MyBloggerTricks

Stay updated with the new Android RSS Feeder Widget

This App has been specially developed for "MBT Readers" by Lubna Essa, an Android developer . We are featuring it here and sharing the download link. If you wish to order similar Android apps, you may contact her anytime at lubna.essa@live.com

Staying updated with the latest happenings is by far the most important thing for every individual in this digital age. Whether you are a programmer or a blogger or a housewife or a businessman or a technician or anything, you read the newspaper, you check the internet just for the sake of staying updated so that you may not stay behind. But wait for a moment here and think "Don’t you want an application that actually lets you stay updated just through home screen of your Android phone?"

If you are a person who uses the PC just to get some daily updates, then let there be something that can save you the hassle of turning on and off your pc all the time to get updates. Just tap on your phone screen and get all you want because it is designed absolutely for you!

Mohammad 8/31/2012 Marketing , Social Media , Webmaster Tools

Publish To Blogger On The Go With Your Cell Phone

Less than a decade ago, the cell phone was rarely, it at all, used. Its primary purpose was to make calls. Now, with the evolution of technology, the cell phone has transformed into a powerful gadget that has become a necessity for everyone. Forget calling, now you can blog with your cell phone! You don't need to have an expensive smartphone for this. Any mobile with a data connection with SMS can be used. Using your phone, you can publish posts to Blogger at any time. This has immense advantages, especially for people who like keeping their friends and family updated, or reporters wanting to break the latest news on their blogs instantly, or travelers who don't often have access to the internet. Such people can publish a new post simply via SMS or MMS or email right from their mobile.

Unknown 8/30/2012 blog , blogger tricks , Blogging tips

Avoid Getting Banned by AdSense Due to Copyrighted Material

One of the biggest disadvantage (among numerous advantages) of the internet is the theft of original content, or piracy in other words. Copyright violation is a big issue, and is not only a danger to the originality of the content online, it is also a threat to the individual content creators, who do all the work while someone else takes the credit, hence offsetting their prospects. Although such violation can not be stopped, it can be discouraged. And Google is taking steps to do just that. Many webmasters use Google AdSense to monetize their sites and generate revenue. So to discourage copyright infringement, Google bans websites that it finds are violating its copyright policies. Here is what you need to know to stay on the good side of AdSense, or else you might find yourself banned in no time.

Unknown 8/29/2012 Blogging ethics , Copyright Violation , Google , Google AdSense

'No Ordinary' Social Sharing & Subscription Widget

This Social subscription widget is made with the aim of promoting and increasing traffic of your blog in various manners. It has the potential to boost your subscribers, Facebook fans and the widget can even make you viral on various social networks. Your readers will also get an opportunity to connect with you on your other networks and all these features are just in one widget in a compact and presentable manner. This widget has almost everything you will need to promote your blog and increase fans and readers. It has a subscribe box, share box, Facebook like box; what else you want? It can replace any other social buttons, widgets or plugins you are using on your blog. Get ready to see the amazing beauty in action which will nurture your blog.

Mohammad 8/28/2012 Guest Posts , Widgets

Increase Page Layout Size by hiding Sidebar in Blogger

If you visit the Search, Advertise , 404 Error page or contact Page of MBT, you will observe that the entire page width expands and the sidebar wrapper which contains all widgets disappears. You will find these static pages and post sections looking like a plain Static HTML webpage with no labels, Author description, Icons and widgets. All that you see is a wide layout with some text and title. This is achieved by overwriting the Stylesheet with custom styles using conditional XML tags to remove certain sections of the blog layout. Sections that can be removed include your blog header, post body, sidebar, footer and what not! Today you will learn an easy way to achieve this and turn your featured pages and posts into a Website Look and not a weblog.

