How to use your own icons in Google My Maps

This article shows how to use your own icons to label places in maps that you make with the My Maps' feature in  Google Maps.

My Maps is a tool provided by Google Maps that lets you make a map showing a specific collection of places.

Why is this helpful?   Well, you can search for a collection of places in regular Google Maps, and share the maps you can see - but if you do this, other people will see different places that are marked on the version of the maps that Google shows them, not the same as the places that are marked for you.    To guarantee what set of places other people see, you need to make a map in My Maps, and then you can share this specific map.

My Maps provides a standard set of icons that can be used for labelling places - and these days it's a pretty impressive standard set.   But it still doesn't include numbers, letters or other labels - and the icons provided may not be styled the way you would like.

Luckily Google have provided a way for you to use any icon to label points on a map you make.

How to use your own custom icon in a My Maps map

Make your map, and add the place(s) you would like to attach a custom icon to.

In the bar on the left hand side, hover your mouse over a place-marker which you want to assign a specific icon to.   

The line for that item will highlight slightly, and a small colour / paint-tipping icon appear will to the right of the place description, like this:

Click on the paint-tipping / colour icon

This opens a small hover-window, where you can choose the colour or icon shape.

Click the button at the bottom labelled More Icons.

On the pop-up that opens, you are able to select an icon from one of the categories available (currently Business, Crisis, Facilities and services, Points of interest, Recreational Activities, Transport, and  Weather).   Don't select any of these.

Instead, at the bottom of the screen, enter in the URL (ie website address) of a  file that you want to use as a marker.  (.jpg  .png  .bmp, and .gif   files can all be used).

Click Add Icon.

This adds the picture that you linked to the list of items available under Custom Icons, and selects it.

Click Ok to apply this icon to the point-marker that is being edited.

Job done!   Your map now has a marker that is made from your own image.

Things to be aware of / Troubleshooting

• You need to load the image file to a file-host which handles picture files yourself:   there is no option to load a file directly from the More Icons tab.

• The image file needs to stay, unchanged, in the place where you linked to - and that place has to be available to anyone who might look at the map: if you are sharing the map with "anyone in the world" then the markers need to be available like that, too.

• The image file should be small to speed up loading time:   images in the set of markers I use are approx 2k each.

• Markers will be displayed in the same small size as Google's markers, ie 32x32 pixels:   there's no point using a large, detailed photograph if it will shrunk down to so tiny that the details can't be seen.

• You must provide the actual URL of the picture you want to use as a marker, not the Google Photos shareable link.   (Because the latter includes more than just the photo).

• I don't know any way to bulk-load many custom icons into a My Maps map at the same time.   (There was a way to do this in the old Google Custom Maps, but this doesn't work in My Maps.)    Or to make one icon available to many / all your your My Maps at once.   If you have a solution for this, please leave a comment below.

• If you your icon background to be transparent, then you need to create it in RGB colour mode: Icons with a transparent background created in Indexed colour mode don't work.

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Related Articles

File hosts:  places used to store pictures used in Blogger

Hosting pictures outside of Google Photos / Picasa Web Albums

How to get shareable links to Google Photos

Making someone an author on your blog

This article shows you how to set up another person (ie another Google account) as an author for your blog.

Google, Blog-Authors and Blogger

Setting someone up as an "author" in Blogger is one way that you can let other people post to your blog.

It's easy to do: you tell blogger to create an invitation, which sends the person an email saying you would like to be an author, they click a link in the email and then sign in with a Google account to accept the invitation. And once it is done, the person can write and edit their own posts.

All you need to know is the person's email address: it doesn't matter if it's a gmail address or not.  You can send invitations to people with hotmail, yahoo, and indeed any email address where your invitee can read their email.

 However the other person will need to use a Google account (which doesn't necessarily include Gmail) to accept the invitation: don't waste time inviting people who are allergic to Google and not willing to sign up for an account.

How to make someone an author on your blog

Send them an invitation:

• Go to Settings > Basic > Permissions

• Beside Blog Authors, click + Add Authors

• Enter the email address of the person you want to invite

• Click Ok

A few minutes later, the email address that you sent to receives an email invitation, like this, from no-reply@google.com:

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: You have been invited to contribute to AnotherTestBlog
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:47:45 +0000
From:   THE NAME OF FROM YOUR BLOGGER PROFILE 
To: maryc@act.nz

The Blogger user Mary has invited you to contribute to the blog: AnotherTestBlog.

