How To Have A Private Or Invitation Only Blog On Blogger

When you set up your blog on Blogger the default setting is to display your blog to the world and be displayed in search engine results and most people are looking to build a following so they leave the settings as they are.But a blog can be a great tool for community's, groups and family to stay connected online and these are blogs you may not want shared with the entire Internet.Not a problem a few quick changes in the settings can block search engines from crawling your Blog and stop anyone you have not personally invited by Email from seeing your blog.

Making Your Blog Private

Step 1. When in your blogger dashboard click the "settings" option for the blog you wish to make private.

Step 2. Now Click Permissions.

You have two options here :

1. You can choose who you want allow to view your blog by clicking "only people i choose"
Then just add the email addresses of who you permit, no one else will be able to view the blog.

2.You also have the option to allow others to write posts in your blog, just add the emails as above and they can log in and write to your blog.

Once you invite an author and they accept you can also grant them 'Admin Privelages' by following the 'Settings' > 'Permissions' route - The invite must be accepted before you grant Admin Privileges.

Now that author can also invite people to your blog, this is a great way to make your blog a community.

Block Search Engines And Blog Lists

In your basic settings you have the option to stop search engines crawling your blog and stop Blogger from adding your blog to their listings - just click settings and scroll to :

'Add your blog to our listings ? ' Select No
'Let search engines find your blog ?' Select No

Make sure to scroll to the foot of the page and save your settings.

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How To Add A Small Search Box To Your Blog

Its easy to add a search box for your readers to search your blog.

On blogger we have the option to add a google search to our blog.
I think the google search box is too big and un-editable so i added my own small search box.

This search is just as effective and very easy to add to your blog and you can make it appear to suit your blogs style and colors.

This is the search box:

Search Okkomadewaltricks



To place this on your blog you just gotta copy the code below and replace by URL with yours and you have the option to make some changes to its appearance.

Below is the exact code that makes up my search box:

<form id="searchthis" action="  http://www.okkomadewal.com/search " style="display:inline;" method="get"><br /><strong>Search Okkomadewaltrick<br/></strong><br /><input id="b-query" maxlength="255" value=" Type and search..." name="q" size="20" type="text"><br /><input id="b-searchbtn" src=" http://i631.photobucket.com/albums/uu40/paulcrowe/searchbuttonsbx.jpg" type="image" align="top"><br /></form>

Only one part of this code must be edited before adding it to your blog that is the URL :

1.The URL :  http://www.okkomadewal.com/search  - change this to your blogs address : http://www.yourblogaddress.com/search

Your search box is now ready and will search Your blog OR you have the option to make three more changes to personalise your search box .

We Are Nearly Finished  If you need more help or have an opinion or suggestion, Please leave a comment Below.

2.The text : Search Spice Your Blog- is the text that appears above your search box you can change it to anything you like or leave blank to have no text.

3.The text : Type and search... - is the text that appears inside the search box and can be changed or left blank for no text inside the box.

4.The URL : http://i631.photobucket.com/albums/uu40/paulcrowe/searchbuttonsbx.jpg - is the URL of the image that appears below the search box.This can be changed (checkPhotobucket.com for some small search icons) or it can be removed to have no image.

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How Back Up Your Blogger Template With Hard Drive Or Notepad

Within this blog we talk a lot about making changes to your template by editing the html that makes it up.Something i quickly realised is that changes don't always work first time so its vital to be able to revert back to the template before you made changes.

I do this in one of two ways :


1.Save to hard drive.

Simply click the "Download full template" option above the html area.
You will get a small window pop up,click "save" then save it (just save it to documents).

Then if your not happy with the changes you made instead of having to rummage through all the code again to discard the changes just click the browse button above your template html select the template as you just saved it upload and your back as you were.

2.Save to Notepad

Every computer has a notepad build in here's how to access it :

1.Click start menu (Bottom left of your screen)
2.From your start menu click all programmes
3.You get another menu just click accessories
4. In the accessories menu choose notepad.

Copy the code all from your template and paste it into notepad.Then If the changes you make to your template don't suit simply swap the code you saved to notepad back into the html area and save.

Important - Make Sure To Tick The 'Expand Widget Templates Box' Before You Copy The Code And Tick It Again Before Putting Code Back 

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How To Make A Clickable Picture Link

How to make a picture (an image, photo or screenshot) clickable, that is, become a hyperlink.

The first thing is you must get the picture up on the web. This you can do by uploading toPhotobucket.

You can choose one of the billions pictures they have or if you have an account or open an account (its free) you can upload an image.


Once you upload or select an image you will get code for the image in four formats you must select HTML.

So for this we will use this image.



When you click this image it will lead you to Photobucket.com.
So we gotta change the direction.

This is the Html for this picture its the same as the code you use sending any pictre comments in Myspace etc...

We are interested in the address http:// photobucket.com.

<a href="http://photobucket.com" target="_blank"><img src="http://i631.photobucket.com/albums/uu40/paulcrowe/info.jpg" border="0" alt="Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket" /></a>

The address determines were the picture leads to when clicked.
So we simply change it to were we want the picture to lead to.

In This case we will change it to http:// spiceyourblog.info :

<a href="http://spiceyourblog.info" target="_blank"><img src="http://i631.photobucket.com/albums/uu40/paulcrowe/info.jpg" border="0" alt="Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket" /></a>

By changing the address the picture now leads to this site.
Easy.

But were not finished yet take your cursor and put it over the picture

You will see a line of text appear "Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket" (does not work in all browsers)
We can also change this it gives a discription of the image and also helps get your image indexed in Google image searches.

We Are Nearly Finished - First A Quick Remunder: If you need more help or have an opinion or suggestion, Please leave a comment Belo

The code we are interested in here is "Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket".