Mohammad 8/27/2012 blogger tricks , CSS and HTMLTricks

How To Add Interactive Transcripts To YouTube Videos

Interactive Transcripts is a cool, relatively new YouTube feature that is designed to enhance your video-viewing experience. You might already be familiar with subtitles for films. They are there to supplement the audio to help viewers better understand what's being said. YouTube now has a feature, Interactive Transcripts, which act just as subtitles, but they are interactive, which means not only can they be played with the video, they can also shown separately and made clickable, so that when you click on a certain piece of text, it will take you to that point in the video where it was said. In this post, we'll talk about how you can create transcripts, and how to add them to your YouTube videos.

Unknown 8/25/2012 Social Media

Keyboard Shortcuts For Popular Social Media Networks

A lot of people use Social Media. It's a great way to stay connected with your friends and family. If you landed on this page through a search engine, or even otherwise, then chances are that you are an active social media user. Some people deal with social media many times a day. For such people, and even others who aren't as avid at social media, it could pay off to learn some keyboard shortcuts. Browsers have shortcut keys, and so do websites. While some people might prefer the mouse, others can browse through their social world more quickly and efficiently with the help of keyboard shortcut keys. Here are the most useful shortcut keys for the three most popular social media networks; Facebook, Twitter and Google plus.

Unknown 8/24/2012 Facebook , Facebook tricks , Google Plus , Google Plus Tricks , Social Media

How to Transfer Blogger To Wordpress?

Whenever, we think about the history of most productive Blogging platform the first word which clicks our mind is either WordPress or Blogger. Still lots of Well-known bloggers are in doldrums whether to select WordPress, or they should try their luck with Blogger. Blogger and WordPress have been competitors since an elongated period but in the meantime WordPress has developed tremendously, in spite of getting introduced before Blogger. Mohammad has covered lots of posts regarding avoiding Blogger to WordPress conversion but one should always know how to do something, so we may continue to make use of the resources. So in this article, we will cover How To Migrate Blogger to WordPress Blog without losing a single SERP Ranking or Page Rank Juice.

Mohammad 8/23/2012 blogger tricks , Guest Posts , wordpress

Optimize URL Parameters For Blogger in Webmaster Tools

You were recently presented with a post on Configuring URL Parameters in webmaster tools but details specific to BlogSpot blogs will be shared today because incorrectly optimizing URLs could make your blog posts and pages stop appearing in Google Search. We must congratulate Google for making it easy for webmasters to more easily control how their websites be crawled unlike Bing which never stops begging to optimize "Query Parameters for Normalization" without even specifying what parameters to ignore!

Mohammad 8/21/2012 SEO , Webmaster Tools

Eid-ul-Fitr 2012 Mubarak To Everyone!

So the much-awaited Eid-ul-Fitr is finally upon us! The Ramadan Kareen 2012 has drawn to a close, marking the end of the 1433rd Ramadan according to the Islamic (Hijri) Calendar. "Eid" in Arabic translates to "Celebration" or "Festivity", while "Fitr" means "Breaking" (the fast). Hence, Muslims from all around the world celebrate the happy ending of the Holy month of Ramadan after 30 days of fasting. They share this joyous occasion with friends and family, and forget their worries and grievances for at least one day so that everyone can join in. Therefore, here at MBT, on behalf of the STC network and its team, Mohammad Mustafa Ahmedzai, Nida Zaidi, and Me, we'd like to wish all our readers a very happy and joyous Eid-ul-Fitr!

Unknown 8/20/2012 Events

Easy Settings For URL Parameters in Webmaster Tools

Google is the world's largest search engine. It crawls millions of webpages everyday. But one problem it faces is duplicate URLs on a website linking to the same content. For instance, the URLs example.com/blog/category/news and example.com/blog/index.php?category=news can both point to the same page, hence creating duplicates, and reducing site efficiency for Google's crawler. In the interest of good SEO, it is important that you optimize your URLs to avoid duplication. To this end, Google Webmaster Tools now gives you a Configure URL Parameters feature, which will help you recommend actions for the GoogleBot crawler to take, so as to increase your site's crawl efficiency. It will also lessen the resource burden on Google that goes into the crawling of your website. In this post, we will show you how to set easy settings for URL Parameters.

