How to add paypal donate button to your blog

PayPal, is an eBay Company,It enables any individual or business with an email address to securely, easily and quickly send and receive payments online.

If you don't have a paypal account yet, you can get a free account

After you have your login ID/password,
Login to your account. Then click the "merchant services" tab

scroll down and on the right sidebar, find the box labelled key features, click on the link named "Donations"

After clicking on that link, you will taken to "Create paypal payment button" page, just make sure that donations is selected in the "Accept Payments for" dropdown box. You can type a name/id for this button

Down below you can customize your paypal button by selecting options like using smaller button, displaying credit card logos, changing language, currency, contribution amount or use your own graphic as a button.

Step 2 & 3 are optional and requires a business account, so leave them for now. and click on create button.

On the next page, copy the entire code from the textbox and paste it into your template of your website or blog, where you want it to appear. Congratulations! You have just added paypal donate button to your blog.

XML blogger users can paste this code by adding HTML/JavaScript gadget to their blogger blog.

(See the demo below)

Installing StumbleUpon links within Blogger/Blogspot

• Download one of the StumbleUpon Icons from it's icon set here . Upload this picture somewhere on the web.
  
  (This is a preview of the available icons, select and upload any one of them.)
  
  



• Login to your blogger dashboard, click manage->template.
• On the template tab, find <$BlogItemBody$> tag
• Copy-Paste this code just below the <$BlogItemBody$> tag

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$">&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>'><img border="0" src="**LINK" alt="Stumble Upon Toolbar" />Stumble It!</a>

• Replace **LINK TO stumbleit.gif** with the full path to the image that you uploaded.
• Save & RePublish your blog.

Sample Preview:


Stumble It!

NOTE : This installation only works with classic templates of blogger. XML Layouts users, check out this post http://zerodollarchallenge.blogspot.com/2007/11/add-stumbleupon-button-to-bloggerxml.html

Blog Graphics

Finding Images/videos/icons and stuff for your blog is a challenging and time consuming excercise. Here's my "unofficial" and "incomplete" list of resources for blog graphics.

Bigoo.ws - Over 50,000 images, all classified as glitters, backgrounds, cursors, quotes, animations, icons etc. Also has layouts and widgets for MySpace, Hi5, Friendster.


Stock Exchange - Free for personal use. Read the license here. [ License ]

Yotophoto.com - Indexes images in the public domain or available for free usage under various forms of "copyleft" licensing.

Freefoto.com - Free photographs for private non-commercial use on the Internet.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net - Free for use in blogs, with some conditions [ License ]

Blogger Help itself list these blog graphics resources for your blogs:

• Openphoto.net
• Flickr Photos - Only those with creative commons licences are free to use.
• http://search.creativecommons.org/ - This search engine should throw up many image resources that can be used on blogs and websites for free.

This list will always be in a "work in progress" mode, as we discover new and better blog graphics for blogs. Do you know of a blog graphics site that you want to share with us? leave your comments.

Standard Feed Icon

While exploring other sites and blogs, you must have come across those orange coloured feed icons that give you an option to subscribe to that site's/blog's feed. Chances are that you are already publishing your own feed.

Here's a free resource that will give you more color options to choose from(for the feed icon), you can also download other file format of the icon to modify and customize for your blog/site.

http://www.feedicons.com

25% of the People Online Use Firefox, do you?

"People are switching to Firefox fast as ever, while IE's share drops every day!"

read more digg story





According to stats released by W3Counter , Firefox is the first choice for almost 25% of the people using the net. Have you downloaded firefox?

Blogthings for Girls Only

Freshen up your blog or website by adding a widget from Hunkdujour.com and display a new picture of a hunk daily on your blog.(See the sample below). 4 display sizes are available for your blog. Ready to install it to your blog? See the Hunkdujour Widget for Blogger

Wondering where to get the glitter images that you see on other blogs? then read our post on Glitter Graphics for Blogs

Related :
Internet Safety for Girls

AdSense Abuse Techniques and Countermeasures by Google

• You must have seen the use of floating layers on many sites (generally created using DHTML & JavaScript). Since these layers can move dynamically and could be programmed to follow the mouse, Placing Adsense Ads on these layers can be unintentional clicks on the ads. Google therefore does not allow the ads to be placed on floating layers.


