The Tech Zone - Blogger Hints and Tips

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.

From time to time we may be sent or create a document in Word or PDF or even Powerpoint format that we would like to display on our blog. (It's a common question that comes up a lot in the Blogger Help Forums). This simple and quick guide will take you through the process. So read on...

One of the biggest issues we see on the Blogger Support Forum is that of comments not working. This Troubleshooting guide will hopefully help you debug the issues and get your comments working. The best option, as I wrote about previously, is to use a proper comments system like Disqus ( See Article ). However if you really want to use Blogger Comments then read on.

As bloggers we want to maximise the distribution of our Blogs content to as many people and services as possible. In the past we would have to manually cross post our blogs content to services like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin manually. This is time consuming and lets face it boring. Wouldn't it be great that as soon as we created a post that our content was automatically syndicated out to our Facebook Page, our Twitter account and our Linkedin account. We'll with the help of the excellent and free service from Twitterfeed you can. Read on for a walkthrough on how you can get this setup in a couple of minutes.

One of the best parts of running a blog is interacting with your readers via the comments they leave. Unfortunately the default Blogger commenting system is very basic and does not provide many features that other systems have. I migrated all my blogs over to Disqus and our users love it. We're getting around 5*times the number of comments than we did before and Spam comments is almost non-existent. It's very easy to install into blogger, has great Spam and Moderation options to ban spammers and IP addresses and allows for threaded conversations. It allows people to log in via Twitter, Facebook, Google, or just email/Username or Anonymous.. you choose. A lot of the large blogs/sites around the internet are using Disqus to power their discussions. It fully imports your existing comments as well as keeping them in sync should you ever want to remove Disqus. And best of all it's totally free :) You can see it in action on my blog here http://www.spoilertv.com/2010/1

I'd like to share with you some tips that I personally use when I want to modify my Blogs CSS but find it hard to know which CSS Selectors to use. First you need to be using the Google Chrome Web Browser (it's by far the best browser currently on the market so you should be using it anyway :) ) Now you need to install a very useful Chrome Extension called Stylebot ( Download Link ) This extension allows you to change the CSS of any webpage. I find it useful for removing ads from sites and to change colour schemes etc. However it also has an added side effect in that it allows you to change/test CSS changes on the fly and gives you the CSS that is used. So download and install Stylebot and once installed you should see a little "css" indicator in your address bar. I'll walk you through a simple example on one of my blogs http://darkufo.blogspot.com/ So goto the link above and when it's loaded click the CSS icon in the address bar.

A lot of Bloggers who setup their own Custom Domain often run into trouble by not setting up their DNS settings correctly. You need to make sure you have the following settings EXACTLY as shown below. Either do this yourself in your DNS control panel of the company where your Domain is registered or contact their support and ask them to do it for you. NOTE: Replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain yourdomain.com. A 216.239.32.21 yourdomain.com. A 216.239.34.21 yourdomain.com. A 216.239.36.21 yourdomain.com. A 216.239.38.21 www.yourdomain.com. CNAME ghs.google.com. Once you have made the corrections, try your Custom Domain again by doing the following.