Custom-search-engine adds an "overlay" results layout

This quick-tip is about a new overlay results format which Google Custom Search Engines have just introduced - and which looks like it will be their new standard. 

Custom Search Engines have announced a new layout - which appears to have become their new standard option.

Search-engine creation is much the same as it was, but at the end you only get one piece of code to install, and it can just go in the place where you want it (no more messing with editing the <header> in your template).

The search results page is shown as an overlay on top of your regular page.  As always with custom-search-engines, there are ads-by-Google at the top of the page, and if you have already become an AdSense publisher you can use your custom-search-engine to share the revenue.

The big question is - will this new layout approach work in Blogger?    If I was writing an article, I'd test it out somewhere else first, and have some advice about the options, likely problems etc.   But since this is only a quick-tip, this post is my research!   Below, you should see a search-engine, which is set up to search inside Blogger-HAT.   Search for something in it, and you will hopefully see how the overlay search results work.    (If not, I'll come back and change this post as soon as I know more about the problem and how to solve it.)

See an example of custom-search-engine overlay results format

Try it out here:

Is this layout better?

If the layout works, my next decision is whether I should switch the overall Blogger-Helper-Search tool over to use it.

 What do you think?   Like the overlay search results approach, or hate it?

A quick way to keep an eye on what is posted to interesting YouTube channels

This quick-tip is about subscribing to a YouTube channel using an RSS feed-reader, like Google Reader

Most bloggers know about other blogs and websites in their niche that they want to keep an eye on, to either know what's going on, or as inspiration for their own posts.

Previously I've explained that RSS was invented to make this simpler: you can get a summary of changes on all interesting websites in the one place (called a feed-reader), rather than having to regularly visit each site individually.

Video is increasingly popular: many bloggers are putting videos in their posts or their posts into videos, and some have even abandoned their blogs and are only publishing new content to a YouTube channel.

I've just found that it's very easy to subscribe to a YouTube user or channel in RSS / Google reader, meaning you can see a list of new videos from you reader, without having to go to the channel in YouTube.

Follow these steps:

• Find the channel or person you want to subscribe to in YouTube

• Right-click on their name or icon, and copy the URL / web-address / link location (the precise name depends on the browser you are using - you want the place that clicking the link takes you to, not the location of the image-file used to make the link)

• Go into your feed-reader, and subscribe to that link (in Google Reader, this is done using a red button near top left corner of the screen labelled "subscribe" - just click it, paste in the link and click the Add button).

The link will be something like  

http://www.youtube.com/user/MariahIsTheQueen  or http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX9_dIohJBxlizx14AozTng

If it has something else after the name (eg   ?feature=watch), then delete that part before you subscribe  you just need a link saying whether it points to a user or channel, and the name of that user channel.

Example of subscribing to a channel about rocket-science in YouTube

Stop Blogger offering to share your posts to Google+

This article describes Blogger's share-to-Google+ feature, and shows how to stop Blogger offering to share to your Google + circles every time you publish a new post, and what you cannot (yet) do with the feature.

Automatically updating Google + from your blog

If you have linked your blogger-account to your Google+ profile, then by default you are shown a pre-filled Google+ share box with details of your post in it, every time that you publish a post, including times when you edit a post that has already been published.

The share box has a snippet and thumbnail picture  based on your post, and section where you can add a comment, remove the description, choose the circle(s) to share it with, and say to also email people who are not in your circles.

You can change the picture associated with the shared post using the arrows (hover over the top left of the suggested picture - the arrows circle through the other available pictures. Or you can remove it using the cross button (hover over the top-right of the suggested picture).

The top right corner shows whether the post is being shared to your personal profile to the the Google+ Page that you previously linked with the blog.

This is one of the easiest ways of sharing your blog posts with any of the social networks: it lets you customise the content of the message and target it carefully, without having to leave Blogger to do so.

Don't bother me: stop Blogger offering to share to Google-plus

If you don't want to see the "share on Google+" option every time post, you can turn the feature off for individual blogs. To do this:

1   Go to the Google + tab.

2   Untick the "Prompt to share after posting" button, currently found underneath your list of Pages

(Unlike some tabs, changes on this tab are automatically saved.)

Why would you want to do this?   After all, if your accounts are linked, then surely you want to share your posts to Google+?

Actually there are a number of reasons why you might want to disable this feature.   Some that I can think of are:

• If you make frequent edits to existing posts it would probably annoy the people in your circles if you shared all of them - and it slows you down, because the share screen takes a few seconds to load every time you publish.

• If you use a private blog to prepare your posts before publishing them - obviously there's no need to share these posts with yourself! 

• You might just want to do the share, but at a later time than the initial post, to spread out the new-post impact.

Even if you've turned off the "offer to share" option, you can still Google+ share individual posts by selecting "share" from underneath the title in the Blogger Dashboard > Posts tab.

Troubleshooting the Google + share option:

You only see this option if when you publish a post, if:

• You have connected any of the blogs owned by your blogger account to Google+

• You have not previously turned it off for this particular blog

• Your blog is not private.
  If you try it on a blog with restricted readership, instead of an error message you are given the not-very-helpful option to share the Blogger sign in screen, like this:

Doing more with the Blogger / Google-Plus share feature

Currently there is no way to:

• Totally automate the share, so it happens without you pressing Ok in the "Share this on ..." box.

• Show the labels from your post in your shared item

• Schedule the share

• Automatically share posts published with mail2Post or which are scheduled to Publish in the future.

• Change whether the post is shared to a selected Google+ page or your personal circles
  This is controlled by a global setting that you can edit on the Blogger Dashbaord > Google + tab, but you cannot alter it on the fly.

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Related Articles:

Post-snippet and post-thumbnail: where do they come from

Linking your blog to the social networks

Prepare Posts in Private, so you can Publish when they're Perfect

How to edit posts that you have already published

Mail2Post: post to your blog without using Blogger

Using Labels to categorize blog-posts

Remove sidebar background in the Travel template

This quick-tip is about removing the coloured section that is in the background in Blogger's Travel template.

Recently, I've been using the Travel template a lot:  it just seems to line things up more sharply on the page.

Today I noticed that there is an option for setting the Sidebar background colour under the Template Designer > Customize > Advanced tool.  However it doesn't seem to work.

Investigating the template shows that as well as this sidebar background colour (which is correctly set by the option above), the template also specifies a background image (ie not a colour) to use in the sidebars.    This isn't removed when the overall background image for the template is removed, and cannot be controlled from the template designer.

But it's simple enough to get rid of it, by following these steps:

1   Edit the template in the usual way.

2   Tick the expand widgets checkbox.

3   Find this code:

background: $(widget.outer.background.color) $(widget.outer.background.gradient) repeat scroll top left;

4   And either replace it with this code, or delete the line entirely.

/*  background: $(widget.outer.background.color) $(widget.outer.background.gradient) repeat scroll top left;  */

The first option just comment its out, meaning you could re-instate it again by removing the /* and  */. But if you are certain that you never want it back, just delete the whole line instead.

Depending on the sidebar layout chosen, there may be one or more places where the background image is.   Make sure that you do all of them that you want the background removed from.

Also, if you later choose a different layout, you make need to remove the background image again even though you haven't actually changed templates.