Update: Read: Optimize URL Parameters For Blogger

Unknown 8/19/2012 blogger tricks , Blogging tips , Google , SEO

Add AddThis Welcome Bar to Blogger

Blogging isn't just about building traffic. it is also about maintaining it. But for that traffic to be of any use to you, you should a good conversion rate, whereby visitors to your site at least take some action such as following you on Twitter, subscribing for your newsletter, visiting your old posts, and so on. There are many ways to increase your conversion. Here's another one. Add a welcome bar at the top of your website, and include calls to actions, such as sharing your page or liking it. That way, people can have easy access to your pages and links. The bar is provided by AddThis, a large sharing platform, and we have been showing you various sharing options for your blog that they provide. Here, we will show you how to use, and customize this bar.

Unknown 8/18/2012 blog , blogger tricks , Blogging tips , Traffic Tips

MoneyPak: Send Money To Paypal without Bank Account

PayPal is the largest payment gateway in the world, and millions of people are using it to send and receive money. But PayPal needs you to have a credit card, or at least a bank account for you to add money to your PayPal account and then transfer or spend it. If you don't have a bank account or a credit card, then you can still add funds to PayPal using GreenDot MoneyPak. With it, you can either load money to an issued PrePaid card, or add money directly into your PayPal account without getting into the hassle of bank transfers and what not. It is perhaps the only way to add money without a bank account.

Unknown 8/17/2012

The Biggest Lie On The Internet Disclosed - TOS Simplified

It is generally accepted that acknowledging "I have read, and agree to the terms of services..." is the biggest lie on the internet. I don't read them, and you don't read them (most probably). Nobody reads them, and you know it, even if most people won't admit it just to sound smart. Even the companies who write them know it. Well, I don't blame them. The fact of the matter is, most ToS are freakishly long, and heavily laden with legal jargon only lawyers are supposed to understand. Some ToS are just plain ridiculous. Well, now there's a service, TOS-DR, that intends to end this rule of ignorance by bringing some companies' (like Facebook, Twitter, Skype etc) ToS closer to the layman user's level of comprehension.

Unknown 8/16/2012 Copyright Violation , News

Does Website Testing effects site performance in Search Results?

If you own a blog or a website and look forward to earn with it, you need to take care of a lot of technicalities other than attracting traffic and producing quality content, which are also essential for a consistent earning. It has been seen that the main center of attention for bloggers is to ensure whether their content is available to their potential users on search engines or not, which is undoubtedly justified. To ensure that what you are sharing with your potential readers is actually been offered to them while they are searching about it on search engines, website testing is a good practice. According to the latest release, Google has encouraged website testing and found answering several questions about it.
We will discuss Google recommendations in latter part of the post, but for now, let us see what Website testing is all about!

Nida Zaidi 8/15/2012 Google , SEO , Webmaster Tools

Yahoo Axis: A Complete New Web Browser

Internet browsers have recently gained considerable limelight as the world is becoming online. Now when physical businesses are turning into the virtual ones and new online methods to make money are productive enough to facilitate the talent across the globe, the competition among the internet browsers is inevitable. We saw that gradually yahoo maintained its pace and somehow has overpowered hotmail when it comes to search engines, it was expected that yahoo will soon come up with its own internet browser as MSN enjoys internet Explorer (thanks to Microsoft) , and the youngest competitor Google that came up with Google Chrome. Realizing the importance of launching a new browser with its tag, Yahoo released its browser, Yahoo! Axis, few months back.

