"HOW" - "HOW TO" - "HOW DO"

This article is about how you can save a  post even if Blogger's Publish button won't let you save your work. Imagine you've been working on a Blogger post for several hours.    It's finally ready: you've got the wording exactly right, everything is formatted with bold, italics and bullet-points, your pictures and links are all correct, etc.    But then your internet connection stops working.   Or you click the Publish button - and get a message like  "Post cannot be saved due to HTML errors".   You can't work out how fix the problem, and you need to stop working on it now ! This may seem like a disaster - hours of work wasted. But luckily there's a very easy way to save your work, and tools to help you diagnose problems. Saving your work and recovering it later How to save the post that you have written Switch to Edit HTML mode (this is a tab at the top left corner of the editing window.  Select all the text ...

You can use the Post Editor to get the HTML code that you need to put a picture into your sidebar (or header or footer, or anywhere else a gadget can go). The Picture gadget is the normal tool for adding a picture to your blog's sidebar . But sometimes you want more control over the picture size or behaviour.  Eg, you may want to have two pictures very close to each other and guarantee that they're the same size. To do this, you need to get the HTML code for the picture, and then put it into your blog as an HTML-gadget.  Fortunately, Blogger's Post-editor make it very easy to do this without writing the code yourself. Using the Post Editor to generate the HTML for a picture 1  Start a new Post   (NB   you're not ever going to publish this:  it's just a work-area) 2  Don't enter any text:   just use the Picture icon on the toolbar to add a picture .   Blogger will prompt you to upload the picture, or to choose it from a Google-album-arc...

Blogger does not have an option to display your posts in reverse order - so that the oldest post is first, and the most recent post is last.  But this article describes displaying your posts in this way by manipulating their post dates.  And it links to an article about some other possible options. Overview Previously I've discussed the options for giving your blog a home page.   One option is to organise the post-date for each of your posts, so that you control the order posts are displayed in. This is easy enough to do, although there are a couple of risks that you need to be aware of as discussed below. Blogger Posts and the Post-date Each Post in your blog has a date-time value, which is called its "post-date".   Normally , this is set to the date/time when you publish the post for the first time.  But you can change the post date for any post , and you can do this either when you post it first or later on. The post-date is important because it controls...

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 . 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 published 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 c hanging th...

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. Years ago, 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...

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 th...