This morning bright and early, Nancy from Connecticut wrote,

I’m still trying to figure out how to put pictures on…I’m technologically challenged!!

So I volunteered to come to the rescue, and here I am!! Let’s dive right in, shall we? I know one should never assume anything when teaching someone how to do something, but I am going to assume, Nancy, that you know how to transfer photos from your camera to your computer (she is an avid photographer and I’m pretty sure she knows how to do this). So, you have the photos on your computer in a file called “My Pictures” or something like that. I am also going to assume that you know how to find them when you want to attach them to an email and send them to a friend or relative. Given these premises, here is how to upload photos to Facebook:

1. Go to Facebook.com and log in with your username and password. You will find yourself on your “Home” tab. If you look at the top left-hand corner of the screen, where your profile picture is, you will see that under the photo there is a menu of options. Here’s what it looks like on my profile and I’m sure yours is very similar.
2. Click on the word “Photos” and it will take you to the next step, where you actually upload the photos. Here is what you will see:

Once you click on “Upload a Photo” you will be taken to the following screen:

Once here, click on “Browse” and it will take you to a screen where you will see the contents of your own computer and you will be able to click around until you find a folder with photos in it. Something like this:

All you have to do here is double-click on the photo you want to add, this screen will close, while the name of the file representing the photo in your computer will appear in the little window next to the “Browse” button. If you click on “Share” the window will close and on your Wall, the public interface of your Facebook profile that all your friends can see, the photo will appear. I uploaded photos for the first time in the past twenty minutes so I could make this article for you, Nancy, so here is what the first photo I uploaded to my Wall looks like:

Now, knowing you, sometimes you might take a funny or lovely picture and just want to share it right away, but at other times you might want to create an album to share, of photos that all “go together.” So go back to step 1 and click on the word “Photos” under your profile picture, and you will see this:

Here, of course, you will click on “Create an Album”, and you will be taken to the following screen:

Write a name for the Album, then the Location where the photos were taken, and then click on the little black arrow to the right of the Privacy tab and choose who can see this album. By default they set it at everyone, which does not meen the whole world, only your friends. If you want to limit this album to only a few of your closest friends, then the window with all your friends will open up and you will click on the ones to include. Click the Share button and you will be taken to the screen where you actually upload the photos themselves, which looks like this:

The tab that is blue is the one that you are in, so here you are in the “Add Photos” tab. Just do what you did for the single photo and you can upload up to 5 photos at the same time. Once you’ve done that click on Upload Photos, at the bottom of the window, and you will have the first five photos of the album. If you want to organize them, just click on the “Organize” tab and you can simply drag the photos around until you are satisfied with the order. If you want to change the info on the album, click on Edit Info and you can rename it and change other things. If you decide that after all those pictures are just too embarrassing, you can delete the whole album by clicking on the “Delete” tab. It will ask you to confirm, so you will have a chance to change your mind.

Once you have an album, all you will have to do is click on the album at any time and you will see above the first picture, which is the “cover” of the album, that there is the option to add more photos. The steps will be just like the ones you have just been through, so I’m sure it won’t be a problem for you to do that.

Please write a comment to this post so I know how you did. If you want to print this article out, just highlight the whole thing and paste it into a Word document and then print it, this way you will be able to have it next to you. I wrote another post in which I recommend that everyone who is technologically challenged have two monitors, this way they can have the post with the instructions on one side and the one where they’re following the instructions on the other. I have two monitors and I can’t imagine going back to one.

Have fun uploading your pictures to Facebook, Nancy, and please let me know if this was useful to you!!!

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Luigia from Italy asks the following question:

How does Amazon acquire the books it sells? In other words, how can I get a book published by an Italian publisher to be sold by Amazon?

There are various ways to sell books on Amazon, but for someone with a book published by a foreign publisher the situation has a few complicating factors. There are two questions we must answer:

1. Is there a North American distributor? And,
2. Who holds the North American rights?

If there is no United States distributor and no holder of American rights to the publication, then you cannot sell the book on Amazon. That is the sad and simple answer.
If this is your situation, you can approach Amazon in Germany, Japan, France, Canada or the U.K.

But if there is an American distributor, someone who has the rights to the publication in the United States, then there are several options, depending on the volume of books one expects to sell. The best option I can see is the Amazon Advantage program. There are detailed instructions on the Amazon site at this link, if you will follow it. The main prerequisites to participate in this program are:

• Having the North American distribution rights;
• Having access to email;
• Having a U.S. bank account;
• Having an ISBN number for the book(s) in question;
• Having a barcode on the book(s).

