Blogger’s Features
There are several buttons and methods that allow you to use in a pleasant way the blogging platform, called Blogger. In our previous article, we have spoken about how to create a Blogger account, a blog, how to give access to multiple users to your Blogger account, but we still have more to say. Let’s see what are the steps for adding a photo to your Blogger profile.
First, click on the link “Edit Profile” from your Dashboard. Here enter the URL of the image you want to set as a picture profile and click “Save” at the bottom of the page. If you do not have a photo, you can post an image and then get back to the blog and set up a photo of your own. After that, switch the post editor to Edit HTML mode. Now copy the photo URL and paste it in the “Photo URL” in your profile then click “Save” at the bottom. Note that the image size must not exceed 50 KB.
Now let’s go to some more complicated things, that are not performed by all the Blogger users, but just in case you are one of those who is more experienced with computers, we will present the path for creating a setup of an FTP connection (or SFTP) to host an external web. More information are available on the Google website, the support section. Go to Settings, Publishing and select a connection method. Then enter the desired settings. Once done, save your server details by pressing the “Save Settings” at the bottom and post the new blog. Note that it will use the default port number (: 21 for FTP and: 22 for SFTP). If you specify a different port, this will have no effect. Also, do not include http:// or ftp:// in the server address or in the path setting.
If you do not want to have blogspot.com in your blog address, you can get a custom domain. We will continue to host your entire content, but it will be displayed at your new address. There are three components to configure: Your domain (The first thing you need to do is to choose a domain name like mysite.com and register it. You can register domain names from any registrar), DNS settings (Then you need to create a CNAME record with the DNS for your domain, by associating that certain domain with ghs.google.com linking field. The exact procedure for making this varies depending on the domain’s registrar, so contact your registrar directly to help you in this regard. Remember that it is possible that the new DNS record to not have an immediate effect) and Blogger Settings, which will be detailed in the next paragraph.
At this time, the DNS servers know to direct people to Google when they want to see your blog, so Google has to ensure that it associates your blog properly with your domain. You will do this in the Settings tab, Publish your blog in Blogger. If you’re publishing on Blogspot, you’ll see a link at the top offering to switch to a custom domain. Go ahead and click that link. The setting for the Blogspot address will now be replaced by that for your domain. Fulfill the domain that you registered at the beginning of this process and then save your settings.
If your new domain does not guide you to your personal blog, wait a day or two to make sure that all the DNS servers have been updated. If you still have problems, contact your registrar to make sure you entered the correct DNS settings. Your original Blogspot address will be automatically redirected to the new domain. In this way, all the existing links or bookmarks to your site will still work. You can use this feature with domains (mysite.com) or subdomains (name.mysite.com). However you can not specify subdirectories (mysite.com / blog /) or wildcards (*. mysite.com).
In order to start using a mobile blog, just send a message (which may be an image, text or both) to go@blogger.com and Google will create a blog for you. After sending the message, you will receive a response that will contain the URL of your mobile blog and a symbol with which you can claim your new blog. To claim your blog, just enter the symbol in http://go.blogger.com. If you claim your mobile blog, you will have full access to Blogger.com settings and features, you can join the blog with a Google account and you will have the possibility of merging it with an existing blog.
When you write a post, the bottom of the form is a field called “Labels for this post”. Enter any tags you want, separating them with commas. You can also click on the link “Show all” to display a list of labels used previously. Then, simply click on tags to add them. When you publish the post, the tags will be listed with it. If you click a tag, it will direct you to a page containing only posts with that label. You can also add a list of all your labels in the sidebar of the blog and they will be sorted alphabetically or by the frequency of use.
To place AdSense on your blog, click the Template tab or Issues for your blog. In a blog with the Layouts feature on, add a new item page and select the AdSense option. If using a classic template, select the link “AdSense” in the Template tab. You’ll be able to select an ad size and then customize how to display them in your blog.
To enable a site feed for your blog, first, go to Settings tab, RSS feed. Here, you have only one feature with the help of which you can select the amount of content you want to share. If you choose “Full”, the entire content of each post will be placed in your feed site, and if you choose “short”, it will include only an excerpt from the beginning of each post. “None” deactivates completely the RSS feed of your website.
