The Real Blogger Status

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.

Sometimes, we see odd confusion in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . I deleted my blog - can somebody help me restore it? I worked so many days writing it! or alternately I am trying to write a new blog, but it says my url has already been taken (by me). If the first owner is kind enough to include the URL of the deleted "blog", we may use our favourite online diagnostic tool - and discover that the blog is still online, and not deleted! In the second case, we may find a new blog, with one post. Investigating further, we discover that the problem here involves terminology. This article that I am writing, "Blogger Terminology - Blogs Vs Posts", is a post, which is part of my blog, "The REAL Blogger Status" (which right now is actually The ONLY Blogger Status - but that is another tale ). The terminology here is pedantic, to us - but it's very real, to the blog owner who has just deleted an important post. Or to the owner who has publi...

Not all blog owners know what pages are - nor how they differ from posts. We see confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? . How do I publish a post, which always appears on the home page? or How do I publish a post, which never appears on the home page? or How do I publish multiple posts on a page? Long ago, we used workarounds, like publishing a post, using a future or past date . The workarounds would create a post which would always, or never, appear on the home page - but there were always side effects, from using either technique.

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.

From time to time, we see evidence of anxiety, in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . Why do my posts have hashtag suffixes? and from some, more anxiety How do I know what hashtags to add, when referencing my posts? These blog owners don't understand the purposes of the suffixes.

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.

Many people have a yearly ritual, called "spring cleaning", where the entire house gets a complete cleaning, from top to bottom. When one does spring cleaning, one does not tear the house down, however - one only cleans what is there. Some blog owners seem to think that "spring cleaning" of a post starts with tearing the post down, as in deleting it and starting anew. We get an occasional query, from a perplexed blog owner, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? . I rewrote a bunch of posts, and now all of the URLs have weird numbers at the end. How do I clean up the URLs? and the only way to clean up the URLs is to start over, and re publish the original posts, with the non suffixed URLs.

I almost hesitate to start this post, because of the date. However, I promise you, this is no joke. Recently (and before today, so I don't see this as a joke), Blogger made a change to their servers, and to how they display "404 Address Not Found". And, I've seen some confusion resulting from the change. Here, for instance, is a link to this blog . And here is a link to this post . Simple enough? How about a link to a non existent web site . See the display? Server not found Firefox can't find the server at nitecruzr-non-existent-blog. Duh. What's a server? OK, "Chuck's Non Existent Blog" doesn't exist. Or, it exists in my mind, purely to make this point. Don't think about this too hard though. How about a just deleted blog ? Blog has been removed Sorry, the blog at nitecruzr-non-existent-blog.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs. This blog did exist - for a few minutes. It doesn't exis...

The title of this blog is "The Real Blogger Status". This blog contains many posts. The name of this blog is "bloggerstatusforreal", and its URL is now " blogging.nitecruzr.net " (it's also known as " bloggerstatusforreal.blogspot.com "). There can be only one BlogSpot blog with the name "bloggerstatusforreal", though there can also be "bloggerstatusforreal.com", and "bloggerstatusforreal.net", and each can be separate web sites, if desired. And any blog can have the title of "The Real Blogger Status".

Most bloggers, but not all, like to prefix their individual posts with a title. The title field is useful in separating, and identifying, each section (aka post) in a blog. For the bloggers who don't want a title to distract from the contents, there's an option. If you don't want titles for your posts, or if you want to make the titles less obtrusive or use images instead of text, you can turn titles off. Go to Settings - Formatting, and set "Show Title field" to "No". What a neat idea. So simple - and yet not so simple. Like many Blogger settings, this one has a double edge. If you, like many bloggers, use permanent links (set "Enable Post Pages?" to "Yes") so you can link directly to individual posts, and you set "Show Title field" to "No", what happens? The URL for each post uses the first few words in the first paragraph. For this post, with titles disabled, you might have something like "bloggersta...

We see the plea for help, periodically I need the URL of my blog, so I can give it to my friends. Help! Who's buried in Grant's Tomb, after all? No Chuck, be polite. OK, OK. The title of this blog is "The Real Blogger Status", and the title of this post is "What's The URL Of My Blog?".

I'll bet we've all made duplicate posts, from time to time. I, personally, am in the habit of hitting the Back button, when presented with"Your blog published successfully.", whenever I look at what I just posted, and realise that I should have said that just a wee bit differently. Do that immediately after publishing a new post, and you'll end up with a duplicate. Or maybe you hit "Publish Post" twice, maybe while Blogger is sluggish (as if that never happens). Or maybe you lack imagination, and you reused the title. Maybe you wrote "Something Or Other" some time ago, and now you feel the need to write a second post in that series. Either way, you now have two posts with the same title, and with similar URLs . If your blog is http://myblog.blogspot.com , and you just posted "Something Or Other", you probably have 2 posts now: http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/ something-or-other.html http://myblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/ somethin...