So, I've been a bit busy of late.
Hi there, bit of a different blogger entry today.
Usually when I do these I'm making you aware of my videos on youtube, and of late I've been trying to branch out a bit a try other platforms, because, believe it or not, youtube isn't the only video sharing site these days.
Oh no, there are other options out there.
One of which is Minds.com, which I've really been using as more of an alternative to facebook, but you can upload videos there too and even monetise them. Problem is every time I tried to do that, the upload failed. Until last night when I tried again and guess what? It worked!
Yay Minds.
The other place I've had way more success with in general is vid.me. Sure I only have half the followers there that I have in terms of subscribers on youtube, but I get better views there. They are even beta testing their own monetising options too with adverts finally showing up there.
Not that I've seen any ads over there yet.
But I am getting more exposure there.
And then there's the real thing I wanted to talk about.
Write about.
Blogger about.
Blogger.
I am not liking the way this thing works at all. And by that I mean the behind the scenes things we need to do to get our bloggers looking the way we want it to. The tools they provide, I just don't like them.
Notice that I changed the layout? You have to do that through the Themes section, and strangely when you do change a Theme, it doesn't carry over any of the graphics you might have set as wallpapers previously.
It doesn't even keep those graphics stored anywhere on site either, which means you have to upload the files again. Ok, not much of a biggy, but still annoying.
But then you have to fine tune everything and the options are just never clear. Say your main graphic has your channel or blogger name splashed all over it and you want that there instead of any text, guess what? You can edit the graphic and then switch to the section that deals with the text overlaying it, but you can't do anything to edit what the text says. In fact you only get to change the text's colour, boldness and font, but you can't change what the text says, you can't even delete it. You have to go to an entirely different part of the site to do that. And to me that doesn't make any sense.
Sure when it comes to the posts, that's fine, that's actually quite easy, the tools work there quite well, but they are designed with content creation in mind, and work. Well they ok for the most part, writing a blog itself can sometimes be tricky as sometimes the pictures you might want to add might not stay in the places you want them to go, and it can take a while to get them to stick.
so yeah, one or two things are ok, but everything else......
It's at times like that I wish I'd learned how to HTML, and hose Divy adverts are starting to look tempting to click on.
So in short, the tools on blogger for editing the layout are not exactly user friendly, at least to my mind, as someone who uses them so infrequently, and the actually blogging tools aren't perfect, but are serviceable, and that's speaking as someone who does use those tools on a somewhat regular basis.
But why did I change the Theme and the Layout I hear you think quietly in the privacy of the back of your mind.
Because I felt like it.
AND! Because I've noticed while looking over the themes, that some of them don't carry over the same features as other themes for some reason that makes no sense at all.
All a bit maddening really.
So after a bit of checking around I think I have the theme that looks most appealing to me, and seems to have the most features, or options for features that I might want to add in the future. God knows there's sections on my blogger I've setup, put some content on, but not updated in awhile and I must apologise for not having done so, that will be addressed and sorted sometime quite soon.
But not tonight.
And one other thing that I am most definitely NOT enjoying on blogger. Trying to get Adsense to work on here. I've set it up already for youtube, that's working, I can see a small trickle of money being made there (and I do mean small) but trying to get the same thing to work HERE is next to impossible.
And that seems to be by design.
I've found so many help guides on the subject, some go into great details as to why it doesn't work the way you might think it does (people setting up blogs and forgetting about them, people setting up blogs for fraud purposes, etc) and if those reasons are true you can understand why Google and Youtube would try to find ways to prevent that for happening.
But this needs to be made clearer, much clearer then it is at the moment, and the help guides need to written in simpler terms. You also have to wonder just why there are so many help guides on google for the same subject.
Why do so many turn up in the search results on this one subject of getting adsense on multiply platforms?
Why not just one that covers all aspects of this?
Strangely with the help of a bit of coding they give you, they will let you apply adsense to your own domain, and if I read it correctly, other blogging sites as well, but to try to have adsense on both youtube and blogger, it appears you would need two adsense accounts, something that from what I read of their terms last night (and I was at the point of pulling my hair out about then) your not allowed to do.
If anyone out there whose reading this has any helpful guidance on this, I am all ears.
I need to do more research in this regard, so what I've written above may not be entirely correct, but if that's the case, I can easily add an amendment to the bottom of this article.
