How to change internal links when you chance your blog's web-address

This article is about how to change internal cross-reference links in your blog, if you change your blog's URL or web-address.

Blog Name vs Blog Address

Your blog has two "names".

The blog title is what you type into the Title field when you create a new blog.   It is displayed in your header (unless you've replaced it with a picture), and in the title-bar of the browser window when someone reads your blog.  It does not need to be unique:  you can make a blog with the same name that anyone else has already used.

The web-address, also called the URL or just address is quite different. You select in the Address field when you create a new blog - but it's not just a matter of typing in what you want.   Web-addresses must be unique, so as you type in a possible URL Blogger says "checking availability" - and if someone else already has what you have entered, it says

Sorry, this blog address is not available.

and you have to keep trying until you find a blogspot URL which is not already taken.

Usually the blog-title and blog web-address are very closely related.   For example, the name of this blog is Blogger-hints-and-tips, and the web-address is www.Blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com.  And they may be even more closely related if you have a custom domain, eg

Title / Name: Rustling.org
Web-address: www.Rustling.org

In this case, I've made the blog-name slightly geeky (with a .org on the end) to make it more memorable.

Changing title vs changing address

You can change the blog-name at any time, using the Settings > Basic > Title tab.   Doing this has no effect on any links in you posts or widgets.  (Although it may confuse people who find your blog by searching for the name rather than for the web-address - which is a good reason to encourage them to become subscribers, instead.)

You can change the blog-address using the Settings > Basic > Publishing tab.   Just like the original URL, whatever you change it to has to be unique, ie not one that anyone else has used.

Sidenote:  If you want to use an address that a different Google account, eg a friend, used to have, then you need to transfer the ownership:  having the previous owner delete a blog is not enough to release the blogspot address for someone else to use.

But if you change the blog-address, then any existing links to your blog become dead, ie they stop working and anyone who tried to follow them gets a 404 error. This applies to both external links (eg on other people's blogrolls or Google's search index) and to internal links (when you have a link to one post inside another post or gadget)

What happens if change your blog's web-address

If you change your blog's web-address, then Blogger changes the links in your Pages gadget that point to your pages.

But Blogger will not change any other internal links in your blog. This includes:

• Links in your Pages gadget that were added as External web-addresses - even if those web-addresses are posts or pages in your blog.
• Links in one post that point to another one (called cross-links)
• Links in your other gadgets - including LinksList gadgets and HTML/Javascript ones.

Therefore all these links will break if you change your blog's web-address.    If someone tries to follow one of these links they get a message like this:

Blog has been removed

Sorry, the blog at yourOldAddress.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.

However gadgets which calculate links (eg Blogger's Popular Posts, or the third-party widgets like LinkWithin) do keep working, because the they get the current link of your posts when they need them rather than keeping a stored copy.   (That said, ones that rely on your RSS feed to for information may stop working correctly.)

And of course Blogger will not change links to your blog that are in other people's blog-posts or gadgets.

This is why it's A Very Good Idea to get your blog name - including a custom domain if you want one - right before you start writing posts with cross-links.

Relative addressing and the Blogger Post Editor

Some people have asked if it is possible to internal links (ie links from one post to another) as

/12/2013/how_to_do.html

instead of

www.my_blog_name.blogspot.com/12/2013/how_to_do.html

So that if they change the blog-address, the links will still work.

However Blogger's Post Edit does not support relative addressing, so this isn't possible: If you enter a link as

/12/2013/how_to_do.html

 then when you you publish the post it is changed to

http://0.0.0.12/2013/how_to_do.html     (if you add the link in compose mode), or

http://yourWebAddress/12/2013/how_to_do.html     (if you add the link in HTML mode).

(I think this is a change from Blogger's previous behaviour from when I last investigated this issue:  previously it changed the links to something like http:/blogger.com/12/2013/how_to_do.html - and of course this doesn't work either.)

How to change internal links in your posts when you change blog-address

Unfortunately Blogger doesn't provide any tool to automatically update all internal links in your posts when you change blog-address.

Instead, you have to manually:

• Edit each post, 
• Look at it in HTML mode and 
• Find-and-replace any links. 

The only slight automation is that you can do the find-and-replace by copying the entire post-contents to a text-editor like Notepad, using the Replace tool there, and then copying the entire post contents back to the post editor.

Some people have asked if it's possible to do this by:

• Exporting all your posts using the Export Blog tool on the Settings > Other > Export Blog option
• Opening the exported file in a text editor, and changing all the links with the Find-and-Replace tool.
• Deleting all the posts from your blog
• Importing from your export file, after it's been edited.

However this won't work because Blogger remembers the address of each individual post, even after they're deleted.   It won't give the same URL to another post, ever.  Instead, it puts some numbers on the end, to make the URL unique. For example, when I tested this:

http://myTestBlog.blogspot.com/2014/07/sweet-retroo.html

became

http://myTestBlog.blogspot.com/2014/07/sweet-retroo_19.html

You could use the custom-re-directs feature to repoint each old post-url to the new one, it would probably be quicker overall to simply edit each post.