To contribute to this blog, visit:
http://www.blogger.com/i.g?inviteID=468-GEEKY-LOOKING-CODE-973&blogID=31-GEEKY-LOOKING-CODE-83

You'll need to sign in with a Google Account to confirm the invitation and start posting to this blog. If you don't have a Google Account yet, we'll show you how to get one in minutes.

To learn more about Blogger and starting your own free blog visit http://www.blogger.com.

When the person who gets the email clicks on the link, they are taken to Blogger, and asked to sign in

Once they have clicked the link and sign in, the Google account that they log in with has "author rights" to your blog (just the one you invited them to, not any others you've made).

The person does not need to have a gmail or Google account for you to invite them to be an author - but they will need to sign in using a Google account (new or existing) to accept the invitation.

What you will see

Once the person has accepted the invitation, the Google account name (which looks like an email address) that they use to accept it is shown as an author on the permissions tab (the one that you went to to invite them to be an author):

If they accept the invitation by signing to Google in with a different email address than the one you invited, you will get a message telling you about this. It says

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Your invitation was accepted using a different email address
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:51:33 +0000
From: Blogger
To: YOUR-EMAIL-ADDRESS

Your invitation for THE-EMAIL-ADDRESS-YOU-INVITED for your private blog "AnotherTestBlog" has been accepted, but using a different email address. It has been accepted by THE-ACCEPTING-EMAIL ADDRESS.

If your invitation has been accepted by someone you do not know or did not intend to invite, please visit the Permissions tab of your blog where you can choose to revoke access.

Thanks,
 The Blogger Team

What your new author will see

When your new author logs in to Blogger.com - using the Google account they accepted your invitation with - they see a regular Blogger dashboard, except that they only have access to a limited range of functions:

An author can:

• Create a post,
• Edit the date for posts they have made
• Turn comments of for posts they can edit (provided the default setting is On)
• Edit a post that they made
• Add a mobile device so they can post using SMS/MMS - (this may only work in certain countries)
• Set themselves up to post using email (the mail2Post feature) - note that their "secret words" address is different to yours - and that an author could use this feature to let anyone else post from their account.
• Remove themselves as an author

An author cannot:

• Edit posts made by other authors or administrators
• Change the template, layout or gadgets
• Change the blog's URL, title or description
• Set up for any email address to receive comment-moderation alert messages
• Moderate comments (even about their own posts), or change the global comments settings
• Edit any of the blog's Pages
• See the blog's statistics
• Install AdSense into the blog (although they can put ad-units of their own inside their own posts)
• Give other people permission to write on the blog - except by sharing their own mail2Post "secret words" address.
• Change the default language and date/time settings for the blog
• Alter the RSS feed settings in any way
• Set up Google Analytics for the blog
• Edit the Adult-content warning setting, or the blog's Open-ID URL.

Troubleshooting

Be sure your transfer works

If you are accepting the invitation yourself (eg you are transferring the blog to another Google account that you control), then make sure that you either

• [Recommended]: use a different browser for each Google account, or
• Each time you need to change Google accounts, log out of the present account, clear your cache and re-start your browser.

Make sure the emails arrive

We sometimes see questions in Blogger Help Forum from people who say that they sent invitations, but the email message was never received.

The most common solution is that the author-to-be needs to check their spam folder - very often that's where the messages have gone.  If that doesn't work:

• Try sending the person an email address from your regular email account - so you know if there's a  problem with their email.
• Cancel the invitation (there's a link in the Invitation screen), wait a few minutes and try again.
• Try sending an invitation to a different email address that you control, and forwarding that message (without clicking the accept link) to the person.yourself.

If none of this helps, post a question in Blogger Help Forum: tell us your blog's URL, and exactly what options you have tried.

More things to think about

As well as giving the person rights, you may also need to work with them to make sure they understand how you use certain features in Blogger:

• What's your editing and quality-assurance approach - how you do make sure you've got posts right before you publish them?  Do you allow adult content?   What about content that might not suit advertising that your blog is showing.

• Do you use labels?  How do you decide what labels to apply? This is especially important if you put your posts into pages. 

• What time of day do you post (to get maximum benefit from your RSS non-email subscribers)

• How are posts promoted on social media - do they need access to your blog's Twitter account or Facebook page too?

• What policies do you have for responding to comments - Who is notified about comments left about their posts?  What guidelines are followed about complaints?  How do you deal with spam and abuse - and what do you regard as abuse?

• How do you organise pictures, and other external files that your blog uses?
  I always upload pictures to Picasa-web-albums outside of Blogger, LINK so I can control the picture size/resolution. If you do this, you need to make sure that your new author knows where to file their pictures.

