The Tech Zone - Blogger Hints and Tips

Over in the Blogger Support Forums we're seeing more and more reports from users complaining about unwanted ads and links appearing on their Blogs. This article will help explain why this is happening and how you can fix it.

Update: 19th November We've just updated the Theme and CSS as Blogger changed a few things. We've also improved hopefully the colours as well as now making the action bar fixed in place as well. Ever since Google/Blogger updated their User Interface it has been surrounded in controversy by users who either "Love it" and Users who "Hate it". Users are typically bemoaning the large amount of white space, bland colours, hard to read text etc. Personally I'm somewhere in the middle. However I do find some of the cosmetics pretty poor like other users inc white space, excessive padding, color scheme etc. I decided rather than moaning about it to try and fix some of these myself and I'm pretty happy with the results so far. Here is what my Dashboard looked like before my changes

How to purchase a custom domain through Blogger.

We see a number of questions by users in the Blogger Support Forums about how do they remove a Custom Domain that they had setup for their blog. It's very easy to switch back to your old blogspot address. Old Interface If you are still using the Old Interface, log onto your blog and go to the Settings, Publishing page. Then click on the Switch to blogspot.com link. New Interface In the New Interface you go to Settings, Basic and click the "X" next to the domain name to remove it.

Late on Friday Blogger introduced, via their Google+ Page , a new and improved searching function for users with Dynamic Views. See this short video that explains how it works.

As Bloggers it's always great to get feedback from your readers and one of the best and most fun ways is to add polls to your blog posts or sidebar. Now if you have ever tried Bloggers own polls you will soon realise there are some issues. 1) Polls are not easily inserted into Posts 2) Polls sometimes mysteriously "lose" votes 3) It's hard to style and customise how you polls look 4) You cannot add images to poll options 5) Easy to cheat the polls by cookie clearing and repeat votes. ... ... and probably a whole lot of other reasons. Now, if you are serious about polls and want a robust, reliable, configurable and fun way to poll your readers then this tutorial is for you. We will show you how to add polls from Polldaddy to either your Blog Posts or Sidebar.

Have you ever wanted to get Feedback from your readers in a structured manor but did not want to use your comments form? Good, then read on as we take you on a very simple tutorial to add a Form to your site/blog post that allows you to collect the responses from your readers. For this tutorial we'll be creating a simple Contact Form but you can create/capture whatever information you like in your form. First we have to create the Form. To do this we're going to use Google Docs/Drive. 1) Head on over to https://docs.google.com and click the Create button followed by Form.