Use Your Own Photo For Your Blog’s Background

This post was taken directly from original post.

After we launched the Blogger Template Designer, one of the most requested features was the ability to upload your own background image. Though we provide hundreds of professional stock photos from iStockPhoto, we know many of you are serious photo buffs and would like to use your own beautiful photo as your blog’s background image.
And now you can! Go to Design | Template Designer | Background, click on Background Image, and you’ll notice a new “Upload image” option, which will allow you to select and upload your image.

For images that fill the entire background, we recommend using a resolution of 1800 pixels wide and 1600 pixels high, and file size less than 200KB to minimize the loading time of your blog pages. We support JPEG, GIF, and PNG format images.
After uploading a photo, you will see additional options that are not available for the built-in images: Alignment, Repeat, and Scroll options.

• Alignment: You can adjust horizontal (left, center, right) and vertical (top and bottom) alignment of your background image.
• Repeat (Tile): If you have a small image, you can have it repeat horizontally and/or vertically to fill the page. Otherwise, we recommend that you choose a page background color that blends in with your background image.
• Scroll: By default, your image stays in place while readers scroll the page contents. By selecting the “Scroll with page” option, both the background image and page contents scroll together. We recommend that you use an image that blends into your background color or set your image to tile vertically if you choose this option.

This feature is available on Blogger in Draft right now, so please go ahead and check it out! As always, thanks for using Blogger in Draft. We will welcome your comments, and if you have any questions, please send them our way through the Blogger Help forum.

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Easy SEO Tips, Using Alexa + Google Keyword Tool To Increasing Your Traffic

There are so much teory about SEO: determining new domain name, writing great content, building quality backlinks, etc. And one of them is determine best keyword for your blog, content or anything on your blog. You need to know, I'm new comer in SEO. But here I just want to share method that I've been used to determining best keyword for my posts :)
Go to the point, how do I determine best keyword to my blog posts? Simple, I use 2 great websites (maybe can be called tools), Alexa and Google Keyword Tool
There's 2 easy (very easy) steps how to determine best keyword:

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New Google Great Feature Again: Blogger Stats, Analytics In Your Dashboard

Do you using Google Analytics or other third tools to track your blog? If you're using Google Analytics, you're lucky! Now you don't need to visit Google Analytics homepage, because it's inside your dashboard!

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Google said:
"The coolest thing about the new Blogger Stats is that it monitors and analyzes your visitor traffic in near-real-time. You can see which posts are getting the most visits and which sites are sending traffic to your blogright now. For example, if a reader shares one of your blog posts on Twitter and the post is getting lots of clicks, you will see a traffic increase in Blogger Stats almost instantly, with the particular Tweet mentioning yourpost being identified as the traffic source. Of course, traffic data across longer time periods (day/week/month) and all-time historical data are available as well." This is true! We can track every post, so we can know what our blog visitor interested in. It means we can post similar things again, to make "loyality" from our visitor. Besides that, we can determine what periode will be displayed. In general, all of common Google Analytics feature is there!

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How To Hide Blogger Widget Title, Since Blogger Not Allow Us To Exclude That Now

Little change on Blogger Page Elements Editor

Two days ago, I intend to slightly change my Blogger template. I want to change some of the views of the widget by modifying that code. As usual, I use the menu Design → Page Elements to change that.

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After I finished the editing, I intend to save it. But in fact this is what I get:

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This occurs because "title" field is still empty, though it is a required field. As a side note, Blogger does not like this before! We are allowed to not fill the "title" field. It may sound insignificant, but it is really important. Because sometimes we do not need a title for the widget that we will tide. For example, as I experienced it. At that time I just wanted to put my own widget, which is "follow us" widget. Where will I display the widget with the attribute "fixed", which means it has fixed position, although visitors scrolling the page. And I don't need a title for that!
I found this changes two days ago, but I do not know exactly when Blogger making this change.

