little control greater than how their sites appear in search-results (while enhancing the quality of search results, of course).

Google Affiliate Network

If you are already an AdSense publisher, then today's announcment about Google Affiliate Network: Introducing Google Affiliate Ads for Blogger may be of interest.

Google Affiliate Network (GAN) is a different type of advertising programme:  instead of getting paid per click, you get paid per purchase (or whatever other key action the advertiser decides).

Removing the attribution gadget from mobile template blogs

This article is about removing the "Powered by Blogger" statement from the bottom of blogs that have a mobile template.


Blogger and attribution gadgets. 


Picture of a cellphone with "Powered by Blogger" taking up screen space
Previously I've described the attribution doohickey so as to Blogger has added to blogs with designer templates, and various ways of removing it.

Finding the gadget ID for a widget in your blog

This article shows you how to find the "identifier" for a gadget in your blog.  This isn't useful in itself, but is a set in various other template customizations, including putting a gadget on a single page only.


Sometimes you need to find the code-name for a gadget that you have added to your blog, so you can edit your template and control how and where that gadget is displayed.

Google Drive will eventually replace Docs

If you service Google Docs as a file-hosting option, afterward the up to date declaration of Google Drive probably has you wondering how Docs will be affected: There's a marketing declaration on the Docs Blog, but it has a diverse lack of assigning on how it will produce.