How to Verify Your Blogger Blog on Pinterest with a Meta Tag

Apparently Pinterest is dealing with as much spam as the rest of the internet and has instituted a website verification process for websites listed in your profile.  You have to prove that you own a website by mucking about in its code.  I deduce that the idea is if you are a spammer who is paid to promote a website as many (poorly written) places as possible, you will not have access to the server/code of the website you're promoting.  Pinterest will then delete the website reference from the account, thus defeating the purpose of paying spammers to promote websites there.  So eventually, companies wil realize they're not getting anything for their money, stop paying the spammers, and then Pinterest will be spam free.  Ta da!  We'll see how that works.  To paraphrase Jurassic Park, "Spam finds a way."

At any rate, that leaves a lot of bloggers who have blogs rather than personal websites so that we don't *have* to muck about in code scratching our heads.  I found instructions for verifying using the downloaded html file, but it didn't work for me.   After a little trial and error I figured out how to verify using meta tags for a Blogger blog (I'm afraid I have no idea how other blog platforms work).

When I logged into Pinterest, this window was waiting for me:



Click on the option at the bottom, "Verify with a meta tag."

Which brings you to this screen:



Which has your custom meta tag.  I have whited out most of the content from mine out so that nobody can hijack my profile and redirect to, what else, spam.  (Hidden underneath the white bar is a long string of  letters and numbers.  You'll have your own unique string.)  Copy the entire line, from "< meta name" to "/ >." (I had to add spaces so Blogger wouldn't interpret this as code; don't change it or add spaces.)

Now go to your Blogger edit page.



Click on "Template" on the lower left.  When you are on the template page, click "edit html."  You will receive a dire warning that you are going to ruin your blog for all time and plus the zombies will come if you edit your own html.  Accept this risk.  We will be very careful.



Once the html window is open, look for < head > (with no spaces).  It is only a few lines down, you don't have to dig.  Put your cursor at the end of < head > and press enter to go to a new line.  This is just to keep things neat, not for a special coding reason.  Then paste the entire line of code you copied from Pinterest, your meta tag.  Once that's done, hit "Save template."  You don't need to refresh your blog or do anything further in Blogger.

Background:  A meta tag is a little piece of code that talks only to other machines.  It has no effect on what a real person sees and will have no effect on your blog.  Meta tags have been (ab)used, for instance, to list a popular search term over and over again.  When a machine crawls the web looking for results relevant to a search term, why lo and behold this here webpage talks about this search term endlessly!  So it became the most popular page for that search term.  The webcrawlers and indexers quickly caught onto this spammer scam (spammers again!) so don't get any ideas.  This is just to explain what metatags do.  They tell machines what's on your blog, among other things.



Once that's taken care of, go back to Pinterest and hit "Click here to complete the process."  It will look around your blog for a second and if all went according to plan...



You win!

You can keep the metatag in your template, or delete it once you've been verified.  I don't know Pinterest's plans for repeated verification; I'm just going to leave the tag so I don't have to do this again in the future.

PS If you'd like to be my friend or whatever we call ourselves over there on Pinterest you can find me here.

PPS Also please tell me if you can't pin from my blog.  I did something at Flickr a while back that should have fixed it, but I have no way of knowing because I'm always me, at least as far as Google/Flickr/Pinterest are concerned.

Pattern Review Photo Posting

I have posted this information at least a dozen times on Pattern Review, so to save myself the trouble I am making this a blog post so I can refer people to it. Sorry for the housekeeping, regular readers! Just skip over this.



There are two places you might want to post photos on PR: in your review and on the message board. I will explain both.

However, for either one, the first thing you have to do is host your photos somewhere online. They must be uploaded to an internet server. PR cannot reach into your computer to display your photo to the other users anytime they want to see it (a good thing!--you don't want other people to be messing around in your computer). Instead, PR will query the server where your photos are stored in the internet. Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket are free hosts. PR offers a very small amount of space to members, about enough to hold 15 medium (600 px or so on either dimension) photos. Some internet service providers include some hosting space in their packages.

It doesn't matter what size your photos are, as long as your host will accept that size.