This was a hard question to answer. It took quite a bit of research. One of the hardest things is that there is pretty much no way to communicate with Amazon in person. I had some questions and I had to just read and read and figure them out myself. There are several other programs, like the Marketplace program, but I think this Advantage program is the best bet, if one has the prerequisites.
I hope this answers your question, Luigia, and good luck!

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The other day I was reading a post on one of my favorite blogs, Problogger, in which Darren Rowse talked about an experience he had when he was younger, at a self-development retreat. The participants were asked to write their own obituary, imagining that they had lived an entire lifetime, and in the obit they were to write down how they wished to be remembered. Then Darren described how what people think of you is what they say when you are not there, and suggested that we bloggers do a similar exercise. Reflect on what we would like others to say about our blog.

This is really just a roundabout way of asking: refocus, take a step back, are you on track, are you still on the path you set out to walk along? WHAT IS YOUR BLOG REALLY ABOUT?

So I thought long and hard, and I realized that what Tech*Tips was really about was helping people learn how to use the Web, the computer, but not just as an end in itself. We all have skills, we all know how to do something, and most of us know how to do more than one thing. But right now many of us, in spite of our skills, are either unemployed or underemployed.

My goal with this blog is to help people use the magnifying power of the Web to put them on the map. Combine your “real life” skills with some online tools and be heard, be seen, be FOUND by people who need you and are looking for what you do.

Hence the move to Life plus Web.

Thanks for following me this far and welcome to all the newcomers. I trust we will go far together!

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My friend Mario from Heerlen in the Netherlands asked me this question:

I know that the meta tag “nofollow” tells a search robot not to follow a link and prevents outgoing link juice to other sites. I also know that the tag “index” means that a page must be indexed by the robot. What’s a little confusing are the different combinations and the fact that you can seemingly use them separately for posts, comments and/or pages. There must be a way to explain these combinations in plain English so that it is once and for all understandable for everyone. Here they are:
index, follow
noindex, follow
index, nofollow
noindex, nofollow
What are the different consequences?

This is an excellent question, and I myself find it difficult to wade through all the documentation on the web that explains the uses of these different tags and their combinations. In my research I have found some very useful concrete examples that have given me some insight into the matter. I will try to lay it all out in English as plain as I can manage.
The situation is more complex than I first thought, because there are other tags to consider besides follow and index.
Google invented the nofollow tag as a measure to contain link spam. When this tag is used by itself, it tells the Googlebot that the link in question will not change the page rank of the website the link leads to. If the nofollow tag is used alone, the search engine will still physically follow the link, in order to index the website it leads to, but the link will not raise the rank of the site. A link spammer is someone who adds comments indiscriminately to all sorts of sites in order to induce search engines to count the links leading back to his websites and therefore raise his  rankings (which in layman’s terms means that when someone is searching for sites similar to theirs, theirs comes up higher on the page of the search results). If you know the links are useless for raising your rank, there is little point in spamming.
So, let us try to look at the consequences of each combination of tags and try to look at some practical examples.

First, here is what these tags look like, and where to put them. They must be located in the <head> portion of the html code of the page in question.

Index, Follow

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>

This is the default setting, so you never see this tag. In other words, if you do nothing, the Googlebot will index the page and follow the links it contains to go and index the pages they lead to.

Noindex, Follow

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”>

An excellent example of when to use this meta tag is for a contact form page. There are many pages in the site that link to this page, but the page does not have valuable content. It is a useful page for readers of the site but only as a contact form, not for the purpose of reading and absorbing interesting information. But because many pages in the site link to this page, it has a lot of “link juice” and looks like it should rank highly. Therefore we can decide to NOT index this page, but to still allow the Googlebot to follow the outgoing links from this page to other pages.

Index, Nofollow

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, nofollow”>

A perfect example of when to use this meta tag is when the pages that the current page links to have time-sensitive content. I found one article in a Google blog that used a very good example. Let’s say that the page in which this tag appears talks about celebrities. In this page there are links to stories that are “breaking news.” After a few hours the breaking news is replaced by new breaking news, and the “old” breaking news stories are put into a longer lasting articles section of the site. With the “index, nofollow” tag we obtain the perfect result. The celebrities page is indexed and the Googlebot does NOT follow the links to the breaking news which will soon be replaced.

