Showing posts with label Getting Started. Show all posts

Saturday, January 28, 2012

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The Edit Posts link has been replaced by a list showing you all posts, and Edit links under each post in this list.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.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

How to cut, copy and paste in Blogger's post editor

Blogger's post editor doesn't have buttons for cut, copy and paste. Google Chrome doesn't have them in a top menu bar either. Fortunately there are still (at least) three ways to move text around.

To my regular readers:You may think I've gone crazy, doing such a "simple" post. But I just answered a question about just this in the Blogger-help-forum. When I tried googling the question no answers came up in the first page. And I'm in a mood to write something simple to help newbie-bloggers (we were all new, once). Humour me, I'll be back with a more complex topic soon. Mary

What can you do in the Post Editor

The Post Editor is the tool that you use in Blogger to edit your posts and pages.

It has buttons for many of the things you would do in a word-processor and many other programs, such as:

un-do/re-do,
choose the font, font size and highlighting (bold, italic, underline, strikethru)
choose the text and background colour
turn some text into a link
insert a picture or video
make the text left, centre or right aligned
numbered and bullet pointed lists
indenting a quote
check the spelling.

It also has a couple of Blogger (or perhaps Google)-specific functions:

adding a jump-break
removing all the formatting from a piece of text

But there is one set of very common functions that are missing: Cut, Copy and Paste. Fortunately there are a number of other ways to cut / copy / paste - you just need to know where to find them.

Option 1: Use the browser menu

To see the post editor, you must first be using a web-browser (eg Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc) to connect to Blogger.

Most of the these browsers have an edit menu in the top left corner where it "should" be, and this menu has CCP. So you can

Select the text you want to work with, or put the cursor into the place you want to copy to, and
Choose cut, copy or paste from the browser menu.

Exceptions: Google Chrome and IE9

In some newer browsers, instead of a menu bar, the toolbar has moved to the top right hand corner of the screen, just under the close-window button. It's shown with a wrench in Chrome and a gear wheel in Internet Explorer, like this.

If you left-click on the wrench, you are shown a menu that has many of the options that are in "normal" browser windows, includng the edit options of cut, copy and paste (in small buttons).

There are also useful option like to view the source code of the page - these are under the Tools item in the wrench-menu.

(There may be other exceptions too, I'm not familiar with browser software on Apple or Linux computers these days.)

Option 2: Right-click

Select the text you want to work with, or put the cursor into the place you want to copy to
Right-click on it using your mouse or keypad button.
Choose the function you want from the small menu that opens in the middle of the screen (called a context menu). (The options that are there will depend on your browser software - but even Chrome has cut, copy & paste)

Option 3: Keyboard shortcuts

Select the text you want to work with, or put the cursor into the place you want to copy to
Press the keyboard short-cut for the function you want.

Some of the most common keyboard shortcut, and ones that definitely work in Blogger are:

ctrl / x - cut
ctrl / c - copy
ctrl / v - paste

ctrl / a - select all
ctrl / z - unto
ctrl / y - re-do

ctrl / b - bold
ctrl / i - italic
ctrl / u - underline

To do these, hold down the control key (it's sometimes labelled "ctrl") and press the letter-key will you are still holding ctrl.
To me, these are the quickest way to work, even though they take some learning to start with.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Getting Started with Blogger

This post is about things you need to think about when you're getting started with Blogger. It's not about blogging in general, just about tool-specific issues for Blogger, Google's free blogging tool.

First things first

Once you've decided to use Blogger to make your blog, there are some basic issues that you need to consider as soon as possible.

1 Understand the basic concepts

Every computer tool has its own way of organising things. When you think about how to write your blog, it's helpful if you start with an understanding of Blogger, blogs and bloggers, Posts, Pages and screens.

2 Decide which account to use

If you are writing a personal diary, travel-blog or similar, it's fine to use your personal Google account.

But if you are creating a blog for a club, or organsation or business (even your own small business that you might want to sell one day), or a blog that you might want to hand over to someone else one day, then you should think very carefully about what Google account to use. In fact, I recommend creating a separate account (done by setting up a Gmail account) just for the blog.

If you're not convinced, read this article about transferring blog ownership, especially the parts that cannot be transferred as yet.

3 Control who can see the blog

Most blogs are open so that anyone can find them, and read them.

But if you want to stop a blog being found by search engines, or by random people looking at Google's list of blogs, then the best time to set this up is before you've written any posts. You set it up in the Settings tab inside Blogger.

For even more control, you can make the blog Private, and choose to only invite specific people to read it. Do this in the Settings tab, too. But note that:

You can only send 100 invitations, ever; they may change this in the future, but that's the limit for now.
There are some cases when restricting your blog's readership may not be as secure as you'd expect.