• Have you got a place where you keep policies, documetation, ideas for new posts, etc (eg I use a separate documentation blog for this) - does your new author need access to this?

What next?

Giving someone administrator access to your blog.

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Related Articles

Understanding Google accounts

Putting AdSense ads into your posts

How to put posts into your blog's pages

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts matters for your blog

Your blog and the so-called-social networks:  Facebook, Twitter, eg al

Putting pictures onto your blog

Advertising and your blog, some things to consider

Turning the RSS feed off or on again

By default, public Blogger sites offer an RSS feed.  But there may be times when you need to turn it off, either for good or temporarily.

RSS and Blogger

Previously I've explained what RSS is and why it's important for bloggers.

But there may be times when you want to turn off your RSS feed, either because you don't want to offer one at all, or because you want to make some posts, or changes to existing posts that are not notified to  your RSS subscribers.

Or you may need to turn it back on again - for example, if you want to use a dynamic template, to offer a subscribe-by-email option, or to enable automatic posting to Google +.

How turn off a blog's RSS feed:]

In post-Sept 2011 Blogger (aka the new interface):

• Go to the Settings > Other tab.

• Under "Site Feed", use the drop-down to change Allow Blog Feed to "None".  
  (This is the only option that totally turns your feed off:  the others, including Custom, leave some aspects of the feed on.)

How turn on your RSS feed

This is just the same as turning the feed off (see above), except that your need to choose one of these options instead:

• Full - the whole post is shown in your feed
• Until Jump Break  - only the part of the post before the jump break is sent to your feed
• Short - only the first 120 (ish) letters, or less if the jump break comes first, are sent to your feed.

Also, the new interface has a Custom option, and the old interface has an Advanced Mode.   If you use these , you can individually set the value for post feed, comments feed (all comments), and comments-feed-per-post.


Private blogs and RSS
Blogs that are not public do not offer RSS feeds, because they cannot be secured.   So if your blog is private, then it does not matter what setting you choose, your blog will not offer an RSS feed.

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Related Articles

Understanding RSS - why it's imporant for bloggers who want to grow an audience

What are dynamic templates

Linking your blog and the social networks

Follow-by-email gadget:  an easy way to offer email subscriptions

Private blogs aren't as secure as you might think

Putting files into Blogger's root directory

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog.

Turnips (Brassica rapa) 
from Wikimedia commons 
Originally posted to Flickr 
by thebittenword.com.   
Licensed under the terms of 
the cc-by-2.0.

If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory.   They may even tell you to use an FTP  tool to do this.

Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger.

Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking you to change the website code itself.

How to add a file to your blog's root directory

The short answer for Blogger users is "sorry, you cannot do this".

 The long answer is still no:  "there is no way to do this, but see the rest of this article for an explanation of why, and some suggested work-arounds."

Why not? Every other website tool lets me do this.

Posts:  Blogger's tool for managing
the content on our blogs

If you're clever, and have lots of time, you can make a website just using a text-editor like notpad, a graphics programme, and ftp software that lets you put the files into the right places on computer that's connected to the internet.

Tools like Dreamweaver take away a lot of the time-consuming work, and some of the need for cleverness.  But you still need to know a lot about the internet to do things in a way that makes a good website.

Content management systems make this easier still: they let a technically-minded person do the nuts-and-bolts work to make the website, and give authors / artists / editors / content-creators simpler-to-use tools that let them put "stuff" (ie content) into the website, without needing to worry about the details of how it works.

Blogger is a (very simple) website content-management system, it creates our web-pages for us based on data that we put into certain places. Administrators can set up and change templates, other people, eg authors simply make posts.

When we use Blogger, the main way that we change the data in our web-pages is using the Blogger software. 

Some items inside posts or gadgets can be changed using other software, eg Google Docs, provided they were were set up using that other software in the first place. But - key point - there is nothing in the way that Blogger is put together that means we need to access the base directory. So they don't let us do so.    And I doubt that this this will change anytime soon.

What to do instead

The options for getting around this restriction depend on how the file that you need to put into your root directory is intended to be used.

Installing code

If you have code to install into your blog, and a file to go with it, then you just need to

1. Host the file somewhere else (maybe in your Picasa-web-album for the blog, if it's a picture)
2. Change the code to point to the full path of where you have hosted the file, instead of the relative path used in the code

For example, here is the code for a button linking to my blog, with the picture in the root directory:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="//Logo.png" width="100" /></a></div>

To change this to use a specific location, I just add a file-path and the file-name of the picture wherever it is hosted.