Noindex, Nofollow

<meta name=”robots” content”noindex, nofollow”>

Another reason not to index or follow certain pages and links is when there is duplicative content in a site, which is something that at times is unavoidable. If possible it is always best to keep the indexing and ranking of our sites as clean as possible and to try to avoid duplication of content showing up with separate rankings. So, if there are pages that duplicate the content of other pages, with links to yet other duplicative pages, we can use “noindex, nofollow” and avoid adding unnecessarily to their ranking. Other examples I found for “noindex, no follow” are “About” pages, which often have artificially high rankings because many other pages link to them, and “login” pages, which also get a lot of “link juice.”

I hope this answers your question, Mario! And if you would like to add anything, clarify, or add something to your question, feel free to do so in the comments!

See you next time!

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So, now you have added Feedburner to your site. Feedburner is keeping track and counting the subscribers to your blog or site. Where do you go to check these numbers, also called “stats” (short for statistics)? It’s very simple and quite satisfying. Here goes.

Go to http://www.feedburner.com

If you are already logged in to your Google account the site will recognize you and you will see something like this:

Feedburner welcome screen

Your Stats

If you were not initially logged into your Google account. All you have to do is click on Sign in, enter your username and password and sign in. So, now you are looking at your number of subscribers. That’s already great and exciting. But what does it mean? Both the name of your website and the number are links. If you click on the name of the site, you see this:

Number of subscribers and reach

The number of subscribers is the total number of people who subscribe to your blog, and this will include RSS feeds and email (if you offer email subscription on the blog, which not all people do). The “reach” is the number of readers who have “taken action,” which means viewed or clicked on an individual item (post) in your blog on that day.

***Note***

The reach can include also people who are not subscribers, they are just visiting and are reading or have read one or more of your posts. So the combination of your subscribers and your reach gives you information that is more rich than the number of subscribers alone.

Below the numbers is another link that says “See more about your subscribers.” If you click on that, you will be taken to a screen with the complete breakdown. It will have a piechart that shows where your subscribers came from (Yahoo, Google, etc.) and there is a chart which breaks down the numbers between the various search engines and email subscribers. It is a large screen and you can scroll down and see all the numbers for yourselves, so I won’t make a screenshot of it, but I’m sure if you’ve come this far you will be able to understand the final screen easily.

***Note***

I highly recommend that you subscribe to your own blogs, both via RSS and email (if your blog offers email subscription) because this way every time you post a new article you will be sure that everything is working properly by receiving your own feed in your feed reader and/or your email inbox. Everyone subscribes to their own blog for this purpose, so don’t feel like you’re cheating or anything .

I hope this answers your question, Kloe, and that it helps anyone who has installed Feedburner on their site and is not sure how to check the stats.

See you next time, and don’t forget, if there is something you want to know, just click on the “Ask Egg Bird” button and fire away!

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I am very excited to post the first answer to an Ask Egg Bird question. Kloe from the lovely blog kloeamongtheturks has asked me the following question (really it’s two or three bundled into one, but we’ll do our best here, ok?):

I would like to know if Feedburner can be used by Blogspot blogs. As the creator of a long-standing blog, I have no idea how many people read Kloe (I’ve actually been scared to know…)
Also, what’s your opinion of Blogspot? Should I be concerned that I don’t own my site? (I don’t need to make money from my blog.)

So, let’s address these questions in order and find out the best way to answer. I must first say that I had some private email exchanges with Kloe because there are step-by-step guides on the Feedburner site that tell you how to put Feedburner on your site, but Kloe had trouble following the steps. And I must say I don’t blame her. I’m fairly savvy and I had to go through the steps a couple of times before I completely understood them myself. I think I’ve got it down now, though, so here goes.


First of all, what is Feedburner? In plain English, Feedburner is a service (now owned by Google) that manages the RSS feeds for people’s websites and blogs. You don’t HAVE to have Feedburner to generate RSS feeds. All blogs and websites with content that is renewed regularly, like newspaper sites or magazines and so on, automatically generate RSS feeds. If you pay attention, you will notice that in the far right-hand corner of the url bar (the address bar) at the top of your screen, when you go to a website, there will be a small orange RSS button right there, and if you click on it, you get the feed. So why have Feedburner at all? Why do you need it? The answer is: TO TRACK YOUR STATISTICS, and, ANALYZE YOUR TRAFFIC. In simple terms this means you will be able to see:

• how many subscribers you have (and Feedburner will count both RSS and email subscribers)
• where subscribers came from
• how many visitors came (not subscribers, new visitors)
• how long each visitor stayed
• and many other things of this nature.