4 Decide whether to help the search engines

There are lots of books, articles and websites about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - and plenty of people who will tell you that it's the most important thing you can do, ever.

Now, if you want search-engines (Google etc) to bring readers to your blog, then you may want to investigate some of these later on. But in the meantime Google have published a general "getting started with SEO guide" - and I've explained how Blogger users can put their suggestions into practise.

But you also want to think about the reasons why SEO may be irrelevant for your blog, too.

5 Get a template to match your blog

Each Blogger blog has a formatting-template that controls how it looks.

After you have written 2-3 posts, try using a changing to use a different template so that your blog's design matches your goals.

To change the template go to Dashboard > Template and choose one.

You could spend a long time "tweaking" your template to make the blog look "just right". If this is important to you, then do it! But most readers are more interested in the content, so you need decide how much time to spend doing this vs writing new posts.

What next?

There's no "right way" to use Blogger or make a blog: the next steps are up to you.

Look around. Experiment.

Keep an eye on Blogger Buzz (where Google announce new features), and on the Blogger product forums (where you can ask for help when you get stuck).

Have fun!

Getting started with SEO for blogger users

Assessing an idea for a new Blog

Changing colours in your Blog

Linking your Blog to the Social Networks

Managing Pictures

Restricting your blog's readership may not be as secure as you'd expect.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Deciding if a new-blog idea is any good

This article is about how to review an idea that you have for a new blog, in order to decide whether to go ahead with it.

Overview:

After I'd set up my first blog-site, I started having ideas for other sites.

Some came from discovering features in Blogger ("ahh, since it does this, I could do that with it"). Others came from observing problems and seeing ways to fix them, or even by chance: For example, Blogger-hints-and-tips started as a place to keep my working notes about solutions I'd found. When I discovered that other people were searching for solutions to the same problems and reading what I'd written, I decided I should put in a bit more effort to make the notes more reader-friendly.

I quickly learned that while it's easy to have ideas, making and feeding a blog takes time and energy: some of my ideas would probably be successful eventually, but would need a huge amount of effort to get them started. And some ideas have occurred to other people already, too.

So I developed a couple of guidelines for myself, and apply these no matter how good an idea seems:

1) Sleep on it

Very, very few ideas are so groundbreaking and urgent that they need to be acted on immediately.

A couple of days spent just mulling on an idea are not wasted: quite often new possibilities (or difficulties) occur to me at the strangest times.

2) Do a formal assessment

Write up a short (1 page is usually enough) description of what the idea will involve. Not just think about it, but actually write it down.

Doing this makes me face up to the immediately problems that I'll have with taking an idea and turning it into a blog, and decide if I can work around them or not. I've found that if I don't write them down, I gloss over the problems - and I've more than once started a blog only to find that I've spend days working on something that will never succeed because of some fundamental problem that I knew about in the back of my mind all along.

I've developed the BIA (Blog Idea Assessment) as a simple tool to help me to do this. You can download it (in MS Word) here, and the following section has notes about using each part of it.

What's in the Blog-Idea-Assessment Tool

1 Working Title:

Every blog needs a name, and I find that giving an idea a name early in process helps me to work out if it will have a life of its own: If I can't work out a name, then perhaps the idea is just a topic that I could write one article about, but not a whole blog.

The name is a working title though. It can, and often does, change as I work through the other stages.

2 Purpose / Aim:

This is a description of what the blog is - and is not - about. It describes what the blog will do, and what problems it will solve or what opportunites it will take advantage of.

It also looks at:

Where the content will come from - eg is it creative writing (fiction), opinion (whose?) or fact (where will the info be gathered from).
How it will be presented (eg does it involve maps, calendars, custom search engines)

It usually takes about 3 paragraphs, maybe more for a complicated blog, or less for a very simple one with all posts being entered inside Blogger.

3 Competitor research:

This is a very important stage. I sit down with Google and a thesaurus (for alternative words to describe my idea), and look at who else is publishing (blogs and other websites) on the topic. For an idea to be worth proceeding with, it generally needs to be either First (to get readers before any else does the same thing) or Best (so that readers from elsewhere will start coming to my site instead).

Then I do some research about potential domain names:

Decide whether the blog can have a .blogspot.com URL, or whether it needs to look like a "real" and if so, what sort of URL it needs (.com .net .info .co.uk etc)
Brainstorm possible brands / names for the blog
Research what domains are available (but don't purchase until after doing the next step

I also think about copyright: can I really create unique, interesting content about the topic without breaking copyright laws.

4 Audience and Promotions:

List the potential readers of the blog - in more detail than just "people who are interested in XXXX".

I need to know who might be interested (or who I might be able to make interested), and why. Sometimes thinking about this questions changes the answer in Point 2) - identifying a new potential audience changes how I do things.