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Related Articles:

How to edit a post you have already published

Adding a Pages gadget to your blog

Setting up a custom domain for Blogger

Giving another Blogger account access to an address that you own

Find things in your blog-posts' HTML by using temporary "marker text"

This article shows how to use "marker text" to help find things when you need to edit the HTML code behind one of your blog posts.

When you edit a post in Blogger, to start with you generally use the Compose mode, which shows you the formatted view of how your work will look.

But behind that formatted view, every post is actually written in HTML, ie Hyper-text Markup Language - a type of computer language that uses tags like <h2> or <a href="www.foo.com">  to say how to display the contents.

A number of articles, here and in other blogger-helper blogs tell you how to do thing by changing the HTML for the post. But if you are not used to working with HTML, it can be confusing tryign to fix the part that you need to change.

Marker-text is a technique that you can use to "mark" problem areas while you are still in Compose mode, so that you can easily find them again when you are in Edit HTML mode.

How to use marker-text to fix a problem in your post

Start to prepare or edit your post in the usual way.

Go to the place just before the problem you want to fix or change you want to make.

Add some extra blank lines.

In the middle of the extra blank lines, put a few characters or a word that do not occurr anywhere else in your post. I quite often use XXX - but you can use any letters, characters or numbers, for example PROBLEM JUST AFTER HERE or 12345.

Use the copy function to put the text you added (without the blank lines)into your computer's memory.

Optional: Go to the place just after the problem you want to fix or change you want to make, and add some more text eg PUT IT BEFORE HERE

Switch to Edit HTML mode, using the button at the top-left of the post editing window.

Start the "find" feature in your web browser:

• ctrl / f in Chrome
• ctrl / f in Internet Explorer

In the search box that opens, use Paste (ctrl / v) to put the exact marker text that you entered into the Find box, and press enter.

The post-edit window will scroll to the place where your marker text is, and it will most likely be highlighted.

You have now found the place where you need to work, so you can now make the HTML changes required.

Once you have fixed all the issues, switch back to Compose mode using the tab in the top left hand corner, and remove all the marker text and extra blank lines that you added.

Good Practise

You will be removing the marker text before you publish your post.

But just in case you accidentally click Publish before you mean to, only use text that would not be embarrassing if some of your readers accidentally see it.

Some RSS readers will see the contents of your post as they are when you first hit Publish, even if you edit them less than two minutes later.)

Leaving your Marker Text in Place

If you might need to find the same place in your post's HTML again, then instead of removing your marker-text, you may just want to comment it out.

To do this, put these characters before it:

<!-- 

and these characters after it

 -->

So it might look like this

<!-- START OF PROBLEM1 HERE -->

Make sure you get the spaces - highlighed in yellow   as well as both of the "-- characters.

If you do this, then you will not be able to see or find your Marker Text when you are in Compose Mode, but you will be able to see and find it when you are in Edit HTML mode.

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Related Articles:

How to edit a post you have already published

Using cut, copy and paste in the Blogger post editor

The Blogger-helpers search tool

Adding tooltips or hover text to Blogger posts and gadgets

This article is about putting a "tooltip" (text that is shown when you hover over) into something (eg text, a web-address or even a picture) in a Blogger post or gadget.

What are tooltips?

Tooltips are a feature found in many websites and modern computer based software:  when a viewer hovers their mouse over an item, a small piece of text is shown, generally formatted in a box which is highlighted in some way.

They can be used for all sorts of things, to provide definitions of technical or foreign-language words, additional information about particularly interesting concepts - or as an incentive or invitation to take an action  eg you could tool-tip "click here to enter" with a description of the prize or benefits of entering.)

You can see them in Blogger's Post Editor when you put your mouse over an item in the toolbar.

But tool-tips can be used on other things too, including pictures and text: put your mouse over This Text to see one.

They can be particularly useful if you want to provide a translation for a few words from another language, or a definition for technical terms, but don't have enough to make a glossary worthwhile.

How to add a tool-tip in Blogger

Open the Post (etc) that you are working on.


Create the item that you want the tool-tip to be on (it may be text or a picture).


Select the item, and use the Link button on the toolbar to set up a link for it.  (Do this even if you don't want it to end up linked to anything - you can remove the link part alter on.)


Go into HTML mode (top right side of the editor toolbar), and find the HTML for the item.  
Hints:

• Use the find feature in your brower - it may be helpful to temporarily put some marker text just before and after the item.

• If you want to put a tooltip into a text gadget - just put the text into an HTML gadget instead, and that way you will be able to work in HTML mode.

• The HTML for the item will have this sort of structure:
  

  <a href="Your Link" > Your item text ... </a>

  or it may be like this if your item is a picture:
  

  <img border="0" src="URL FOR YOUR PICTURE" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" />

  or even like this if it's a picture that's linked:
  

  <a href="Your Link" img border="0" src="URL FOR YOUR PICTURE" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" </a>

Add  title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" to the HTML, so it becomes something like:

<a href="Your Link" title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" > Your item text ... </a>

or, if the item is a picture:

<a href="Your Link" img border="0" src="URL FOR YOUR PICTURE" title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" </a>

If you don't want the item to be linked, remove the href="Your Link"
part of the statement, so the HTML becomes similar to:

<a title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" > Your item text ... </a>

or, if the item is a picture:

< img border="0" src="URL FOR YOUR PICTURE" title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" />

If you're working in the post-editor, return to Compose mode (top right of the Post Editor window), so that you aren't faced with HTML the next time you edit a post.

