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This article explains how to use Labels to categorise the Posts in your Blog, and how you can get around some of the limitations in Blogger's categorising tools. Why categorise your Posts Grouping your blog's contents makes it easier for people who have reached your blog via Search to find other posts that they may be interested in - provided you add tools to your blog that let them navigate using labels. It's essential if you want to make it look like you have put your Posts into Pages . And it helps you to find posts yourself. Blogger's tools for working with categories The only tool that Blogger provides for categorising or grouping Posts is Labels . In short, Labels are tags that you apply to posts . Each post can have as many Labels as you want (there is an upper limit of 5000 labels-per-blog, but most people don't get near it). And you can use labels for different purposes.  For example, a post titled "Photographing Long-haired Bla

This article shows how to set up your blog made with Wordpress so that that (it looks like) your posts are on separate web-pages, without needing to install any plugin. (For this task, the answers for Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com are so very similar that they have been combined into the one article.) Wordpress, like most blogging platforms, is basically made up of Posts, Pages and Widgets (aka gadgets). People who are building blogs often want to "put posts into pages" ie to have a page which shows a subset of their posts, based on the category.   The standard, but unsatisfactory, answer is " Sorry, that's not how Wordpress works.   Static pages are used for reference information that doesn't change often, which you don't want to be part of your regular post-feed, but which you do want users to have easy access to. " Luckily it's easy to set up your blog so that it looks like your posts are on different pages  by following thre

This article shows how to use Google's Takeout service to make a copy of the contents of all your blogs at the same time. A backup is a copy that you can use to restore from if something goes wrong.  For your personal compter, you may have a backup copy of the files on your hard-drive, so that if you lose the machine, you can get the files back, usually with a little work. In blogging terms, a backup of your blog is a copy that you can use if you accidentally delete a post, or lose control of your blog, or perhaps even a copy of a blog that you have deleted but still want some last-chance access to. Unfortunately Blogger does not offer a complete solution for backing up our blogs .    Instead, we need to take separate actions to back up our gadget settings , our template when it is being edited , and our post-contents. You can back up the posts from one content from the Settings > Other > Blog Tools  tab.  If you choose the Export Blog link, Blogger makes

This article shows you how to set up another person (ie another Google account) as an author for your blog. Google, Blog-Authors and Blogger Setting someone up as an "author" in Blogger is one way that you can let other people post to your blog. It's easy to do: you tell blogger to create an invitation, which sends the person an email saying you would like to be an author, they click a link in the email and then sign in with a Google account to accept the invitation. And once it is done, the person can write and edit their own posts. All you need to know is the person's email address: it doesn't matter if it's a gmail address or not.  You can send invitations to people with hotmail, yahoo, and indeed any email address where your invitee can read their email.  However the other person will need to use a Google account  (which doesn't necessarily include Gmail) to accept the invitation: don't waste time inviting people who are allergi

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog. If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory .   They may even tell you to use an FTP  tool to do this. Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog  , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger. Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking you to change the website code itself. How to add a file to your blog's root directory The short answer for Blogger users is "sorry, you cannot d

This article describes making a Facebook badge to promote your page, and putting it onto your blog. What is a Facebook page This article is about how to make a badge to promote a Facebook  Page . This is an example of the "follow me" approach to linking your blog and the social networks , although for Facebook pages your reader becomes a Fan rather than a Friend. Many people are confused about when they should use each of the types of "thing" in Facebook, ie Profiles - accounts for flesh-and-blood, living, breathing, individual people Pages - for websites, brands, and organisations that don't want to approve all their Facebook members Groups -  for organisations that want to approve individual members who join (and in return, group-owners can send private messages to individual members. The most common "thing" for blogs to have is a Page - and a Badge is the tool which Facebook provides to help you to promote a Page on your blog or

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

This article is about how to copy all the posts from one blog to another, using Blogger.  There is a separate article about copying individual posts, or pages, from one blog to another . To copy all the Posts from one blog to another, you need to export them from the first blog, and import the file that was created into the second file. Any Pages (see The Difference between Posts and Pages ) in the first blog, need to be moved individually , because pages aren't currently included in the export file. If you want to totally  replace the contents of the destination blog with the contents of the source blog, then you should delete the existing posts from the destination blog before you import the file.  (NB   Delete posts by going to the Posting / Edit Posts screen, and pressing the Delete button that is beside the post.   Don't delete the entire blog , or you will lose access to the URL). Follow these steps to copy all posts from one blog to another 1  Log in to

Blogger doesn't 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. 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 publish it first, or later on. The post-date is important because it co

You can set your blog up so that no posts are shown on the main screen - provided you have used some of the other "home page" approaches to give readers other ways of getting to your content. Previously I've explained how to only show one post on the main page of your blog . But some people who want to give their blog a home page  go further than that, and don't show any posts on the main screen at all.   (Remember, the main screen is where people who navigate to your blog, rather than to posts within it, go.) This sounds like a strange thing to do - after all, blogs are about posts. But actually it's fine, provided you use some other tools to let readers move around the blog .  I've made a 150+ page blog this way, and it works very nicely because I have organised the information and used some index-pages (containing lists of bus-routes, suburbs, maps etc) with tables  that link to many other posts. How to show no (ie zero, 0) posts on the ma