Then I need to know how I'll tell them that the blog is available - and I need to be sure that it's possible for me to do this in the time I have available.

There are lots of websites with suggestions about how to promote websites, so I'm not going to repeat them here. But in general, the answer to "how to promote?" comes directly from "who is the audience?". And it usually involves a mixture of approaches: very few blogs can be promoted successfully using only one too.

It is possible to build a successful blog based on search results alone, but it can take a good 6-12 months to get readers - or so I'm told. For a niche area, I'm even sceptical about this, and think that it may take longer, and have a high chance that the audience don't arrive before the content is out-dated.

Personally I prefer to have some early feedback about how well the blog is doing, and whether it's solving the problems I set out to solve. This means I need ways to promote the blog and get readers (and feedback) sooner rather than later.

Getting Started with Blogger

Blogs, Blogger and bloggers - some basic definitions

Copyright, blogs and bloggers

How blogs in Blogger are organised

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Blogs, Blogger, bloggers, Posts, Pages and Screens - some basic definitions

This article defines some of the basic words if you are using Google Blogger. It is helpful if you are just getting started, and need to accurately describe a problem you are having. It is part of a series of articles about getting started with Blogger.

Google, Blogger and Blogging, Posts

Google, the noun, (sometimes called Google Inc or Google Ltd) is a company. They became famous by creating a very, very useful search engine. Since then, as well as making the search engine even better, they've created (or purchased) lots of other tools as well, and become rich by selling on-line advertising space inside their tools.

Using their most-popular tool (www.google.com or your local version eg www.google.co.uk), you can google (a verb), ie search, for things. (The same way that you can hoover the floor, or xerox a piece of paper

A blog is a "binary log" - geek-ese for "a diary you keep on the internet". A blog can contain anything you want to write, for example:

a fantasy story that you made up,
a factual account of your life,
your opinions about politics
newsletters from a club you belong to
information about your business and the services you offer
and many many more

Blogger is a piece of software (ie a computer program) provided by Google, which lets you create a a blog.

A blogger (small b) is a person who writes a blog. They may use Blogger, or various other types of blogging software (eg WordPress, TypePad)

A Post is the basic item that you publish onto your blog.   After you have been blogging (writing a blog) for a while, you blog will (usually) have many Posts.

Pages - AKA Static Pages

In regular websites, a page is roughly the same as a screen (at least as far as anyone who reads this article needs to know).

Until recently, most documentation about Blogger talked about Pages as through a Page was something that showed one or more Posts. (More about these soon.)

However Google introduced a new feature, called Pages, into Blogger in early 2010.

These Pages are intended for bloggers who want some material on their blog which is slightly different from the rest: it's not part of the usual material that they publish, and stays current and relevant in a way that older posts in a blog don't.   Typical pages content includes contact-details, frequently-asked-questions, or "about this blog" statements.

Pages are edited using a tool that is similar to the Posts editor, but they have some small differences: eg they don't have a publication-date so they don't appear in the Archive. I have previously written a full description of the difference between Pages and Posts.

Pages also have a gadget all of their own (called the Pages Gadget), which can be used to give a "menu bar" at the top, or bottom, or in the sidebar of your blog.

A key difference between regular websites and blogs is that Posts don't go onto Pages: all your Posts go onto what feels like the "main page", and the other pages are for reference materials only.   There are ways around this, eg using labels to categorise your blog, and making it look like you have put posts into pages by making a horizontal linked-list of label-search statements instead of the standard pages gadget, but even this isn't quite what many people expect.

Some people refer to Pages as Static-pages, to try to avoid the confusion. I don't use that term because:

It's not the term that Google/Blggger uses, and
Some of the target information (eg contact details for a club) is not static - it could change many times over the life of the blog.

Templates and Collections of Posts

A Template is a control file that says how a Blog will look. Blogs that are about different topics may use the same template: their content will be different, but they will look very similar to a person who reads them.

I have recently started using Screen to refer the display that Blogger generates each time that someone looks at your blog.

A Posts Screen may show 1,2, 3 or even dozens of Posts. The number of posts shown is controlled by an option that the blogger sets (in either the Design > Page Elements > Blog Posts, or Settings > Formatting options) and by a (relatively new) feature called auto-pagination, which restricts overly large collections of Posts, so that Blogger works more quickly overall.

If a Blog has a Layout or Designer template (see Types of Blogger template), then there are links near the end of each screen for Newer Posts and Older Posts: clicking them take the user to a new Screen, which shows a set of newer or older posts.

There are other types of Screen also:

If a blog has a Labels gadget, then clicking as option in it opens a List of Posts screen showing all published Posts in the blog that have the corresponding Label.
If a blog has an Archive gadget, then clicking an option in it opens a List of Posts screen showing all published Posts in the blog that were published in that time period.

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