Once you have uploaded your photo, you need to find the photo's URL. The photo's URL is NOT the address of the webpage on which you view the photo, it is the address of the photo itself (when such a URL is pasted into the white bar at the top of your browser, you see a page that just has the photo and nothing else, like this. Do NOT click and copy the white address bar at the top of your browser. The URL will end in .jpg (with a few rare exceptions for other photo formats, such as .gif).

To clarify Alexandra's point: For pattern reviews, you are not *required* to use the photo's URL. if you use the URL of the webpage where the photo can be seen, rather than the URL of the photo itself, the link will work. When the review is opened and the reader clicks on the thumbnail at the top of the review, a new tab will open displaying the page where the photo can be seen. However, the shrink/magnify function in the gallery will not work.

Using the URL of the webpage where the photo can be seen, rather than the photo's .jpg URL, will NOT work on the message board. No photo will be displayed, and there will be no link generated.

The screencap below shows you how to do it in flickr. That is the hosting service I use; I do not know exactly how it's done in Picasa or Photobucket (users of those services, I'd be grateful if you had screencaps to donate).



The fabulous sewing community has come to the rescue for other services!

Sandi explains: With Photobucket, you can click on your picture's info and there are four options below the preview. Clicking on the URL will automatically copy it for use on PR. You can also right click the photo itself (any photo) and chose "Copy URL" from the options.

AllisonC investigated Picasa: You click on a photo and the information comes up on the right of the screen. Under Tags, click on "Link to this Photo" and it will give you 2 options. One for linking [the webpage on which the photo is displayed] and one for embedding the image [the photo's URL].

Another Picasa method from jenleeC:  Right click on the photo and select "Properties". A box will pop up and in the middle of the box the "Address: (URL)" can be seen. Copy and paste this your PR review.



ADDING PHOTOS TO A REVIEW

There are two steps to putting a photo in a review: the larger photo that displays when clicked and the tiny thumbnail that displays in the gallery.

First, the larger photo



When you are first drafting a review, the screen above displays before you get to the actual review form.  Copy the photo's URL, the one that ends in .jpg, into the box indicated in the screencap above.

The URL is required for the shrink/magnify function in the review gallery to work.  You can enter the web address where the photo is displayed in this box (something like this: www.flickr.com/photos/7573004@N06/6809614993/), but the shrink/magnify function will not work.

You can add this later if you miss this screen!  Enter the URL into the box called "Finished Garment Photo URL" in the review form.  It is circled in orange two photos below (the one that shows you how to add a thumbnail to a review).

Second, the thumbnail. When you have finished your review or when editing your review, you need to upload a photo from your computer to be the thumbnail in the gallery. Yes, this is confusing because I just said you have to host your photo somewhere on the internet. PR hosts this tiny 100 by 100 px photo on its own servers. PR automatically resizes your photo to 100x100 so you do not have to do anything about the size of the photo (but keep in mind that anything but a square will be cropped funny--it's best to start with a square; more on that here).  If you do not upload a thumbnail, your review will not display in the review gallery.  It will go to the review list, but the vast majority of PR users look at the gallery rather than the list.

The can be uploaded in one of two places.

This is how you add a thumbnail to a review on the first go-round. This screen appears after you have published your review or saved it as a work in progress.  Click on the photo to enlarge so you can follow the five steps:




If you miss that screen, don't worry. You can edit the review and add a thumbnail in edit mode.

 This is how you add a thumbnail to a review you are editing (see also, the top item circled, which is how you add the shrink/enlarge URL link if you missed it when first creating your review):




ADDING PHOTOS TO A MESSAGE BOARD POST

In addition to reviews, you might want to put a photo in a message on the message board. Now, for posting on the message board, the size of your photos DOES matter. Huge photos are not automatically resized and you end messing with the formatting. The photo hosts listed above allow you to get code for various sizes of the same photo. You want one that is no more than about 500 pixels wide. The default image size on Flickr is a good size for the message board, though I sometimes go a little smaller if it's not a detailed photo.

To post an image on the message board, you must be in "full post" mode you can't use the "quick post" box at the bottom of the page. Either hit "reply" to a message in the thread or hit "post reply" on the lower right below the posts.