Formatting unlinked text that has tooltips.

If you put hover-text on words that aren't linked to anything, it's good to give them a different format so that readers know to mouse-over them to see the hover-text.    For example

When you visit Ireland, you will undoubtedly experience rain, ceol and great craic.

To do this:


1   Add this CSS rule to your blog's template  (See Adding a new CSS rule to your template if you need help with this):

.toolTippedText {
   border-bottom: 1px dotted red;
}

2   While editing your Post (etc) to add the hover-text, also add this class statement

class="toolTippedText" 

to every URL which has title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" added to it.  So the full statements become

<a href="Your Link" title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" class="toolTippedText"> Your item text ... </a>

or, if you don't want the text to actually be linked to anything:

<a title="YOUR HOVER TEXT" class="toolTippedText"> Your item text ... </a>

It probably doesn't make sense to add a font-decoration like this to tool-tipped images - though it can be done in exactly the same way.


If you don't like using red dots as the way to highlight text that has hover-text, there are other rules you can add to your template.  For example to get a solid underline in the same colour as the text font, use:

.toolTippedText {

 text-decoration:underline;

}

There is more information about some of the options for formatting a line in this article.

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Related Articles:

Adding a new CSS rule to your template.

Adding a horizontal line between blog-posts - including CSS line formatting options

Using marker-text to find places in your HTML

Changing the author for a published blog-post

This article explains how to change the author of a post that has already been published in Blogger.

Blogger posts and changing post-authors

When you Publish a post in Blogger, a number of features are set up for the post, as well as the contents.  These include:

• The URL / web-addresss where the post can be found
• The post date/time when it was published
• The post-author (which is now set the first time that the post is Saved, ie even before it is published.)
• The labels that apply to it.

Some of these can be changed by editing the published post.

But there are some features that cannot be altered after they are set.

In particular, Author is not changed even if a different Google account is used to edit the post - or if the original author has their permission to write to the blog removed.

This can lead to interesting situations on multi-author blogs, especially when one writer leaves the team and perhaps even deletes their Google account.   Because of this, some blog owners choose to not show the "Posted-by" - but even if it's not displayed it is handy for the administrator if they can see the correct owner for individual posts.

When someone asks how to change the posted-by (ie author) value, the simple, and correct, answer is "You can't."

But there is a way to make it look like the author has been changed, so that only the most eagle-eyed readers will be able to tell the difference.

How to change the author of an existing blog-post

In short, you need to make a new post with the same contents, and then use a custom-redirect so that anyone who tries to look at the old post (eg by following a link to it) is automatically taken to the new post.

Follow these steps:

You need to take note of several values during this procedure, which are used later on. It may good to open a text-editor (eg Notepad) before you start.


1   Look at the URL of the existing post, and note the part that is fro the single-slash after your blog's name,  For example in

http://www.Example.blogspot.com/2012/06/my-post-title   

the part you are looking for is the bold part, ie "/2012/06/my-post-title" - including the single slash a the start.



2    Edit the existing post, go to the HTML tab and

• Copy the contents (like you would if you were copying a post from one blog to another). 
• Note the value under Options > Line Break, which is either use <br> tag or Pressenter for a new line.

3    Log in to Blogger with the account that you want to use as the new post author-name.


4    Create a new post, and make sure you have the same setting under Options > Line breaks, to be sure that you get the spacing right.


5   Edit the post to be just like the old one:

• Put the HTML that you copied into in the HTML view of the new post.
• Apply any Labels or Location values that applied to the old post.
• Make the title the same as it was in the old post.
• Change the date to the same as the old post.

6   Make the URL of the new post similar but not quite the same:

• Put the value you found in 1 step into the custom-permalink field. 
• Add some text to it so that it is not the same as the original value,
  eg make "my-post-title" into "my-post-title1"

7   Publish the post and  note the part of  the post-URL from the single-slash after your blog's name


8   Set up a re-direct from the old post to the new post:

• Go to Settings > Search Preferences
• Edit the Custom Redirects
• Add a new redirection (only needed if you already have some)
• Enter the value from step 1 into From
• Enter the value from step 7 into To
• Tick Permanent
• Click the save link for this particular re-direction, and then the Save Changes button.

9   Check your blog, to make sure that the re-direction is working correctly.


10  Once you are happy that the re-direction is working correctly, delete the old post.
You will need either the existing author account, or a Google account with administrator rights, to do this.   If SEO matters for your blog, then it is good to do it as soon as you can, so you are not penalized for having duplicate content.

What your readers will see

Everyone who is subscribed to your blog's RSS-feed or follow-by-email gadget will see a new post.
(I you don't want this, turn your feed off before you start - but don't forget to turn on again when you are finished!)

