This is a rephrasing of my original question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14516983/google-sites-trying-to-script-announcements-page-on-steroids:
I've been looking into ways to make subpages of a parent page appear in a grid like "articles" on the home page of my Google Site — like on a Joomla home page and almost like a standard "Announcements" template, except:
The articles should appear in a configurable order, not chronologically (or alphabetically).
The first two articles should be displayed full-width and the ones beneath in two columns.
All articles will contain one or more images, and at least the first one should be displayed.
The timestamp and author of each subpage/article shouldn't be displayed.
At the moment I don't care if everything except the ordering is hardcoded, but ideally there should be a place to input prefs like the number of articles displayed, image size, snippet length, css styling etc.
My progress so far:
I tried using an iframe with an outside-hosted Javascript (using google.feeds.Feed) that pulls the RSS feed from the "Announcements" template, but I can't configure the order of the articles. One possibility would be to have a number at the beginning of every subpage title and parse it, but it's going to mess up with time and the number would also be visible on the standalone article page. Or could the number be hidden with Javascript?
I tried making a spreadsheet with a row for each article with columns "OrderId", "Title", "Content", "Image" and process and format the data with a Google App Script (using createHTML and createImage), but a) there doesn't seem to be a way to get a spreadsheet image to show up inside the webapp and b) these articles are not "real" pages that can be linked to easily on the menus.
This feature would be super-useful for lots of sites, and to me it just seems odd that it isn't a standard gadget (edit: or template). Ideas, anyone?
I don't know if this is helpful, but I wanted something similar and used the RSS XML announcements feed within a Google Gadget embedded into my sites page
Example gadget / site:
http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/105840169337292240573/CBC_news_v3_1.xml
http://www.cambridgebridgeclub.org
It is badly written, messy and I'm sure someone could do better than me, but it seems to work fairly reliably. The xml seems to have all the necessary data to be able to chop up articles, and I seem to remember it has image urls as well, so can play with them (although not implemented in my gadget).
Apologies if I am missing the point. I agree with your feature request - it would be great not to have to get so low-level to implement stuff like this in sites....
Related
I have a question regarding the latest core web vitals. How exactly it works on a HTML static website with a lot of pages? I made some tests, but the results which I get are really weird. Are these results related to the whole website or only to that page, in my case the frontpage? I also removed a lot of elements to test that, but the result wasn't changes.
And another thing which confuse me .. on one side, google recommend to avoid shifts, but when there are adsense (which is also a product from google), there must be a shift. So, how you are handling that?
I'm working on a site to help students with ACT prep, and I want to have a page where I can post explanations to questions that people submit. I want to be able to put a few tags on each post so that site visitors can click on or search whatever's relevant for them in the archives ("semicolons", "geometry", etc.) and all the relevant posts will come up, blog style. I'm very new to this, though, and I don't know how to do it or even what to search - when I search for tags I keep getting SEO recommendations, and that doesn't seem like the right thing.
Here's a solution (but it's not great)
It might be the only way to make what you want happen with a static HTML site.
You could, by hand, create pages that you fill with links to all of the posts that fit a certain category or "tag". For example, you could make a page that has links to all of your posts concerning geometry. Lets call this your archive page for geometry.
Then, when you include tags in a post, you would make each tag link to it's corresponding archive page.
Why do I say its not the best solution?
Virtually every blog that you see has a "back end" with a database that stores posts. When someone comes to your website and looks at a post, that posts data is inserted into a template and displayed to the user. You do not have to re-write the entire web page every time. Thing like the header, sidebar, footer, main page background etc are all in a template.
Having a database also lets you search the database and return relevant results. And a blog with a back end will typically let you write rules (or have them already written) that say, when you add a "tag" to a post, a link to that post should be automatically added to an archive page etc.
As far as I can tell you don't have database, so you'll just be linking static HTML pages. That means that every time you make a new post, you'll have to add a link to all of it's relevant archive pages by hand. Maybe you don't mind that now, but eventually it will be a nightmare to maintain.
I would strongly encourage you to look into a blogging platform like Wordpress to make your site. It will be more complicated to learn at first, but technology that's meant to do what you want it to do will ultimately be easier to use and maintain than technology that's simply meant to mark up a page.
There is a website called file2hd.com which can download any type of content from your website including audio, movies, links, applications, objects and style sheets. Of course this doesn't work for high profile websites such as Google, but is there there a type of method I can use to cloak content on my website and prevent this?
E.g. Using a HTML Code, or using .htaccess method?
Answers are appreciated. :)
If you hide something from the software, you also hide it from regular users. Unless you have a password-protected part of your website. But even then, those users with passwords will be able to fetch all loaded content - HTML is transparent. And since you didn't provide what kind of content are you trying to hide, it's hard to give you a more accurate answer.
One thing you can do, but it works just for certain file types, is to server just small portions of a file. For example, you have a video on your page and you're fetching 5-second bits of the video from the server every 5 seconds. That way, in order for someone to download the whole thing, they'd have to get all the bits (by watching the whole thing) and then find a way to join the parts... and it's usually just not worth it. Think of Google Maps... and Google uses this/similar technique on a few other products as well.
It's for a while I'm researching on the microformat for styling my site information different in google result page.
I found some detail about microformat in this links:
http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard-authoring#The_Importance_of_Names
http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/add-microformats-magic-to-your-site
http://microformats.org/get-started
that will have result like this :
Now, I'm trying to find out could I manipulate microformats to force google show my site information in result page, just like do it for stackoverflow or other most popular sites :
Or Is it possible to do that...?!?!?
Thanks in advance...
You can't force Google to show your website and sub pages like the Stack Overflow example you posted. Your search term was stackoverflow and so the information displayed on the results page was far and away the most relevant. Hence why it displays like that.
If someone searched for your website by name you might get a result like that. You'll need to submit an xml sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, give it time to index and hopefully your website name will be unique enough.
I guess the main thing is that your website is first on Google's results page for a given search term and the sitemap shows Google what your other pages are.
With respect to microdata - it's really good for giving extra information to search engines. The CSS-tricks one is a perfect example. You'd need a Google+ profile and using the microdata specify that profile as the author.
Again, Webmaster Tools has some great Microdata validation tools. You can even load your pages source code up, highlight the text you want to tag and it'll show you exactly what tags to add and how so it works. Link below:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/
I had a food takeaway website where the users can search the restaurants by giving their area name. I want my website's LONDON search page to be listed when user searches in Google TAKEAWAYS IN LONDON.
I think google doesn't crawl websites with query string. How can we achieve that?
Remember that Google just looks at the page you create, not how you create it.
Now this basically translates your question to "how do we make our dynamic pages visible to Google"? There are a number of tricks. Basically you build links from your homepage to specific other pages. You could have a "Top 5 searches" box, with links to "http://www.example.com/london/takeaways" etc. On the result pages, you can have links to similar queries, e.g. "http://www.example.com/london/finedining".
Basically, Google will see and follow those links, and remember the results per URL. The basic SEO rules till apply - good content, clear structure, etc. Don't bother Google or users with query strings. Use URL rewriting if a query string easier for you internally.
Maybe you're supposed to have a sitemap, which could have a discoverable link to a page of yours whose URL is http://www.food.com/london and whose title and heading is 'TAKEAWAYS IN LONDON' (and whose contents you can retrieve dynamically).