Nida Zaidi 8/14/2012 Google

Correct way to Optimize Permalinks in Blogger

With the introduction of Custom permalinks in blogger, you now have a great opportunity to utilize this new feature to improve the usability, aesthetics and forward-compatibility of your links. It also helps you to target your rich keywords. I wrote a detailed tutorial when Custom Permalinks were first introduced in Blogger draft on June 25th 2012. Permalinks can now be seen on blogger.com also. We highlighted several areas of this feature by discussing Character limit, what Characters are accepted, good and bad permalink practices but after observing the permalink keyword structure in majority of blogs, I felt the necessity to explain its importance more because newbies are really not using it the correct way in order to drive traffic from Search engines. Just like a title tag, permalinks are also now a victim of keyword stuffing. The Character limit for a permalink is different for both Google, Bing and Yahoo. Understanding this restriction is what we will learn today. You will also learn today why You should always follow Mashable but not always TechCrunch when you talk of SEO.

Mohammad 8/13/2012 SEO , Webmaster Tools

Migrate Feedburner Subscribers From Blogger To Wordpress

If you have made up your mind to migrate your Google blog to wordpress safely then redirecting your RSS subscribers and Email subscribers to Wordpress is a must thing to do. You will need to migrate only if you have changed your domain or moved your content to a new location or server. Since in case of blogger to self-hosted wordpress migration, domain remains the same therefore we will only need to redirect the Feed. Moving your bulk of readers from one platform to another is linked with your blog Feed address. BlogSpot blogs support both RSS and atom Feeds whilst wordpress supports RSS web Feeds alone (though you can use plugins to switch to atom). What we will learn today is to simply change the FEED address and let your readers to receive email updates via your new blogging platform. This method will shift your syndication from one network to another without losing a single subscriber. The steps are clearly demonstrated to make your job easy. Lets get things moving!

Mohammad 8/11/2012 blogger tricks , Webmaster Tools , wordpress

Use Payza to Send and Receive Money Online in Pakistan and India

It is true that today, the best business to start your career with is the online business. Whether its blogging or freelancing, you can always expect a quick return by investing simply nothing-but-time. However, all the hopes come to an end when you realize that your country doesn’t support PayPal. Take an example of freelancing; you might have noticed many times that having a Pay Pal account is mentioned as a requirement in the freelance offers. Even I have lost 5 good offers just because of not having one. People have been looking for some good alternates to PayPal and here is a new alternative!

Nida Zaidi 8/10/2012 Make Money Online

How You Can Pay Facebook to Promote Your Posts?

Facebook has become a major source of promoting business as well as individuals when it comes to marketing. The Highlight of the Facebook that let your friends view your Facebook activities, status updates and interactions that appear in their news feed has been a tool that is more than just a change. Now, it is one of those tactics of the social networking website through which it earns its bucks from its 900 million users round the globe. Those updates that are significant and you want then to standout, you need to pay Facebook some amount to advertise it for you. This method has been highly effective in raising funds, gathering people for a cause, etc. Let us see, what it is all about!

Nida Zaidi 8/09/2012 Facebook

5 Must Follow Principles for Bloggers

With the hype that has been created in the world about the best online ways to make money, Blogging comes on the top. There is no doubt about the power of blogging at this time of stage, yet there are some ethical principles that a blogger must dissolve in his career and drink to maintain his business smoothly. What happens is once the blogs start generating revenue, bloggers find themselves, somewhere out of the world, often neglecting the fact that it was their readers who contributed in taking the blogs to such successes. In order to grasp your customer’s attention consistently, Here are five simple principles to keep your readers happily bonded with your blog and enjoy making money online!

Nida Zaidi 8/08/2012 Blogging ethics , Blogging tips

How to Make Your Website Multi-Culturally Accessible?

Starting an online business with a blog or a website demands more power at all levels as you have the entire world to counter in order to survive. It is essential to understand that your Online business is operational for the visitors who belong to different regions, widely spread across the globe, having one thing in common and that is, the facility of accessing the internet world. Think about targeting a greater audience rather than establishing your business for a particular group. It is true, that English is used as the major language when it comes to online communications, however, the fact cannot be neglected that there are 34 languages existing on the internet , contributing to two-third of the web surfers worldwide. Interesting, isn’t it?

