Once you’ve got your blog up and running, you can get down to the real task at hand: writing. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to create new entries, edit them, save them as a draft, post them, and finally, delete them.
You’ll also learn how to add links, formatting, jump breaks, and labels, change the date and time, and control commenting to your blog entries.
The Compose bar, available on most browsers, offers a variety of formatting tools and wysiwyg display.
If you have a long post, you can insert a jump break to make it easier for visitors to browse through all your posts.
You can add labels to your posts in order to categorize them and make it easier for your readers to find all your posts about a given topic, say, your job or your family.
On page 66, you’ll learn how to make a list or cloud of the labels available to your readers.
If you see the generic Blogger home page instead of the Dashboard, you probably have not signed in yet (see page 10).
You can also get to the Posting | New Post page by clicking NEW POST on the left side of the Posting | Edit Posts page as shown below.
If the toolbar looks different, it may be that you haven’t chosen the Updated editor. See page 9 for details.
Note that when you’re editing an already published post, the post is not saved automatically—and thus the changes aren’t published automatically. If you click Save as Draft, your changes are saved but the post is unpublished (removed) from your blog. You’ll have to click Publish Post again to republish the post.
If you are adding a link to a regular Web page, you can copy the URL from the Address Bar at the top of the Browser window by selecting it, right-clicking (Control-click on a Mac), and choosing Copy from the pop-up menu that appears.
Each time you publish a post, Blogger does three things: it adds the new post to your main blog page, it updates the archive page if necessary, and it creates a separate, independent post page whose sole job is to display that new blog post (and any comments and backlinks it may receive). Because the main page of a blog is subject to frequent updating, using the blog’s main URL for linking to the current post will only work until a new entry is posted. Instead, if you want to link to a specific blog entry, you should link to the post page, whose URL will not change. Such a link is called a permalink.
Currently, Blogger creates a permalink out of the title at the beginning of each post and the timestamp in the byline at the end of each post. In older versions of Blogger, the link was labeled Permalink. In some blogging software, permalinks are identified with a hash sign (#).
If you use a browser that doesn’t offer a Link button, or if you use the Edit HTML tab, you can write the link code manually. Type <a href=“url”> before the linked text and then </a> after it. It should look something like this:
<a href="http://www.site.com/target.html">linked text</a>Make sure to use straight quotes, and don’t forget the http://.
If you disable post pages on the Settings | Archiving page, your blog’s permalinks will change since the post pages will no longer exist. When you disable post pages, Blogger keeps all your current posts on the main page and creates a separate page for each set of archived posts. In this case, if you change the archiving frequency (see page 53), the permalinks will also change.
Once you publish a post, Blogger won’t save the changes automatically (in order to keep readers from viewing your edits in real time). You will notice that the SAVE NOW button changes to SAVE AS DRAFT. If you choose SAVE AS DRAFT, Blogger will unpublish your post and thus remove it from your blog. You can republish it by clicking the PUBLISH POST button.
You can also remove a post from your blog temporarily by editing it and saving it as a draft.
Unless you choose otherwise, a post is dated with the day and time it was first published, not when you began writing it (which is how Blogger used to work).
If your Compose bar doesn’t look like the one shown, make sure you have followed the steps for updating your post editor on page 9. That said, the Compose bar varies slightly from browser to browser. The one shown is from Internet Explorer 8 for Windows.
Although the Compose bar is designed to save you from writing HTML, it is perfectly fine to type HTML tags right in there; you don’t have to switch to the Edit HTML mode. If you do switch to Edit HTML mode, you’ll notice the HTML code stays intact. But when you switch back to Compose, the HTML code will be displayed as if it were in a browser.
If you need help with HTML, try my bestselling HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition: Visual QuickStart Guide.
Another reason to use the Edit HTML mode is to adjust the CSS that Blogger applies.
Did you notice that there’s no Video tool or Spell check in this rendition of the Compose bar? By the time you read this, there may be. Blogger is always in a state of flux. Consult the book’s web site for more details (see page xii).
The Schedule at: label changes to Set Date and Time for posts that have already been published. If you don’t have either option, make sure you have updated your post editor as described on page 9.
Blogger used to date posts with the time and day you first began writing them. Now if you choose the default Automatic option, Blogger will stamp your post with the time and date that it was first published. If you edit the post later, the original time and date of publication are still used.
If you omit the am/pm from the time, Blogger will assume that you mean am.
A post’s date and time determine its place on your blog. So, to change the order of your posts, change their date and time.
You can use the Schedule at: box to write posts ahead of time and then have them published at the time and date of your choosing.
If you’re not sure whether or not to delete a post, you can always save it as a draft (page 20) and decide later. Blogger will keep the post in your Edit Posts list, but will unpublish it from your blog.