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNn3gOoY81C6pvlYYZ89hXl2UU8OE0M0spOWthm3MXun4vo5PiAJCOvQ2-f3OCE-rSwxp4_0CX6TZTOyZinG0nFAb4GvYnTm9NJAaYE81Ids_KdmqJ5IbhJnXqMhQ4RAQGsCb5fWkZkpOw/s320/Logo.png" width="100" /></a></div>

TIP: blogger's editor sometimes gets links mixed up, so it's important to start the filepath with "http://"

Verifying ownership

If someone wants to use a file's position to check that you control a website, then they will have code on their own website that looks for the file in your root directory.

You cannot change this code. And you cannot place the fie.

So you need to ask them for an alternative way to verify, that is suitable for people without root directory access.

 If they don't have any alternatives, try lobbying for this on their product support forum:  by not having alterantives, they are ensuring that Blogger users, among others, cannot use their service.

If the official answer is still "no", then you could also ask in other on-line forums if anyone has found any other work-arounds.


What other reasons have you found for installing files to your root directory?   
What work-arounds have worked for you?

An afterthought: what isn't recommended

I've recently seen someone suggest in a help forum that people with custom domains can put files into their blog's root directory by FTP'ing the files into place.

 This may be true, if the service that you are purchasing from your domain registrar includes file-hosting. But file hosting(*)

1. Isn't necessary for a custom domain used in Blogger (since Google hosts our files for us), and
2. Isn't available as part of the services when you buy a custom-domain through Blogger.

So it's not a general solution for most Blogger users, though it may work for some.

Initially I was a little sceptical of the idea: Blogger doesn't expect to see any files in our root directory, so I was concerned that it might do strange things if it found them there. But on reflection, I think there is probably a low risk of this happening, since the file-location is outside Blogger's control.

(*) To avoid any confusion, file hosting and DNS hosting are not the same thing. If you buy a custom domain for your blog from a registrar without going through Google/Blogger, then you do need to pay for DNS hosting, but do not need to buy file-hosting.

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Related Articles

File hosts - places to store files used in your blog.

Picasa-web-albums: a quick introduction

How Blogger data is organised

Setting up a new administrator for your blog

Options for letting other people write in your blog

The Risks and Benefits of Using 3D Home Tours

3D home tours let potential buyers tour a property without physically being there, rather than just looking at a set of still images. For the first time, buyers can take a 3D tour of potential homes without ever setting foot on the property. When this new 3D technology was first available it was groundbreaking, but the technology is currently only in use by a tiny fraction of realtors.

At a glance, it could make a lot of sense to create a virtual tour, but as with any new technology, you have to look at it from all angles to evaluate potential risks. Here are some of the pros and cons of using 3D home tours.

Pros:

1. Immersion

Having the ability to get a good look at each room with a 3D tour can be far more immersive than photographs or videos. A 3D tour can help many potential buyers get a better look at the property than they could with any other form of media. This is one of the biggest advantages of using 3D home tours.

2. Long distance tours

If a buyer is located overseas, or it's inconvenient for them to visit the property themselves, a 3D tour would be perfect for them. If used in conjunction with photos and videos, they allow potential buyers to get a really good look at the property in a simple and convenient manner, without ever having to travel to the property themselves.

3. Staying up to date with trends

3D home tours are only now becoming popular in mainstream media, and they haven't been around for very long. In a market where many lag behind current trends, adding 3D home tours into their business strategy would make any real estate business stand out, giving them a competitive edge on everyone else.

Cons:

1. High Cost

As with all business choices, balancing the cost versus the benefits is extremely important. The cost to create a virtual tour can often be extremely expensive. For many, the cost might simply be too high to justify creating a 3D home tour for the property.

2. Less control than photographs

While far more immersive than photographs, letting potential clients pan and zoom around the house can also have its disadvantages. Even the greatest photo stitching programs can still distort the picture, or produce unwanted artifacts. And if the tour is poorly laid out, buyers could easily get the wrong impression of the property. While uncommon with high-quality 3D tours, these problems should always be considered.

Conclusion

Is it realistic for a business to incorporate 3D home tours into their marketing plan? For high-end properties, a virtual tour can be well worth the high price. However, while the advantages for real estate industry are clear, it may not be a good fit in some cases. There can be cases where photographs or video tours would be more appropriate, and low-end properties may not be worth enough to justify the high expense of creating a virtual tour.
 
While in many cases, the benefits of 3D home tours far outweigh the risks, in some cases the high cost involved may not be worth the trouble.



Author Bio:
Written by Sally, a full-time worker at a specialized training center for business development. She is lucky enough to work with many aspiring entrepreneurs. She loves to read, write, and learn to use technology as her learning tools.