Now, to ensure that you become a universal source to be visited, you need to take into account the following factors so that the probability of making more money by attracting a large audience increases.

Nida Zaidi 8/07/2012 Blogging tips , Traffic Tips

6 Myths about Ad-Blocking Answered By Google Adsense

Whether to block an Ad on your site or not, has always been in a jeopardy, especially when you are earning only with your Google Adsense. What we have observed is bloggers make their own strategies playing with the Ads that are available via Google Adsense, which sometimes work, but most of the time gives a real tough time in generating consistent revenue.

Google Adsense was keen enough to notice this confusion persisting among the bloggers and hence recently Google has answered the most common myths that are related to ad-blocking. The fact that you, being an owner of your blog, have got all the rights to decide which ad to show and which to block, Here are some of the most common myths and the realities revealed by Google itself, that would definitely help you out in understanding more about Ad-blocking.

Nida Zaidi 8/06/2012 Google , Google AdSense

5 Best Ways Bloggers Can Do Keyword Research

Your online Money Making business highly depends upon your understanding about two things in particular, first being the most productive domain to start with, and next to it is an effective Keyword research. Keywords are the most powerful ingredient of your Search Engine Optimization which drives traffic to your site from the search results. However, attracting a considerable traffic to your site/blog is directly related to your knowledge about the keywords utility. This means that you need to think from your potential visitor’s point of view that what he might be looking for. Effective keyword research does not only drive traffic, in fact beside increasing your followers, it helps boosting your overall site statistics, while on the other hand, generating huge revenue.

Nida Zaidi 8/05/2012 SEO , Traffic Tips

Bitly has a New Realtime Search Engine For You!

As many of you might already know, Bitly is the largest Link Shortening service. In fact, it is the one responsible for ushering the world into the concept of short links four years ago. Since then, it has been extensively been used to replace long URLs into a collection of just a few characters, which can be easily shared on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. It came is handy especially for twitter, where there is a character limit on tweets. Well now, after almost four years, Bitly has finally collected enough data to create a whole new search engine of its own! Bitly calls it "Real-time", and describes it as an "Attention Ranking" Search Engine. Although still in its beta phase, it has been rolled out to the public. It can be accessed at http://rt.ly.

Unknown 8/04/2012 News , Social Media

Google PageRank Update August 2012

Well there comes just a new update on Google's Page popularity algo on 2nd August 2012. The PageRank toolbar has started showing new ranks for all websites worldwide. The update this time seems a major one and there could be no further expectation of any new changes within the next 24 hours. The last update was on May 3rd and third last was on February 6th. The duration gap has now become constant. Google rolls out these updates quarterly, after every three months. The next update and last update of this year is expected anytime between November 1-10 2012. PageRank as you all know is a numerical weighting scale between 0-10. Websites that are recommended by related niches via backlinks rank higher on PR scale and get the benefit of faster crawl and index rate. Blogs with higher PR are crawled faster compared to those with lower PageRank. For example a PR 7 webpage is crawled several times per minute compared to a PR 5 page that is crawled once every minute. The faster the robot crawls your pages the greater the chances for you to drive organic traffic from Google and build readership.

Mohammad 8/03/2012 News , SEO

How Can Weak Eyesight Destroy Your Blogging Career?

Being Neutral in everything you do is the primary rule to lead a happy, peaceful and contented life. However, when it comes to making money, there are hardly any rules to be followed to ensure a healthy routine. If you are a blogger or a freelancer, or an entrepreneur, making money online, then one thing you have common with all others in your niche, is your eye exposure to the Screen of your Machine. Although the idea of earning from your living room is always an appealing one, but what you really risk is your eye! It is no wonder that the online money making business causing vision weaknesses and in return, weak eyesight can affect your productivity, further bringing a downfall in your career.