Visitors who browse your blog posts will see the "old" post, with the new author, in the original place.

Visitors who try to go directly to the old post via an existing link or from search-engine results will automatically be re-directed to the "new" version of the post. Very observant ones may notice that the URL is slightly different from the original. Most won't.

A quicker way: get control of the original Author account

The method described is fiddly and tedious - especially if you want to change the author of many posts.

The only alternative that I can think of is to ask the original author if they still want the Google account  that they used to make the posts. If you are lucky they

• Don't want it, and 
• Are willing to hand the password over to you. 

In this case, you could

1. Quickly change the password (before they change their mind!), and
2. Edit their profile to the new author name that you would like to have displayed. You may also want to change some other details - and if they are using a Google+ profile and you already have one, then you should probably delete this.

This isn't a total solution, of course: no matter how you edit their profile, it will still be different to your own profile. But it may be better than nothing.

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Related Articles:

How to edit a post that has already been published

Understanding Google accounts

Copying a post from one blog to another

Giving someone permission to author posts

Changing the publication date for a blogger post

Setting the URL for Blogger posts

Why SEO doesn't matter for some blogs

How to link posts together in Blogger

This article shows how to link from a new blog post to one that you have already written. It is part of the Blogger-Basics series.

Sometimes, when you're writing a blog-post, you want to refer to a post you wrote before.

• It means that you don't have to repeat information, and can focus on writing it really well in just one place.
• It encourages visitors to read more than one post, and doesn't bore people who already know the related information..
• It's good for SEO (encouraging search-engines to give your blog a good place in their result lists)

For example, many of the posts here on Blogger-Hints-and-Tips are about how to get other tools (eg Facebook, Feedburner, AdSense) to work with Blogger:  in general these posts describe how to get some HTML code from the "other" site, and then how to install it into your blog. Originally, I repeated the "how to install" instructions in every post - but when Blogger changed how this was done, this meant I had to update dozens of posts.  To make this simpler the next time, I just wrote one post about installing third-party code into Blogger.

Follow these steps to link two posts together

1   Write the first post (the one you want to link to), and publish it. (You cannot link to it until after you have published it.)


2  Copy the URL / web-address of the first post.
The URL will start with https:// and then have your blog's url and the post information, like this:

http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2010/04/adding-separator-line-between-your.html

You can see the URL at the top of the browser in the address bar, when you choose to View the post from the list of posts in the Dashboaurd. Or you could right click on the View link and choose "copy target".

3  Edit the second post, ie the one where you want to put the link.


4  Find the text that you want to put the link on, and select it.

• This is called the "anchor text", because you attach your link to it.
• It's best if you use descriptive text like "worn with a formal dress" rather than words like "click here", because they help visitors and search engines know what the other article is about).

5  Click the Link icon in the toolbar: it's the one with the word  "link" on it - or in older versions of the Blogger software, it had a pictures that looked like a chain.   It also shows the word "link" if you hover the mouse over it.

6  In the window that opens, paste the address of the other post into the Web-address field.

7  At this point you can also choose whether clicking on the link shows the other post in the same window, or in a new one, using the "open in a new window" checkbox.
(Some people think it would be good to always open linked posts in a new window - but it can be very annoying for a user if they end up with a lot of open windows. Personally, I usually make links to my own site open in the same window, and links to other sites open in a new window.)


8  Click ok

What your readers will see

When someone reads the post that you put the link into, they will see your post in the normal way. The anchor-text (ie the linking-words that you chose) will be formatted in the same way that other links in your blog are formatted.

This is true for readers who are looking at your blog through a web-browser, and for ones who subscribe to your blog by email or who read it in a feed-reader.

When they click on the link, it will be opened in the way that you said - either in the same browser or in a new window.

Linking to or from other things?

In this article, we've talked about linking from one post to another post, using text.

You can also go back and re-edit your first post, and put a link to the second one in it - in exactly the same way as described above. (If you look at some more Blogger-Hints-and-Tips posts, you will see that I use lots of an lots of links to all sorts of posts.)

Or you could put the link onto a picture instead of onto text.

Or you might want to link to an email address, so that people can easily send you a message.

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Related Articles:

Getting started with blogger

How to edit a post that you have already published in Blogger

The follow-by-email gadget: a quick way to offer email subscriptions to your blog

Why do some blog-visitors use feed-reader software

Using a picture as the link-anchor in Blogger

How to show a working email address in your blog

How to remove the numbers in blogger post URL's

This article looks at the numbers that are in web-page addresses created by Blogger, what they mean and how you can influence them.

When you first publish a post, Blogger assigns a permanent web-address (aka an URL or a permalink) to the post.  I've previously explained how you can control the words used in this hyperlink.

And a common question from people who are researching SEO for their blog is "how do I get rid of the numbers in the post-URL?".

Unfortunately the answer is not as straighforward as most people hope for.