Once you have the full post window open, click on the button that says "Image" above the text box on the right. Then enter the URL of the photo (ends in .jpg) in the dialog box that appears. Once you press "enter," the formatted html will automatically appear at the bottom of your post. If you intended to insert the photo in the middle of your text, well, it still goes to the bottom. Go down there and highlight the code, which will say something like < IMG SRC='xxxxxx.jpg'> (extra spaces added so blogger wouldn't read that as code) and cut and paste to where you'd like it to be.



Do note if you're using the PR photo album, that the code provided for displaying the image actually won't work on the message board.

In the photo album, when you click on "html" just to the right of the photo a window pops up. The second bit of code in red looks something like this (spaces added so it wouldn't be read as a link)

< img src = " http://www.friendsofpr.com/nicegirl/IMG_2414.jpg " border="0" alt="photo" >

However, the message board html uses the single quote rather than the double quote, and doesn't accept the border data.

So copy that text, paste it into your message and then edit the text to change the " to ' and delete the
border="0" alt="photo"

Make sure that there is not a space between your .jpg' and your closing bracket >

I can't demonstrate what the code should look like because it will be formatted, but with spaces it should look like this:

< img src = ' http://www.friendsofpr.com/nicegirl/IMG_2414.jpg ' >

In real life, the only space in the code should be between img and src. When the auto-format Image button is used IMG SRC is capitalized, but that *shouldn't* make a difference.

Alternatively, you can just copy the http://www.friendsofpr.com/nicegirl/IMG_2414.jpg part of the code, the photo's URL, and then use the "Image" button as illustrated above.


I provided this information on PR here.

Please let me know if you have any more questions and I will add to this post if needed.

Pattern Giveaway Winner and Flickr Tutorial

I forgot to announce the Butterick 5451 big collar wrap dress pattern giveaway winner! It was a little hard to tell who was entering but based on my best guess of who entered the random number winner is

Stoffhamster!

============

I recommended a while back that you regularly check your recent activity on flickr to make sure the flickr nasties haven't gotten to you. It is an easy process to block unsavory users and I make a practice of it. To be clear, this does NOT prevent them from seeing your photos. The only way to prevent someone from seeing your photos is to make them private. But that means you can't share them with the sewing community either. I have made the decision to make my photos public knowing that they can be seen by flickr nasties; you have to make your own decision.

Anyway, when I brought it up I figured I'd do some screencaps the next time the opportunity arose and lo and behold! It has arisen. As always, click on the photos to see them larger.




When you are signed in to flickr, there is line of options across the top with drop-down menus. Click on "You" and find "Recent Activity." Clink on this and it will bring you to a list of recent comments, photo favorites, and person favorites. I like to check this anyway to see new comments--sometimes people ask questions in comments and I try to answer them.





Look at the names of people in your recent activity. The flickr nasties are usually pretty obvious, like this most recent "Sexy Satin Lining." That's probably not someone I want aggregating my photos! I don't check out everyone who has favorited a photo because often it's clear they are fellow sewists, such as if they favorite a photo of a pattern alteration. But if the name is ambiguous or they seem to be favoriting a certain kind of photo (the turtleneck fetishists are surprisingly numerous) I dig a little deeper.


Clicking on the person's name brings you to their photostream. Often, the flickr nasties keep their photostreams private. Because they are realllllly into respecting privacy. Yeah, right. This one was unusual in that their photostream is public. Be ready to avert your eyes when you get to the photostream. Some of them are graphic. The blocking option is on the person's profile page, so click on "Profile."






Once you're on the profile page, click on the option for "Block this person."






Blocking is a two step process. First, you must click the checkbox at the bottom of the list of things blocked persons may not do. Then hit the "Block" button. Once you hit the "Block" button, flickr gives you a pop-up asking if you're sure. That way you won't accidentally block a friend. Say ok and the deed is done.




As you can (sort of) see, when you block someone they can't
-comment
-favorite you
-favorite your photos
-add your photos to their albums or galleries
-contact you through private message

They can still see your photos, but they can't collect them, they can't find you or your photos easily by looking on their favorites list (unless they bookmark them in their browser--these people are after volume and I seriously doubt they'll go to the trouble), and they can't send you a message. I appreciate flickr for creating such a comprehensive blocking system! I highly recommend you take advantage of it. You can see all these photos in my Tech Support album.