How to Add Image Slideshow To Your Blogger or Website

If you host your blog or website on blogger and have content which requires lots of images to be included you can do so by using inbuilt feature of blogger. This method is very easy to setup and requires minimum technical skills.

For this your first need to save all the relevant images by creating an album on popular image hosting sites such as Picasaweb (http://picasaweb.google.com/ ), Flicker (http://www.flickr.com/ ) or any other site which offers public feed for your album. Once the images are uploaded share this album public permissions. You have to make this album public because private albums can not be used in slideshow by this method.

Now log on to your blogger account. Select your blog/ website, Go to layout and click on “Add a gadget”.

  

Now select “Slideshow” gadget: 

• Input the details such as title of slideshow, Source (Picasaweb, Flicker, any other)
• Click on Option- Album
• Input your picture hosting account username
• Select the “public album name” & other details to customize your slideshow (speed etc.)
• Save the gadget settings and you are done.

In the main layout settings, place the gadget at the position you want your slideshow to run.

How to Setup “You Might Also Like” Post Suggestions for Your Blog or Website

Giving your website visitors suggestions about what they can read next on your website could be a good idea in increasing your website’s likeability. This would help in terms of increasing the time spent on your website, it will decrease the bounce rate (the % of visitors exiting your page after first visit) and overall it can help in increasing the likelihood of returning visits in the future if you have vast content for your web audience.

If you are using Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad or any other hosting method for to host your website or blog, it is quite simple. You can use this widget which is called LinkWithin (Click here: http://www.linkwithin.com/learn?ref=widget ). 

The setup is pretty fast and neat! You simply go to the link fill your email address, blog link, platform (Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad or any other), choose no. of posts you want to suggest for visitors (3, 4 or 5) and simply click on Get Widget- the self guiding install guide will setup this widget for your website in minutes.

Once you have successfully installed it, it will start showing a list of related posts your visitors might be interested at the end of the post. This is a free service and works like charm in helping visitors navigate on your website effectively. 

How to Host Your Custom Domain on Blogger.com

Do you want to setup your custom domain for hosting on blogger? There are lots of benefits of hosting your domain name directly on blogger. This will save you from all the trouble of hosting, technical knowledge required to run your website. You can create dynamic pages with clicks and run your own www.yourdomainname.com with little help and great tools and inbuilt applications available with blogger. 

I am giving step by step instruction for doing so ahead. You first need to have a www.blogger.com account. Register and create new blog. 

This can be done in 2 steps, one to change settings at your domain name control panel and then changing settings of your blogger blog.
 

First you need to login to the control panel of your domain registrar. Go to change advanced technical settings/ settings (depending on your web domain registrar)

Change these 2 settings here: 

CNAME

·        In text box change the domain detail next to your domain name to www and points to field enter ghs.google.com as host name (See snapshot below)

·        Google will ask you to enter some specific CName value while you are changing blogger settings later (repeat same steps as above then as well)

A-Record

·        Though this is optional if you need to consider all domain forwarding for your domain without www you should change the A record setting as below:

·        Write * in first field and change “points to” 216.239.32.21. You have to create 4 A records with below IPs

·        216.239.32.21
216.239.34.21
216.239.36.21
216.239.38.21

Add these 4 A-Records.

Wait for propagation which might take upto 24 hours (you can try further steps to see if it is done.) You won’t be able to change settings in blogger unless it is complete.

Now you need to change basic settings for your blog on blogger.com

·        Logon to your blogger account:

·        Go to Settings> Basic> Blog Address

·        Change settings under “Advanced Settings”

·        Enter your domain name with “www”, as you will not be able to put your naked domain to host on blogger.

·        Resolve any CNAME error (if blogger asks you to create another CNAME entry, do as instructed above)

·        Click on “Redirect your yourdomainname to www.yourdomainname.

And you are all done. You can comment issues with your setup here, I will try to help you in case of any problems.

Web resource:

https://support.google.com/blogger/troubleshooter/1233381?hl=en#ts=1234251,1734115