The Real Blogger Status

Some blog owners, who publish multiple blogs with different subjects, may decide that some subjects would be better discussed in a different blog. With various posts published in one blog, the owner may decide that those posts should be published in a different blog, to continue discussion. The question now is how to move posts, from one blog to another? The dashboard "Export / Import" feature, which is now labeled "Import & back up" , lets us copy pages and posts from one blog to another. Just copying all pages and posts, though, will create problems with duplicated content.

We see the occasional hopeful yet naive request, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about a common mistake. I deleted my post, that I've been working on, for a week. How do I get it back? Here, the blog owner is asking about a feature that has been requested, several times. If you delete your blog, you can recover it - within 90 days, using the same Blogger account . There are no "do overs" for a deleted page or post, however.

We see the occasional query, about name changes, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . I just got married, and now I have a new email address, and a new name. How do I change my Blogger identity? And the usual advice was You can change youe email address, and / or change the display name (not the account name) - and you can transfer control of the blog to a new Blogger account, which bears your new name. But old posts will remain, with your old name. And there, we would have one more disappointed blog owner. But that does not have to be the final answer.

As you develop your blog, you may observe that some of the post titles don't encourage viewer attention. Since the post URLs are derived from the post titles, renaming a post involves some planning. The post URL should match the post title. If you change the post URL, all of the existing links to that post will break. So, what to do? This makes renaming a post into a major project. Or, do you think your readers enjoy seeing Sorry, that page does not exist. Even with the blog using a custom "404" page , this isn't going to cut it - if you want your readers (not to mention the search engines) to feel loved. But if you plan, and practice, you can rename a post in a minute or so - and possibly half that time, the post actually may be "404".

When you rename a blog, the most that you can do, to keep the old URL useful, is to setup a stub post , with a clickable link to the new URL. Yo! The blog is now at xxxxxxx.blogspot.com!! Blogger forbids gateway blogs, and similar blog to blog redirections . When you rename a post, you can setup a custom redirect - and automatically redirect your readers to the post, under its new URL. You should take advantage of this option, if you change a post URL.

Even after being able to find a deleted post in cache, and retrieve the BlogID / PostID , some blog owners may find themselves unable to restore a deleted post. Until Blogger gives us an actual recycle bin / trash can for deleted pages and posts, some deleted pages and posts just may not be re publishable. It appears that all deleted content is not retained consistently, similar to the legendary "90 days" for deleted blogs.

Some blog owners want to publish posts, and display a static main page - and want to view blog content, in one or more tabbed pages. It's not difficult to create the tabbed pages. The difficulty would come, long ago, when setting up the main page. We had several workarounds for making a static main page - none of them equally easy to use, effective, and elegant . Then, Blogger created Custom Redirects - and gave us static main pages, that are easy to use, effective, and elegant.

Some blog owners want to publish posts, and have a dynamic main page - but want to restrict specific posts to a tabbed page. Having created a tabbed page with specific posts, the next question would be But how do I keep those posts off my main page? And long ago, there was no good answer for this question. Then, Blogger gave us the Custom Redirects feature.

One odd question, that has intrigued me for a while, is about dynamic templates, and reader choice. We see the occasional question, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . How do I prevent my readers from viewing my blog, using an unacceptable dynamic view? This blog owner is overlooking one of the major advantages to dynamic templates.

One feature of the Blogger home page, enjoyed by some blog owners, is the ability to explicitly set maximum main page size, for the blog when displayed. We see an occasional complaint, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . I redirected my home page, using a label search - but the display is now way too long! How do I shorten my custom main page? This blog owner is probably a little disappointed, to discover one tiny limitation, in main page setting. The "Show at most" setting, in Settings - "Posts and comments" - mirrored by "Number of posts on main page", in "Configure Blog Posts" - lets you set an explicit maximum page size. That setting only applies to the native main page URL - and some blog owners like to customise the main page, using a label search redirect.

Long ago, a renamed blog post would automatically receive a new URL, to match a change in date or title . Blog owners would happily rename posts - and see a new URL, with no problem. Those blog owners who monitored search engine activity, however, later became concerned by the "404"s, shown in the search engine activity logs, in Webmaster Tools - or from various test searches.