The benefits of being able to track and measure the quantity and quality of the traffic your blog or website is getting are immeasurable. When you see that one particular page or series of articles is popular, you know that you should write more like them. Being able to see your statistics will help you improve your site in many ways. Let’s leave it at that for now and tackle the practical solution to the question at hand.

When we say “get Feedburner on our site” we mean use Feedburner as a filter through which our RSS feeds pass to get counted and measured. That’s all it means. You know when you see those people standing at the beginning of a bridge or something with that little counter in their hand, and every time a car goes by the press the clicker? Well, that’s what Feedburner is: it’s that person with the clicker in their hand. So the feeds go through Feedburner and they get counted. Now let’s move on to the actual “getting” of Feedburner on our site.

First, go to the Feedburner site at: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home and click on the button toward the top left of the screen that says “Blogs.” This will take you to the first page where you have to do something. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see this:

Type in your blog address

Do not click on the box that asks you if you are a podcaster, because you are not, so this does not apply to you. And then click on NEXT. You will be taken to a screen where you simply have to choose between Atom feeds and RSS feeds. Atom is simply another format. We will choose RSS, as you can see below:

Choose RSS feeds

Once you have chosen, simply click on NEXT. You will be taken to a screen that shows you your new Feedburner feed address. This is important, please copy and paste this address separately from what you are doing on the screen. If you have two monitors, great, just paste it into any Word or Notebook file on the other screen. You can also just write it on a piece of paper. Let me make another little note. You see the red arrow that points at the FEED TITLE? Well, that is what the world will see as the name of your feed in their Google Reader or whatever other feed reader they use, so write it the way you want people to see it, with the right use of capitalization and all that.

See your Feedburner feed address

Once you have copied the feed address, the one I highlighted in yellow, you can click on ACTIVATE FEED. Now, I am not going to click on this button because I don’t want to activate your feed for you, since I don’t have access to the administrator page of your blog. I will switch to a fake test blog that I started this afternoon and continue the process on that blog.

So once you activate the feed, you will be taken to a page where you are asked to set up a Google account. I know that Kloe already has one, so it will be easy for her. Incidentally, Google owns both Feedburner and Blogger (her blogging platform), so they will all “play well together.” Nice to know, right?

Here is what will happen next. When you click on ACTIVATE you will be asked to open an account or, if you have one, to sign in. If you are not Kloe and you don’t have a Google account, you can create one. If you don’t know how, just read the post on how to creat a Google account right here on Tech*Tips. If you are Kloe, then sign in, and you will be taken to the Feedburner page that displays all your feeds. Since this is your first one, it will only have Kloe Among the Turks. But it will look just like this:

Your New Feed

A small RSS gray button on the left, the name you chose in blue and the number of subscribers you have. Of course it is zero at first because we have just started.

Now comes a very important step! Feedburner will measure all the new subscriptions you get from this moment forward, but you want it also to go back and get all the subscribers you already have. To do that you have to access your administrator page, where you write new posts, and plop that string of text that I had you write down in a certain box. Let’s do that now with eggbirdtest and then you will know how to do it in your own blog. So here goes:

Open your administrator page, and click on the tab that says SETTINGS and then on the one that says SITE FEED. You will see the following screen: [IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO THIS STEP]

Remember the FEED ADDRESS that I told you to write down separately? Well, you have to paste it or type it into the window with all the arrows, the POST FEED REDIRECT URL. Read the paragraph I highlighted. This is where Feedburner catches all the feeds that are already going out to your loyal readers, the ones who, like me, have been following you from the beginning, and makes them cross the famous bridge so the little man with the clicker can count them too.

Also, in the upper portion of the screen, where you see ALLOW BLOG FEEDS and the little box currently is set to FULL, it’s up to you. If you want the entire article you post to be in the feed reader of the recipients, then leave it set to Full, otherwise change it to SHORT. That will cut off the feed after about 255 characters. Your posts are generally short, so I would stick with Full, but the advantage of using Short is that people who want to read the rest click on the “more” or “continue reading” that appears at the end of the short post and are taken directly to your site, where they will read other posts and look around. In the case of a commercial website this is advantageous. But in any case, if your goal is to be read, you want people to visit the site itself and not limit themselves to reading the feeds.