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How To Add Custom Font To Blogger (Like This Blog Header Font)

Adding Custom Fonts to Blogger can improve the look and feel of your blog. Before getting into font embedding lets know how this works. In your templates you can use any font you want, but these would be properly displayed only if the viewer has those fonts installed on his/her System. Font embedding Techniques allows you to use any font on your Blog and these fonts will be viewable to the viewers even if they don’t have the font installed on their Systems. @font-face is the best Font Embedding technique in my opinion but it wont easily work with externally uploaded fonts unless the server has special Access Control Headers for your blog .(blogger wont allow you to upload the font to it’s servers :) So here are certain simple alternative methods to add custom fonts to your blog. These are listed out in an order of my preference :

1. Google Font API
2. Kernest Font API
3. Cufon JavaScript Font Embedding

1. Google Fonts API.

This is the best and robust method to add custom fonts to your blogger blog. It uses the @font-face technique but you needn’t worry about the backend things. You can see a list of available Fonts at the Google Font Directory . When you select a particular Font, Google will provide you with the Embed Code which looks like

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=FontName' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Copy out this code and you have to modify it by changing > at the end of the code to /> That is you have to change the code to something like

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=FontName' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>

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Blogger In Draft - The Blogger Template Designer

You liked my blog template? Do not think I made it myself, because you can make it now with ease. How do you? Where? The answer is in Blogger!

Blogger In Draft!

Blogger In Draft, a new innovation from Google. Where we can easily customize the template according to which we want to use the tools provided. It's hard to explain, better to direct you to try it and I guarantee will not be disappointed!

How To Use It

Sign in to http://draft.blogger.com, look exactly like http://www.blogger.com with additional features template designer. Of the additional menu that we can customize the template that we use very easily, but with very satisfactory results.

• Fully customizable template - that we can actually change according to our desire
• 15 new, highly-customizable templates - from Google design team, split into four families: Simple, Picture Window, Awesome Inc, and Watermark
• One-, two-, and three-column layouts for each template - with complete control over the size and arrangement of the columns
• Hundreds of background images and patterns from iStockphoto - the leading microstock image marketplace

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How To Verify Blog Submit On Technorati

I just registered my blog at Technorati and find something unique. If it is usually to verify your site ownership using a unique meta tag or uploading certain files, but not on Technorati.At first I was confused, I get an email containing a unique code: GGDN9HC9B5QR but not described how to use that code.
According to the instructions in the email, I headed into my Technorati account pages. I thought would find a column to write down the unique code. Apparently not! Then what?
After searching, I get this official statement:
"...make sure the claim code (also called the claim token) is in a post and is visible in your feed.Technorati relies very heavily on feeds for all of our processing, so make sure we can find the code there. And the code needs to be in a post, there are too many ways to get text onto someone else's blog page, so we require that you demonstrate that you can actually make or edit a post to claim a blog..."
Finally I know how to methods of verification at Technorati is by including a unique code in the post or feed. Very unique method, where the code can be viewed by anyone. And it's means not a unique code anymore.LOL.
I hope this post help you who experienced the same problem with me.

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How To Set Up co.cc Domain At blogger.com

Co.Cc is a free domain service, but with PRO features :

• Absolutely NO ads!
• Full DNS control and domain management!
• Supports for CNAME, A, MX, NS records!
• Support simple URL Forwarding!
• Support Google Apps
• Support for Adsense For Domain

Co.Cc account setting

To be able to use co.cc domain in blogger, you must already have the previous domain name already registered. If you do not already have, please check the availability of the domain that you want in the form below.

Make sure that the domain you want is not already used (Skip this step if you have registered domain that already pointing to ghs.google.com and you can set your Blogger account).
If the domain name you want is available, follow the instructions there. For domain set up, use the Zone Record and complete the setting like the image below.

Host »» "www".
TTL »» leave default.
Type »» choose "CNAME".
Value »» "ghs.google.com".
This setting will register your domain with CNAME pointing to Google.

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Few Tips When Engaging Images On Blogger Posts

See the picture below (taken from a previous post from this blog)

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As you can see, the picture actually follow the previous layout. And followed by a new paragraph that begins with a header. There's an empty space between thesecond paragraph, so the post look neat.

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Not as easy as you see to make a layout like that, at least I have a hard time before finally found the solution. I've take two days to find a solution to make these layouts! Which of course I will share today.Maybe just because I was stupid, but obviously I want to share what I've found here.

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