If there's one question, seen occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger ?, that confounds me, its a simple one. How do I change the order of my posts? or Why does my blog display the newest post first? Where is the option, to change to oldest post first? It is very difficult to respond both correctly, and helpfully, to both questions, equally well. Blogger does not provide a dashboard setting, to change the post display sequence. Post sequence is only changed, by altering the date and time of the posts .

One of the neatest features added to Blogger, this decade, has to be the Custom Redirects. For many years, we asked, over and over, for the ability to optionally publish a blog with a static home page . 2 years ago, Blogger gave us that ability, and more, with Custom Redirects . But, Custom Redirects had a problem - it did not work with a mobile template , and a redirected mobile home page. Recently, however, that changed.

If you rename a non Blogger hosted website - and you retain ownership of the previous domain (or re publish a website within the same domain), you can redirect traffic from the old URL to the new URL, for some websites, using the ".htaccess" control file . Some Blogger blog owners, used to setting up ".htaccess" based redirection for non Blogger websites, have renamed their blog - either from one BlogSpot URL to another , or maybe from a custom domain URL to another URL . Finding the links in the blog now broken, they wonder. How do I setup .htaccess for the old URL? This is an option that Blogger does not provide.

One of the most fascinating features of Blogger blogs is the various options to organise our content. Long ago, I wrote a simple article, Adding A Blogger Blog To A Website . That's become one of the most consistently popular posts, in this blog. Most blog owners have multiple interests, and like to organise their different interests , by subject - and have a different blog, for each subject. Some people like to have a blog, and a website - and host both the blog and website in one Blogger blog, under one URL. For a small blog / website combination, that's an easy way to start out - and a good alternative, to having multiple blogs / websites.

We've recently seen a few reports about problems with custom redirects , in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . I want to redirect my blog URL to a static home page. With a redirect in place, mobile computer users can't access my blog. Mobile browsers display an error, mentioning too many redirects.

We've been advising anxious blog owners, for some time, how to recover deleted pages and posts. The easiest solution, in the long run, is to recover the PageID / PostID , and re publish the deleted page / post. Unfortunately, all deleted pages and posts can't be edited and re published . With new posts, un indexed by the search engines, you won't be able to find the post in cache - and you'll never determine the PostID. This will be a frequent problem with deleted pages - as static pages generally won't get indexed by the search engines - nor will they ever be included in the blog posts feed. In some cases, even when you know the PageID or PostID, the page editor / post editor may simply reject your attempt to re edit - and give you another bX code. Even so, all is not lost. You may have to rebuild the page or post - but you can generally keep the URL, of the deleted page or post, operational. Just plan the rebuilding process.

Blog owners have been deleting their pages and posts, then changing their minds later, since Blogger started providing the ability to delete pages and posts. We've been advising anxious blog owners, for some time, how to recover deleted pages and posts. The easiest solution, in the long run, is to recover the PageID / PostID , and re publish the deleted page / post. When the deleted page or post cannot be re published, the next option is to re build the page / post, possibly using feed cache. Using this technique, you'll have to reformat the post content, as feed content is formatted relatively simply. When you publish the post, it will publish as a new post, with a new URL - so any external references to the missing post URL will still be broken. Thanks to the recently offered Custom Redirects option, though, we can make this latter choice slightly less undesirable.

Long ago, Blogger blog owners would publish a blog as part of an existing website. With the website published as "www.mydomain.com", they would create a website subdirectory "www.mydomain.com/myblog", and publish the blog there. The option to publish a blog as "www.mydomain.com/myblog" required an externally maintained domain / website - and the Blogger feature "FTP Publishing". In 2010, Blogger, with many man hours spent fixing a constant stream of problems, retired "FTP Publishing" , in favour of "Custom Domain Publishing".

In 2012, Blogger gave us a suite of useful utilities to control how the search engines see our blogs . This feature suite includes the ability to redirect one URL in our blog to another URL in our blog . The "Custom Redirects" feature is easy to use - but like many Blogger features, not immediately so. Neither its possibilities, nor its limitations, are obvious to everybody.