Numbers near the start of Blogger URLS

As described in setting the content of your post's permalink, the URL given to posts publisehd in Blogger shows the year and month of the original publication date for the post. I think this is because Blogger was originally set up as an on-line diary, with a lot of the features organised around the post-date.

Today, there are ways of giving your blog a home page, showing your posts in pages, and changing the order of the posts, which let your blog be a lot more than a date-ordered web-log.

Some blogging software (eg Wordpress) lets you choose the structure of the URLs which are used, eg leaving the date out totally, or puting it after the words.

However Blogger does not currently have any way to remove the date-part of the post URLs. And I could be wrong, but my best guess is that this will not change anytime soon.

So what options are available:

If you just don't want people to know the correct month and year of the post, then you can change the date before you publish the post for the the first time. Maybe make it something non-sensical (eg 1/1/1990). (However do remember that your RSS feed will show the actual date of publication, not the assigned date).

If you have some content where any month-and-year are particularly irrelevant, put it into a Page instead of a Post - because Page URLs don't contain a date. Remember that each blog can have no more than 20 pages, and that you need to give users a way to get to these Pages. Also remember that they are not sent out in your RSS feed, so subscribers won't see the content.

The third - and least attractive - option:  accept that this is how Blogger works and that you need to live with it or switch to another blogging tool.

Numbers near the end of Blogger URLS

Blogger puts digits at the end of post-URLs to make sure that each post ever published has a unique address.

Notice that I said "ever published": if you publish a post, then delete it, and then publish a second post with the same year, month and either title or customized-URL-words, then the second post's URL will have some digits put on the end, to stop it being the same as the first one.

Once a post is published, you cannot remove the digits. The only way to avoid them is to make sure that your post-URLs are unique. So if you publish a post and notice that it has digits on the end of the URL, your only option is to delete that post, and replace it with one which has a different publication date (don't forget to copy the post contents before you delete it!)

For example, if you publish and find that you get

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-07/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes01.html

you may want to delete the post, and republish the content in a post with a different date like

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-06/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes.html

Does it really matter?

Personally I'm not convinced that having numbers Blogger URL's is a problem.

If the content is so weak, and poorly linked to by other sites and social media that the presence of numbers in the URL is affecting visitor numbers, then it seems to me that there are more important things for you to be worrying about.

On the other hand, if your blog is already popular and well-optimized, and you're looking to get the last possible bit of SEO benefit - you'd be better off using your time to write even more good quanlity, unique, content so that your exisiting subscribers visit more often, instead of fussing over something that you cannot control.

Or am I mistaken?

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Related Articles:

Setting the custom-URL for a blog post

Giving your blog a home page

Putting Blogger posts into pages

How to set the date for a post

The difference between Posts and Pages

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Removing a post from your blog

Copy the contents between blog posts - and keep all the formatting.

How to set the URL for Blogger posts

This article shows how to use the Permalink options to control the URL used for a post in your blog.

URLs and Blog Posts

When you first publish a post in blogger, an URL (called a permalink in blogger) is automatically generated for that post. It looks like:

www.yourDomain/yyyy/mm/WORDS-ABOUT-MY-POST

In this URL:

• yourDomain is either your custom domain (eg fred-fish.com) or your blogspot domain if you aren't using a custom domain at the time (eg www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com)
• yyyy/mm is the year and month of the post's original publication date.

Until now, Blogger chose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-MY based on the title, or the first words in the post if the title was blank. They used some rules eg leaving out "the" and other common words, and putting numbers on the end so that every post has a unique URL (called a "permalink" in Blogger).

However Blogger have now provided a tool that lets you choose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST separately from the post-title.

How to change the customisable part of the URL for a post

1  Edit the post in the usual way.

2  In the Post Settings area (currently at the right hand side of the editor), there is a section called Permalink.

3   Click on Permalink to show the options in it.

4   Click the custom URL radio button

5   Type the words that you want to use in WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST into the Custom URL box

6   Click Done.

7   Finish the post, and Publish it.

Restrictions:

This is a one-time option for each post - you if you use the wrong words, or make spelling mistake, then there is no way to change it.

The only characters you can use are:

• lowercase letters (ie a, b, c ... z)
• uppercase letters (ie A, B, C ... Z)
• digits (ie 0, 1, 2 ... 9)
• underscore (ie _)
• dash (ie - )
• full-stop, also known as a period (ie .)

It looks like there is no restriction on the number of characters you can put into the URL.  For example, I was just able to make a post in my test blog, with this URL:  
http://bhat-draftarticlestore.blogspot.ie/2012/07/123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-.html
(you cannot see the post, because that particular blog isn't open for public reading.)


If the combinaton of yyyy-mm from post-date (which you can change - see Setting the Post Date) and WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-BLOG is not unique, Blogger will leave out the last character(s), and put in numbers to make it unique.

It only applies to Posts, not Pages:  the only way to influence the URL / permalink for a Page on your blog is to choose the initial words in the page-title very carefully.   (Ref:  the difference between Posts and Pages)

Why should you bother? What words should you use?

Firstly, it's only worth changing the custom words in your post-URL  if SEO matters for your blog.

