Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with blogger

Can you convert a free Wordpress theme into Blogger?

MrningLight — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 17:36:09 -0800

Hi. I'm trying to create a new blog and found a great free Wordpress theme that I'd like to use in Blogger. Can I do this? If so, how? Here's the theme I want to convert: http://wpthemeland.com/theme/Cooking/ Thanks for your comments and advice. Take Care, Dawn

Can any RSS reader read private Blogger blogs?

freddymungo — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:21:07 -0800

How can I view private Blogger blogs in any RSS reader? Is there any way? I think it's silly that I can't in Google Reader, since I use the same account to read those blogs as in Google Reader. Bonus points if there's a good downloadable (not online) service that can finagle it.

How to recover a deleted Blogger blog?

Guywood Threepbrush — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:36:08 -0800

A friend of mine recently deleted her Google account, but she didn't know this action would also delete her Blogger blog. How can she recover it? She's been trying to contact someone from Google in the last days, but she had no answers.

I've been looking for cached copies in several search engines and archives (Google, Yahoo!, WayBack, etc.), willing to rebuild her blog by hand from cached content, but any online trace is gone.

Has anyone succesfully recovered a blog under similar circumstances?

My Wife Hates Movable Type!

smithmac_99 — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 14:58:51 -0800

Can you import a MT Blog into blogger?

What to do with a spare blog?

gonzo_ID — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 04:15:37 -0800

I've got a spare blogger blog ('domainname'.blogspot.com) with the same name as a wordpress blog('samedomainname'.com).... what could i do with it? bonus points for income generation. I bought a domain and slapped wordpress onto it where I shall be posting an inspirational image of a document (say... a book cover) per day.
i got a gmail account to work as a spam filter for the domain email and, obviously, i get a free blogger account to go with it.

what can i do with this blogger account that could be linked / unlinked with this main blog? devblog? best of blog? something else? could I make money from this second blog? should i just not use it?

How can I upload MY OWN MP3s to my Blogger Blog?

paulyballs — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:18:38 -0800

How can I upload MY OWN MP3s to my Blogger Blog? I want to be able to put my own MP3 into a music player that will play when people go to my blog. Anyone know of a place I can store my music and then use a player to play it online?

* Thread: 1187332127924996518

gerryblog — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:00:36 -0800

Blogger/Haloscan problem. I've been using Haloscan for the comments on my blog for a while now. I'd used the "Blog Post Retrieval" Beta Feature in the settings on Haloscan to link the comment thread name with the relevant post title so that words appear rather than random numbers in things like the RSS feed. However, this randomly stopped working last week, and now the numbers are back. (Screenshot.)

Any attempt to link my Blogger account with Haloscan a second time yields this error: "An internal server error occurred. Please try again later." I've tried this on several days on Firefox, Safari, and even Internet Explorer, running both Mac OS X and Windows Vista. No dice.

I've written Haloscan support (which is now administered by JS-Kit) and got absolutely nowhere. (JS-Kit actually asked me to permanently grant them administrative access on my blog in order to diagnose the problem, even though the error is pretty clearly on their end; I told them I'd rather not.) Has anyone else managed to beat this bug?

Help me snark more efficiently

jacquilynne — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:50:50 -0800

I need a third party Blogger app that'll help me manage draft posts. Either that, or instructions on how to do this in Blogger itself. I keep a lot of draft posts until I can collect them into daily sets of related posts and post them, but I'm having trouble in Blogger itself identifying the ones that go together.

I tag them with keywords, but there's no way to see just the keywords as they apply to draft posts, rather than all posts. I'm not interested in whether I have existing posts tagged with X, only if I have enough draft posts tagged with X to do another set about X.

I tried tagging things with draft and removing it before I published, in hopes that I could view posts that were tagged both X and draft, but that doesn't seem to be possible, unless I'm missing it.

So, is there a third party blogging app that will work with a Blogger.Com blog, and allow me to view my tags within a certain post status, or view posts that are tagged with two different tags?

I've found Blogger's list of third party tools, but I'd rather not install and check each of them to see if they do what I need, and it's kind of specific, so isn't generally mentioned in the overview of how the product works. Is anyone using one of these apps and knows it does what I want?

Blogger Help

caroljean63 — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:38:25 -0800

Are there any tools to make Blogger commenting easier (posting links, etc.)? I post comments quite often on blogs using my Blogger account. If I want to create a blog I can click one button to easily post links, use italics, etc. But when I want to post a comment on someone else's blog, I must laboriously type the html each and every post. Surely there must be a tool so that I can click one button to add a link to a blogger comment! I just want what's at the bottom of the MeFi posting window I'm looking at right now. Am I asking for too much?

Picky CSS edit

Jaltcoh — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:52:26 -0800

I have a Blogger blog, and I have a CSS theme that I customize. How can I change the color of links only in the blog banner ("header"), without changing the color of links in the rest of the blog? I'm not an expert at CSS editing, but I know enough that I can go to "Variable definitions" in my template and change the color for "linkColor." (I can't paste the relevant code here or it'll get automatically altered.)