I hope this answers the first question, of how to actually “get” Feedburner. And now for the other two:

1. What do I think of Blogger? Well, I think that for a free site Blogger is fine. It belongs to Google and so does Feedburner so they will work very well together. I had a very successful blog on Blogger a couple of years ago and I found it very easy to use. Now it has been enhanced in many ways, I see, and it seems to work even better.

2. Am I afraid that you might lose your content? Well, not really. Your site is not violent or full of sexually explicit content or politically inflammatory rants or anything that could offend anybody, really, so I can’t imagine that Google would ever have any reason to suddenly drop the site altogether. Also, I know that you back up your content, and that is the key thing. If ever something “technical” should happen to the blog, you can simply reinstate it from your backup. As for not “owning” the site, here’s the deal: EVERYTHING YOU WRITE ONLINE IS YOURS. In other words, the copyright of your original images and artwork, even the photos you take of other artists’ work, is yours and no one can take it away. What you don’t own is the actual DOMAIN. the xxx.xxx.xxx.com/kloeamongtheturks part of it. The shell of the house that your content lives in. In other words, Blogger is like a hotel that lets you stay there for free. But if they ask you to leave, you take all your belongings with you.

Kloe dear, I hope this answers all your questions. And for all you other readers, please add your comments and ask any questions you wish to ask. You can ask in the comments, you can click on the Ask Egg Bird button, or you can click on the Contact tab of the site. And if you have a website or blog of your own, then run off and “get” Feedburner on it, right away!

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Dear readers and subscribers! For starters I would like to come clean about something very important: and by coming clean I don’t mean that I have been lying or anything like that. Of course not. I would like to tell you what prompted me to start this blog in the first place.

About three months ago I started another blog, Turtle^Haus, a blog that I love and that allows me to share my passions with the world. I sent word around to a few friends, withouth much fanfare at first because I didn’t have much content yet, and then gradually I began to spread the word a little more. I encouraged these friends and relatives to sign up for the RSS feed of my blog so they could receive the posts as they were published. Well, I found out very quickly that hardly any of them used RSS feeds and many of them had never even heard of them. So I gave a few tutorials over the phone, of the click here, do you see that button?, click on it, type. Each time it took about an hour and a half. So during one of these tutorials, while I was on the phone with my aunt, I said, it would take me less time to start a blog in which I teach people how to do this, and then I could just give people the link. It was something of an aha! moment. I realized, for the umpteenth time, that teaching is really my “thing.” It’s what I’m best at. Of all the skills I have, it is really the one that keeps cropping up. No matter what field I think I’m in, I inevitably end up being in the field where I teach people how to go about being in the field I thought I was in.



Teaching gives me great joy, because there is nothing more wonderful in this life than empowering others with knowledge. Seeing the light go on in people’s eyes when they “get” something cannot be compared to any other feeling. And then there is the whole “give a man a fish” thing. It’s not just teaching people how to do one thing. It’s giving them tools so that in the future they can find those things on their own, because now they know how! That’s the best thing of all.

Now, there are tons of things I know that I also know many other people don’t know (was that unclear?). So when I think of these things, I sit down at the computer and I write about them. But I want you readers to feel free, very free, completely at ease with, the concept of asking away. And don’t worry about the level of your question. If it is an easy question, it will be very easy and fast for me to answer. If it is a hard question and I know the answer, I will try to explain it in such a way that pretty much anyone can understand it. If it is a really hard question that I do not know the answer to, then I will do my best to find the answer and once again I will try to explain it clearly, in plain English.

So I have added the “ask egg bird” button to the upper right-hand corner of the blog. You will find the button on every page of the blog, so no matter where you are you will always be able to click on it. Once you click on it you will be taken directly to the Contact Form. All you have to do is fill it out with your information and your question.

I promise to answer all questions as quickly as possible. Everyone will be acknowledged personally and everyone will get an answer. If I have so many questions that I can’t answer all of them right away, then I will send you a personal email and let you know that you might have to wait a little while. But I will get to you, scout’s honor.

I encourage you to sign up for the RSS feed, or if you really prefer email, that’s fine too. But do subscribe, because this way you will be sure to see your answer when it comes. The thing is that most questions benefit many people, not just the person who asked. And if I see a more “universal” aspect of the question, I may decide to expand on it and write a more exhaustive post, or a series of posts.

So, ask away and subscribe! Thanks to all my readers and subscribers so far and see you soon.

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