If you think the change is worth it, then you need to think about what specific words
1) accurately reflect the content of your blog, and
2) are likely to be the words that people search for.

Unless you're a spammer, there is no point in making your post url www.myBlog/2012-07/hot-and-sexy-topic if your post doesn't have any content about hot-and-sexy-topic. (And if you are a spammer, you may as well leave Blogger now, before you get kicked off anyway.)

Leave out smaller filler words like "the" "a" "and" - unless they are relevant to the post-contents. For example include "the Who" if your post is about the band called The Who, but leave it out if your post is about the cats who can fly.

Lastly, many SEO experts (self-proclaimed and otherwise) say that dashes are better than dots or underscores. Only Google and Bing know if they'are correct or not. But it's probably a good idea to use xxx-yy-aaaa instead of xxx_yy_aaaa or xxx.yy.aaaa, just in case they are.

Changing the post-title after publication

Google's help-article about the custom-permalink feature says:

"because Blogger automatically creates the URL from information from your post title, your URL would change should you decide to edit the title. This would result in broken links, and fewer visitors to your blog"

This isn't the way Blogger worked before: until now, I often published a post with one title using the words I wanted in the URL, and then very quickly edit it and change the title to the words I wanted in the title. For example, for a recent post

• the URL is  http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2012/07/html-code-for-popular-gadgets-in.html
• the post-title is now:  Where to get the HTML code for popular gadgets in Blogger

I just tried this again in my test-blog, and found that it's still true: even if you change the title, the post URL doesn't change.

Changing the custom-URL words after publication

After you have hit the Publish button for the first time, there is no way change the permalink:  if you click on the Permalink option in Post Settings, you are shown the custom value that you chose, but you cannot change it.

Your only option in this case is to:

• move the post-contents to another new post, 
• set the custom-URL that you want for the new post
• delete the original post.

---

Related Articles:

How to change the date for a post

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Use a private blog to get your posts right before publish them

Linking your blog and the social networks

Moving material from one blog post to another

How to put a gadget into a post in Blogger

This article describes how to put a gadget into a blog post / page - or at least how to make it look like you have done so.

Gadgets and Blog-posts

Previously, I've explaiend how to add a gadget to your blog. In that post, I said that the only place where you could put a gadget was one of the areas defined by your template - basically the header, footer or sidebar.

For gadgets where you get the HTML or Javascript code from somewhere else, it's easy to add the code to a post - see adding code from external sources to your blog for more information.  But for gadgets from the Add a Gadget list, there is no way to do this.

But it's fairly easy to make it look like you have put a gadget into a post or page, provided you're willing to accept the risks of editing your template.

The way to do this is by putting the gadget below the blog-posts area, putting any further post-content into another HTML-gadget under this, and then setting both of these up to only show on the specific post or page that you want the gadget to be "in".

While this is tedious, I don't expect the restriction of putting gadgets inside posts to be changed anytime soon.   (Go on Blogger ... prove me wrong!)

Follow these steps to put a gadget into a post or page:

1)   Make the post or page
Give it a title, and if there is any content that you want to put above the gadget, then add it now.


2)   Publish the post / page.
If you use a Post, remember that it will go out in your RSS feed - and it could look strange for your subscribers to see a half-written post - make sure that what you'd doing is worth any confusion that this may cause.
And if you use a Page, you may need to adjust the Pages gadget to not show it, depending on what how visitors will access the page.

Despite these side-effects you need to publish the post/page now, before the gadget is added, because you need its address later on.   So take note of the URL of your published post.


3) Add the gadget to your blog in the usual way.
Position it immediately underneath the Blog Posts gadget. Find out the gadget-ID, and keep a note of it.


4) If there is any content that you want displayed after the gadget, then

• Use the post-editor (or any other tool) to generate the HTML code for this content 
• Add an HTML/Javascript gadget:  Put the code you made into the Content field, and position the gadget immediately underneath the gadget you added in step 3.
• Note the ID of this gadget, too.

5)   Set up which page/post your gadget is shown on:

Edit your template (don't tick the expand widgets checkbox).

For both of the gadget-IDs that you noted (the one that's going "inside" the post, and the one that contains the rest of the "post"),  change the template so that they are only displayed on the Page or Post that you created in the first step.

The way to do this is very similar to only showing a gadget on your home page, except that instead of

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'> 

the condition to use is

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "URL-OF-THE-POST-YOU-MADE"'>>

How well does it work?

I'm still testing to see how well this approach works, and what gadgets it's most suitable for.  Some, eg the Labels and Followers gadget, are likely to expand to fill the space available.   So will Search - though if it doesn't then it might be as easy to just use a custom-search-engine, which will give you the code.   AdSense gadgets will take the space required for the type of gadget you choose, but again it's probably simpler to just get the code from AdSense and put it into your post directly.

One issue I've found is that the gadget is left-aligned, and there is no way to make the "post" text flow around it if it doesn't take the entire post-width.