<a href="http://spiceyourblog.info" target="_blank"><img src="http://i631.photobucket.com/albums/uu40/paulcrowe/info.jpg" border="0" alt="Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket" /></a>

We simply change this text to whatever we want it to say like this :

<a href="http://spiceyourblog.info" target="_blank"><img src="http://i631.photobucket.com/albums/uu40/paulcrowe/info.jpg" border="0" alt="Type the text you want here" /></a>

Now the text will show "Type the text you want here"

Try it out :



You now have a simple professional hyperlink that leads to anywhere you choose.

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How To Make An Easy Clickable Link

In this post i will show you how to make a text link or hyperlink.

Making the link is very simple.

This is how you would create a link directing to this site:

<a href=" http://okkomadewaltricks.blogspot.com "> Click Here</a>


And this is how it looks:

Click Here

To make the link direct to your site or any web page you want all you have to do is replace my link (the bit in red) with your link.

<a href="Replace this with your link">Here</a>

You may also change the text that shows.

So instead of "Click Here" you could have :

<a href=" http://okkomadewaltricks.blogspot.com ">abcdefghij</a>

Which appears as so:

abcdefghij

This is just a simple html text link for more help and a more indept look at creating links check out w3Schools.

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How To Make A Youtube Video Auto Start Or Auto Play

This is very easy to do and also a very common question.When you place a YouTube video on your blog the default setting is set for the video not to start unless play is clicked.If you would like the video to start automatically when someone arrives on your page you just need to add a simple piece of code.

Make A YouTube Video Auotplay

 YouTube have a newer embedd code and an old code i will cover both.You can see in both codes were i have added &autoplay=1

- The old YouTube code

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vK9_rU37IbE&autoplay=1"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vK9_rU37IbE&autoplay=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

- The New YouTube Code

<iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/vK9_rU37IbE&autoplay=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

With the auto play code added your video will now start automatically.

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How To Totally Remove The Blogger Navbar Or Top Menubar

The blogger navbar is standard on all blogger templates.Some don't mind it personally i don't like it.Removing it is easier than you might think.In fact i have this Blogger tip down to three easy steps for you.

Remove The Blogger Navbar

Step 1. In your Blogger dashboard click Design > Edit Html.

2.Copy the code below :

#navbar-iframe { display: none !important;}

3.Place it in your blogs html below the template details (found very close to the top of you html) and just above /* Variable definitions as displayed below:

-----------------------------------------------
Blogger Template Style
Name: Minima Stretch
Designer: Douglas Bowman / Darren Delaye
URL: www.stopdesign.com
Date: 26 Feb 2004
----------------------------------------------- */

#navbar-iframe { display: none !important;} <---- Just Below Template Details



/* Variable definitions
====================

If you don't want to completely remove the navbar you can make it into a 'Hover Effect' so it will only appear when you place your cursor over the navbar area :

Make a hover effect navbar

Victory Teachers Blog - Asked in the comments : "If i hide this tool bar - how do i then access the edit buttons?"

Great question, What i use is a link in the footer to my dashboard.

Once your logged in to your account any link to the Blogger homepage will bring you to your homepage.

So just add this code to your sidebar or footer :

<a href="http://www.blogger.com" target="_blank">Blogger</a>

Now you can click this to get to your dashboard.

You can also add a link to your 'Create a post' page and 'Layout Page'.

In your dashboard click 'New Post' then copy the URL address in the address bar at the top of your screen :

Now put that URL into a link as shown below :

<a href="PUT-URL-HERE">New Post</a>

Replace PUT-URL-HERE with the URL you copied from your new post page.

You can do the same for your layout page, settings page or any page.Don worry about putting links to your pages on your profile only people logged into your account will be able to access them.

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How To Get A Feedburner Rss Feed For Your Blog

One of the first things you should do when you start Blogging is set up a Rss feed..All blogs no matter what platform have a default feed, for Blogger the default feed is

www.Yourblog.Blogspot.com/feed/post/default

But the Google Owned Feedburner offers so much more and don't worry it is very easy to set up.

Feedburner offer so many extras and as you build your blog you will notice so many areas that Feedburner can optimize your blog, we will also go into how feed burner give you the option to provide a 'Subscribe by Email' as you see on most blogs and also you can add AdSense units to your feeds.

I covered Rss feeds and how to use them in detail in a previous post Click Here to check it out.

Lets get your Feedburner Feed

As Feed burner is owned by Google you can log in with your google account details.
(same as for Blogger ,GMail ,You tube etc..).

Step 1. Go to www.Feedburner.com log in or create an account if you don't already have a google account.

Step 2. You will now come to this page:

Now just enter your blog URL in the space provided :

Example :

http://www.yourblog.blogspot.com

If you have a custom domain :

http://www.yourblog.com

Step 3. Your feed will be created and feed burner will take you through a few steps to get you started, don't panic and think you need to set up everything now as you can go back and make changes.

The one thing you need to set up is the address of your feed, this is similar as choosing the address of your blog and it is best to use your blog address or name.

Your feed URL will be :

http://feeds.feedburner.com/YouPickThis

Mine is :

http://feeds.feedburner.com/spiceupyourblog

Once you feed is ready take some time to look through the options in the menu to: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize and Monetize your new Rss feed.

You can now also change your blogger settings to use your new rss feed as default.

In your dashboard click 'Settings'--> 'Site feed' for your blog to find this option.

Email Subscriptions

You can allow visitors to your blog subscribe by Email.To activate this option you need to go to your Feedburner account and on the homepage click on your feed title.

This will bring you to the Manage feed area, in the top menu click 'Publicize"

In the side menu click Email subscriptions.

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