• Images as Graphical pointers beside ad units were preferred way of many ad publishers to grab the attention of the visitor who would otherwise have ignored the ads due to the “ad blindness” behavior. In this technique images or flash objects are used in order to deceive the visitors into clicking the Ad by suggesting a link between the image/flash object and the ads. Google therefore disallows any images or flash objects beside the ads, which could suggest any link between the two.


• Some publishers tried to hide the “ads by google” tagline by customizing the background color of the page and the color of the ad itself so that it would blend into the page and hardly be visible to the visitor and the ads would look like regular links. Google now uses an image tagline on ads that will not blend into the background.


• Some publishers altered the adsense code to make the ads appear as a “single line link” and then camouflaged them in between the navigation links or their recommended links. Google strictly prohibits any alteration of its adsense code.


• Some publishers would load the ad in a floating frame (<iframe> tag). The frame dimensions would hide the fact that it is a google ad. In fact the user wont be able to tell that the ad is loaded using a hidden frame. Google does not allow ads to be loaded that way. (No Google ad may be placed on any non-content-based pages.). Although, this technique does not alter the adsense code. Google policy states “Elements on a page must not obscure any portion of the ads”, Therefore it is an unacceptable practice.


• Some publishers place ads adjacent to the site interaction objects, such as navigational links, Flash/JavaScript Games & Buttons, Download Buttons, under popups or anything that requires frequent clicking. Some accidental clicks are received on those ads.

Also, One of the most common abuses of adsense that is done unknowingly by many is that they place a wide skyscraper ad on the right hand side of the page, adjacent to the scrollbar. Whenever an Image ad is displayed on the wide skyscraper the entire area becomes a “click zone”(unlike the column of text ads). Clicks are received when the user, instead of clicking the scrollbar accidentally clicks the ad. Google now considers the clicks with very low returns to the advertiser as invalid clicks and threatens to disable the account of the publisher.

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The Techniques described above are for Information purpose only. Under no circumstances does this article suggest that you abuse the Google Adsense program using the techniques described above. Furthermore the author does not take any responsibility if anyone gets banned/ejected by google as a result of using the techniques described above.

New Blogger Layouts and Google Analytics

Need some help in Installing Google Analytics in Blogger? or did you stumble here looking for New Blogger Layouts? Try our Template & Layout Finder.

Some people have reported that the new drag and drop layout of blogger does not work with google analytics. When testing the problem myself. I found out that the code which is typically in the format of

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-XXXXXX-X";
urchinTracker();
</script>


is changed to

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = &quot;UA-XXXXXX-X&quot;;
urchinTracker();
</script>


upon saving and probably that breaks the code. Actually this is an installation problem. you can't copy paste the code into the blogger layout code( because its XHTML code now). Google Analytics site recommends that you paste the tracking code before the </body> tag. That install procedure is outdated.

Below are the instructions for installing Google Analytics tracking code to new drag and drop layout of blogger/blogspot without problems.

1. Login to your dashboard and click "Manage : Layout"
2. On the template tab, select Page Elements
3. On Page Elements, click Add a page element( I recommend adding it to the bottom of the page)
4. On the pop up window click the "Add to Blog" option beside "HTML/JavaScript" Option
5. On "configure HTML/JavaScript" popup window, paste the Google Analytics code in the "content textarea"
6. Leave the title "blank" and Save Changes

Now, Google Analytics should be working on your blog. Leave your comments if Something still does not work.

Note : Google Analytics is working on a new version ( Which will probably be XHTML compliant). See more on this http://analytics.blogspot.com/2007/05/new-version-of-google-analytics.html .

Update: Some of the visitors have pointed out that the above method does not work correctly now,So, unless we find a workaround to make Analytics work with the new blogger, both would remain incompatible.

AdSense Tip of the Day

So, what URL do you type on your addressbar to get to the official AdSense site? is it http://www.google.com/adsense , Here's an AdSense Tip that will save you some time and keystrokes. type adsense into the addressbar and press ctrl+enter, the browser will connect to http://www.adsense.com and auto redirect to the official Google Adsense page. I hope this tip is useful to you.

Reduce clutter from your blog

Have you seen those 10-15 or more social bookmarking buttons for technorati, digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon, google bookmarks, yahoo myweb etc. on other pages/blogs? Instead of having all those buttons you can have a single bookmarking button from Addthis.com.

Delivering your content on Mobiles

Now, your site visitors can have the contents of your site delivered right into their mobile phones, Get your personalized button at http://www.hubdog.com/gui/affiliates.aspx and add this functionality to your blog for free.

The button might look like the one below, you can add it to your sidebar.