It may be possible to centre the gadget within the post, by putting this code around in in the template:

<div style='text-align: center;'>
<b:widget id='XXXn' locked='false' title='YOUR-GADGET-TITLE' type='Text'/>
</div>

That said, I haven't tried this yet, and there may be some extra things to think about here.   Let me know if it doesn't work, and I'll try to find a way to solve any problems.

---

Related Articles:

Adding a gadget to your blog

Finding the id for a gadget 

Using the post-editor or generate HTML

The Pages gadget:  a menu bar for Bloggers

Showing a gadget on your home-page and no other pages

Advantages and disadvantages of editing your template

Putting AdSense ads into posts

Styles on Blogger's post-editor menu bar

This article shows how the styles that can be applied in Blogger's style-bar look.

What do these styles do. 

By Vishraval (Own work) [Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

This week, without any announcements that I've seen, Blogger added a style drop-down to the menu bar.

I noticed it first on Thursday night (UCT) and have since confirmed that it's in both the new and old interfaces.

This small-but-important change makes it a lot easier to add SEO friendly "tags" to your blogger content.  

If you use the "header" style on some text, the HTML behind the post says

<h2>Some text</h2>

and "all" the SEO-gurus say that using H2's properly is important to rank well in search results.

However using these tags, by inserting them myself, is something I tried to do in the past, but gave up on because of issues with how  my posts looked in RSS-feed-readers and also for email-subscribers.

So I'm very interested to see how they work, and how they look for my readers.   And this post is a way to find out.


What do they look like?

The heading above this paragraph is done in my usual way, applying the largest size and bold to the text.   And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.

The menu-bar in the post editor now looks like this:

This is a heading

The heading above this paragraph is done with the "heading style".   In the post-editor, it makes the heading look like it's in "larger", ie not largest, with some extra padding above and below it.

Notice that it has the same formatting as my gadget headers and post-date. I don't like this at all - am waiting to see if it's something that Blogger changes (or maybe has already changed, but can't apply to my blog because I've edited the template a lot), or whether I need to work out how to assign different styles to them myself.

And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.  And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.

This is a sub-heading

The heading above this paragraph is done with the "sub-heading style".   In the post-editor, it makes the heading look like it's in "larger", ie not largest, with some extra padding above and below it.

And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.

And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.  And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.

The heading below this paragraph is done with the "minor style".   In the post-editor, it makes the heading look like it's bold, again with some extra padding above and below it.

This is a minor heading

• And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.
• And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.  
• And this is some more text to make the paragraph look fuller, so I can get a better idea of what the headings look like.

What your readers see:

That's what I'm trying to find out!

I thought about doing all this in a a test blog - where I would have needed to set up an RSS feed and an email subscription etc.   But that was a lot of work, and I figured that some of my readers might be interested in the results too.

I'll be looking at this post in my own email and in Google Reader.   But if you have any feedback on how they look in other feedreaders, I'm very keen to hear how they worked.    Ditto if you are reading this through any kind of assistive-technology software or screen reader.


Why have Google done this?

Since the new privacy policy was introduced, there's been a small-but-noticeable move towards other search engines.    In my blog-statistics, visitor traffic is coming from a wider range of places.    There's no one winner getting a lot of alternative traffic - and I certainly haven't seen more visitor from Bing or Yahoo!    But I suspect that Google have decided that a little bit of work to make our blogs more Google-SEO friendly would be a good idea.

What's why they announced the various options for "customising your search preferences" (which are nothing to do with your search preferences, and everything to do with how your blog looks in Google search results when other people search.

And I think it's why they've slipped in the style bar, while all the blogger helpers are busy trying to understand the implications of the search-preference change.

---

Related Articles:



Setting up Google Analytics for your blog

What is an RSS feed reader

Adding am email-subsription option to your blog.

Changing the Date for a Post

This article is about how to change the date of a post in Blogger.  It looks at where the date value is found, and what format is used to display and edit it.

Where is the post date (date/time) value kept?

Each Post (not but each Page) that you create in Blogger has a date and time associated with it.

• You can see the date (but not the time) in the Posts (new interface) or  Edit Posts (old interface) tab.

• You can see the date and time in the Post Editor, by clicking on Post Options link (old interface) or the Published on link (right-hand sidebar in the new interface):

  
How to set the post date (date/time) value

To change the date (or date-time) value for a Post:

1  Open the Post in the Post Editor


2  Click the Post Options link, which is near the bottom left of the page above the Publish button (old interface) or the Published on link (in the right-hand sidebar in the new interface):

This opens up the window to show various options that apply to the post.   The date-time is on the right.

Initially, the date-time is set to Automatic:  the post will be given a date-time when the Publish Post button is clicked for the first time.

3  Tick the Scheduled option (old interface) or Set date and time (new interface), which lets you edit the date.


Understanding the Date format:

Blogger does not (currently) have an option that lets you set the format of the date that is shown in the Post Options window:  the date-format under Settings / Formatting tab applies to inside posts only.

Therefore in the old (ie pre-Sept-2011) version of Blogger the date value you will see is in American date format.  This has:

• the month value first, 
• then the day value
• then the year value

To change the date, you need to use the same order.  For example, to set the date to 3 December 2009,

• the 12 goes first
• then the 3
• then the 09 for 2009

In the new (ie post Sept-2011) version of Blogger, they've removed the need to compensate for American date formats.  

