Saturday, January 24, 2015

Eliminate white background from text in Blogger

Sometimes I copy and paste an article into blogger, it looks great before it's posted, but appears with strips of white behind the text when the article is posted. This may be avoided by pasting the copied text into "Notes" on a Windows PC and then recopying it. But, "Notes" will strip out pictures and links as well, which is a real pain. So here is another solution that may work out better: using a not so obvious "unformat" option in Blogger.

Embedly: How to embed media that has no embed code

Today I wanted to embed a news article into I blog that I manage. But the site had no embed code generator. I came across "Embedly" and was able to create an embed code that worked fine. Here is an example: Mini Meditations The process is simple. Simply paste the URL of the desired site into the embed code generator and BAM! you have the code you need to embed the article into your blog post.

There are a few caveats: The article does not appear full length but has a "read more" feature. When your readers click on the embedded article, they will be transported out of your website to the site hosting the original article. They will also be exposed to any advertising that may be surrounding that article. And those ads change, by the way. Your readers may be offended by ads that you never even saw, because they were not on the site when you first shared the article. Not everyone understands how the internet works and they may hold you accountable for what happens on a site run by somebody else.

Because of these two factors (readers being taken away from your site and potentially being blamed for something that is not under your control), simply cutting and pasting the text of articles may be a better option. But for the times when you do need a utility to generate embed code for your blog, Embedly will the job and do it well.