That at least, is easily done.
Usually when I do these I'm making you aware of my videos on youtube, and of late I've been trying to branch out a bit a try other platforms, because, believe it or not, youtube isn't the only video sharing site these days.
Oh no, there are other options out there.
One of which is Minds.com, which I've really been using as more of an alternative to facebook, but you can upload videos there too and even monetise them. Problem is every time I tried to do that, the upload failed. Until last night when I tried again and guess what? It worked!
Yay Minds.
The other place I've had way more success with in general is vid.me. Sure I only have half the followers there that I have in terms of subscribers on youtube, but I get better views there. They are even beta testing their own monetising options too with adverts finally showing up there.
Not that I've seen any ads over there yet.
But I am getting more exposure there.
And then there's the real thing I wanted to talk about.
Write about.
Blogger about.
Blogger.
I am not liking the way this thing works at all. And by that I mean the behind the scenes things we need to do to get our bloggers looking the way we want it to. The tools they provide, I just don't like them.
Notice that I changed the layout? You have to do that through the Themes section, and strangely when you do change a Theme, it doesn't carry over any of the graphics you might have set as wallpapers previously.
It doesn't even keep those graphics stored anywhere on site either, which means you have to upload the files again. Ok, not much of a biggy, but still annoying.
But then you have to fine tune everything and the options are just never clear. Say your main graphic has your channel or blogger name splashed all over it and you want that there instead of any text, guess what? You can edit the graphic and then switch to the section that deals with the text overlaying it, but you can't do anything to edit what the text says. In fact you only get to change the text's colour, boldness and font, but you can't change what the text says, you can't even delete it. You have to go to an entirely different part of the site to do that. And to me that doesn't make any sense.
Sure when it comes to the posts, that's fine, that's actually quite easy, the tools work there quite well, but they are designed with content creation in mind, and work. Well they ok for the most part, writing a blog itself can sometimes be tricky as sometimes the pictures you might want to add might not stay in the places you want them to go, and it can take a while to get them to stick.
so yeah, one or two things are ok, but everything else......
It's at times like that I wish I'd learned how to HTML, and hose Divy adverts are starting to look tempting to click on.
So in short, the tools on blogger for editing the layout are not exactly user friendly, at least to my mind, as someone who uses them so infrequently, and the actually blogging tools aren't perfect, but are serviceable, and that's speaking as someone who does use those tools on a somewhat regular basis.
But why did I change the Theme and the Layout I hear you think quietly in the privacy of the back of your mind.
Because I felt like it.
AND! Because I've noticed while looking over the themes, that some of them don't carry over the same features as other themes for some reason that makes no sense at all.
All a bit maddening really.
So after a bit of checking around I think I have the theme that looks most appealing to me, and seems to have the most features, or options for features that I might want to add in the future. God knows there's sections on my blogger I've setup, put some content on, but not updated in awhile and I must apologise for not having done so, that will be addressed and sorted sometime quite soon.
But not tonight.
And one other thing that I am most definitely NOT enjoying on blogger. Trying to get Adsense to work on here. I've set it up already for youtube, that's working, I can see a small trickle of money being made there (and I do mean small) but trying to get the same thing to work HERE is next to impossible.
And that seems to be by design.
I've found so many help guides on the subject, some go into great details as to why it doesn't work the way you might think it does (people setting up blogs and forgetting about them, people setting up blogs for fraud purposes, etc) and if those reasons are true you can understand why Google and Youtube would try to find ways to prevent that for happening.
But this needs to be made clearer, much clearer then it is at the moment, and the help guides need to written in simpler terms. You also have to wonder just why there are so many help guides on google for the same subject.
Why do so many turn up in the search results on this one subject of getting adsense on multiply platforms?
Why not just one that covers all aspects of this?
Strangely with the help of a bit of coding they give you, they will let you apply adsense to your own domain, and if I read it correctly, other blogging sites as well, but to try to have adsense on both youtube and blogger, it appears you would need two adsense accounts, something that from what I read of their terms last night (and I was at the point of pulling my hair out about then) your not allowed to do.
If anyone out there whose reading this has any helpful guidance on this, I am all ears.
I need to do more research in this regard, so what I've written above may not be entirely correct, but if that's the case, I can easily add an amendment to the bottom of this article.
That at least, is easily done.
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