Instead, we're shown a calendar to pick the date from, and it's displayed in with the year first,  So, for example, 2009-12-03 is shown for 3 December 2009.

Unfortunately this makes choosing a date sometime in the past difficult.   For example to set the date back to 1998 (which I've had to do recently for a historic blog about a choir), you need to do a lot of clicking.   And to make matters worse, when I tried it a couple of weeks ago the selected date value wasn't actually applied.   Hopefully this is something they'll fix soon.

Why set the date?

You may want to set the date if you are giving your blog a home page, or if you want to schedule a post to go live at some time in the future.


Is any other date information kept in Blogger?

You can work out the month and year when a post was first published by looking at its URL: this contains the original publication month and year.  For example, the URL of this post is

http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2009/12/changing-date-for-post.html

The bolded bit says that it was originally published in December (ie the 12th month) of 2009.   This URL is kept even if I change the values in "Post Date and Time"   (which I'm just about to do, to show when the article was last updated).

I think it's likely that Blogger also stores the exact publication date and time somewhere too (at least, to help them resolve DMCA copyright complaints), but don't know any way to access this.

---

Related Articles: 



The difference between Posts and Pages

Giving your blog a home page

Making one post always come up first

Taking action when someone has copied your blog

Editing published posts in Blogger

This article describes how to edit a post that has already been published in Blogger, using the new interface.

Where has the Edit Posts link gone?

Picture by RichTea
From Wikimedia Commons

Blogger's new user-interface (UI) was introduced in September 2011.   ("Interface" is just a long word for the part of Blogger that you use to do things.)

The new look has organised things in a slightly different way to the older (ie pre-September 2011) version of Blogger, and some functions are a little harder to find.

The Edit Posts link has been replaced by a list showing you all posts, and Edit links under each post in this list. These are the tools you need to use to change a post once it's already been published, for example to fix spelling errors, or add new information.


How to change a post that is already published:

Log in to blogger at http://www.blogger.com, using the Google account that wrote the post, or one that is an administrator for the blog
If you made the blog, then you are automatically the administrator for it to start with - so just use your normal Blogger account.


You can now see the Blogger Dashboard. If you are using the new interface it looks like this:

The section in the middle lists all the blogs that your account has access to.
Most people reading this article will only have one blog - at the moment - but it's worth understanding how extra ones look.


Each blog has one line in this section.   In the middle of the screen, beside the blog name, there are four icons (small pictures):

• A pencil (for write a new post)
• A stack of "papers" (for viewing your existing posts), which is right next to a drop-down arrow (for getting to the other blog -options)
• A button labelled "View Blog" (no prizes for guessing what it does!)   

Click on the stack of papers:  this opens a list of all your posts.

In the list, hover your mouse over the title of the post you want to edit.    The link will highlight (slightly) and you will see some links under the post-title. The links are

• Edit
• View  
• Share (this one only shows up if you've linked Google+ and the blog)
• Delete.

Click Edit:  this takes you to the post editor. Make the changes you want, Press the Update button at the top of the screen to save them. Job Done!


The quickedit pencil - a fast alternative

Depending on how your Post Template is set up, you may see a Quick Edit Pencil icon when you are reading a post.   If it is turned on, it will be either below the post-title, or at the bottom of the post above or below the contents. Clicking this icon takes you directly to the post-editor.

You will only see the icon if it's turned on for your blog (in Layout > Blog Posts, edit), and if you are logged in to Blogger using an account that is allowed to change the posts.

Your readers will never see it.


 Saving changes while you edit the post:

 Because you are working on a post that is already published, the "autosave" feature will not work. So if you are going to make a lot of changes, you may want to copy the post to a private or test blog.   There you can publish the post (ie save it properly) as often as you want, and no one will see the messy in-between-old-and-new stages.

 When you are finished, click the Publish button (near the top-centre of the screen)


What your readers see

Until you click Publish, the post that your readers see is the same as it originally was - no matter what changes you have made in the post editor.

If there is a post that you urgently need to "take down", then click the Revert to draft button (at the top of the screen, next to publish).   This makes the post unavailable until you next click publish:   in the meantime, anyone who tries to see it using a link will see this message:

Page not found Sorry, the page you were looking for in the blog YOUR BLOG TITLE does not exist.

Making changes to a post that you didn't write

Some people want to edit blog-posts that they were not the author of,  and which they do not have administrator access to.

The short answer is that you are not able to do this - you need to ask the post-author or blog-administrator do it for you.

However if the blog-post has copyright material, there may be some actions you can take.   And if you believe it breaks's Blogger's rules, you can report a terms of service violation.

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Related Articles:



Blogger, blogs and bloggers: Posts, pages and screens. Basic Blogger concepts.

How to move a post from one blog to another

Understanding Google accounts

Giving someone author access to your blog.

Planning changes to your blog - in private

Making a new administrator for a blog

Copyright, blogs and bloggers