If You Work for a really long duration on your machines daily, then you need to have a keen look on the unfolding aspects, that we will share in this post.

Nida Zaidi 8/02/2012 Blogging ethics

Customize Labels Cloud in Blogger

Back in the year 2008 when Blogger.com was moving through several update phases, third party developers would often take the golden opportunity of creating widgets for BlogSpot blogs but as soon as Google rolled out massive changes to their online services, several official widgets popped out which load fast and perform well because the scripts are served by Blogger servers. Page List and label cloud/list enabled designers to create dynamic menus. Since the stylesheet was made accessible. therefore we all got a chance to play with these widgets and transform them completely in look and appearance. We shared tutorials first time on how to create dynamic menus with page list and an automatic menu with label list and today we would share a simple stylesheet that will transform the labels cloud into organized small blocks that rotate on mouse over. I must ensure you that the styles are perfectly compatible in all major browsers including IE8+.

DEMO: Look at the label cloud on the sidebar of this blog

This is how labels look in cloud display:

labels widget blogger

This is how it will look after you apply the new style.

label cloud widget

How it works?

Each label link is nested inside a span tag followed by a class named label-size. If the font-size is not specified the widget changes font-size of each label according to its post-count. Therefore showing big and small clouds. Introducing custom styles would over-ride the exiting styles thus changing the entire look.

Turn Random Cloud display into Blocks

The code below can be customized in several ways to create exciting label designs. You can also add background images to them.
Follow these easy steps:

Go to Blogger > Settings> Layouts
Click add a gadget and choose Labels
Inside the settings make sure to choose the cloud display. You may set other options as per your requirement. See the screenshot below as example

Please choose to display at most 25 labels. Too much labels on homepage look awkward. Showcase your best categories only.

Read: What are blog labels or categories?

       4.    Now save the widget and go to settings > Template
       5.     Backup your template
       6.     Click Edit html > Proceed and search for this

]]></b:skin>

7. Just above it paste the following CSS code:

/*-----Custom Labels Cloud widget by www.MyBloggerTricks.com----*/
.label-size{
margin:0 2px 6px 0;
padding: 3px;
text-transform: uppercase;
border: solid 1px #C6C6C6;
border-radius: 3px;
float:left;
text-decoration:none;
font-size:10px;
color:#666;
}

.label-size:hover {
border:1px solid #6BB5FF;
text-decoration: none;
-moz-transition: all 0.5s ease-out;
-o-transition: all 0.5s ease-out;
-webkit-transition: all 0.5s ease-out;
-ms-transition: all 0.5s ease-out;
transition: all 0.5s ease-out;
-moz-transform: rotate(7deg);
-o-transform: rotate(7deg);
-webkit-transform: rotate(7deg);
-ms-transform: rotate(7deg);
transform: rotate(7deg);
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Matrix(
M11=0.9961946980917455, M12=-0.08715574274765817, M21=0.08715574274765817, M22=0.9961946980917455, sizingMethod='auto expand');
zoom: 1;
}

.label-size a {
text-transform: uppercase;
float:left;
text-decoration: none;
}
.label-size a:hover {
text-decoration: none;
}

8. Save your template
9. All done!
Visit your blogs and see the labels completely transformed to small neatly crafted rectangular boxes. If in case you want the label boxes to be of random sizes depending on the post-count then simply delete font-size:10px; from the above code.

Need help?

I am sure the installation of this tweak wont trouble you a lot, if in case you needed help in changing the font colors on active, hover and visited modes then let me know. By default the visited link will turn black, unlinked and would also not rotate. Click any of your label links and see that page to check this effect.
I will be posting normal tutorials on plugins and widgets and I have got some new SEO tweaks for blogger blogs that would further improve your SERP ranking. I am sure you would love to try them out. Peace and blessings pals :)

Mohammad 8/01/2012 blogger tricks , Widgets

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