But "linkColor" isn't the variable I want to change. That affects the color of links in my actual posts. I don't want to do that. Right now the links throughout my blog are dark purple (on a white background), and I want to keep them that way. But I have a dark background in the banner, so the text in the banner can't be dark purple or it'll be barely visible.

I've tried simply entering the appropriate HTML directly in the banner text, but Blogger rejects this for some reason.

I've tried googling for the answer, but this seems pretty obscure. Anyone know how to do this?

Blogger/Google Hit Counter?

anastasiav — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 07:45:14 -0800

StupidQuestionFilter: I have a small-time blogger blog, but I can't seem to find a tool that will give me the most simple thing: a hit count for it. Blogger is a Google tool, so you'd think that under Webmaster Tools there would be some kind of hit stats, but there don't seem to be. Feedburner used to provide me with this basic info, but that vanished when Google bought them and now Feedburner only tracks who has my feed. What embarrassingly simple thing am I missing? Or do I need to install some third party tool?

Hey, mp3 bloggers, what do you wish you'd known when you started out?

mds35 — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:04:26 -0800

Hey, mp3 bloggers, what do you wish you'd known when you started out? I'm close to launching an mp3 blog. What pitfalls have you encountered? What mistakes have you made along the way? What unexepected successes have you had? What do you wish you'd known before launching?

I'm looking for anecdotal advice of the technical, legal, and monetary varieties.

My blog will focus on obscure-ish music. I'm using WordPress on my own domain, hosted at Dreamhost.

Wayback Machine Plugin for ALL old/dead outbound links on a website?

bollockovnikov — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:19:17 -0800

My old website still gets a lot of hits. But many of the outbound links I posted years back are no longer valid, are dead or have changed location. Is there any way to integrate the Wayback Machine Internet Archive into my site's code so that links are redirected to the archive for the date they were originally posted? Ideally I would like an integrated plugin that directed old outbound links to their archived page on Wayback automatically. It would be great if visitors to the site hardly even knew their click had been redirected. I would like to implement it site-wide, so that either:

1. All outbound links were directed to the original date they were posted, or
2. If links are dead then the plugin kicks in and directs to the wayback archive, or
3. The plugin places a Wayback version of each link next to the original (something like: Original Link [archive])

(My site is a self-hosted blogger blog - the old version - if that makes a difference...)

Is there a way?

Blogger + Indentation?

chairmanroflmao — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:15:18 -0800

How do I make Blogger work with indentation? I'm trying to write some poetry in Blogger, and it has the habit of removing excess space (both at the beginning of words and in between words) that I don't want removed. Is there a way to make it not do that, without too much mucking about with HTML tags and that?

Why is Megan McArdle a good fit for the NYTimes?

waxbanks — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:30:00 -0800

Why is Megan McArdle so highly regarded? Economist/business types: Apparently Megan McArdle of the Atlantic - the blogger formerly known (laughably) as 'Jane Galt' - is being talked about for Bill Kristol's spot at the NYTimes.

Why? What has she done, written, thought that qualifies her for such a position? Note that I'm not interested in a comparative discussion: I'm aware that e.g. David Brooks's only qualification for his NYT columnist spot is being David Brooks. I just want to know what her writing is worth, on its own. I've never had any reaction to her blog but the proverbial 'Meh' - what am I missing?

(Note that I'd have the same reaction to the NYTimes picking Yglesias, Sullivan, Ezra Klein, Amanda Marcotte, or any other ideologique(?!) blogger whose major experience seemed to consist of, um, blogging. Actually of that crew Sullivan would make the most sense to me, as he's older by a decade and more popular by a factor of ten than the others, and has a longish record of public-intellectual/advocacy experience re:, among other things, his signature topic (LGBT civil rights).)

Is this ideological tokenism? Some other, more insidious form of tokenism? Or is McArdle a good fit and I just haven't seen her best stuff?

Help me Mefi-wan Kenobi! You're my only hope!

ps. A link to e.g. a single impressively original insight would be a good start.

Birthday gift for a blogger

telsa — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:25:50 -0800

Looking for a birthday gift for a blogger friend. Female friend's birthday is coming up and she has a passion for writing/blogging. I'm looking for a gift that is special and will stand out and won't be the type that everyone else will get. As for pricing, anything around $150 seems reasonable.

Also, she already has a personal domain.

Blogger to Wordpress, side order of Flickr

Pater Aletheias — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:56:42 -0800

Blogger to Wordpress conversion: I've imported all my old Blogger posts reasonably successfully, but I've got this extraneous html stuff on most of my posts. Is there a way to edit it out of every post at once? The problem comes from the posts that display a Flickr image, which is most of them--around 400. Before every picture there is this bit of code for all to see:

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

I don't really know anything about coding, but I'm assuming this this was meaningful in the Blogger template, and unneeded in Wordpress. At any rate, Wordpress isn't doing anything with it. I've manually deleted it out of twenty posts or so with no noticeable problems. But I'd rather not do that step by step another 380 times.

Is there some magical step that will clean up all the affected posts simultaneously?

What's a reasonable fee for a web design freelancer to customize a Blogger.com template?

Nelsormensch — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 07:46:43 -0800

What's a reasonable fee for a web design freelancer to customize a Blogger.com template? I'm thinking of starting a blog related to my industry. I'm not planning on having this make any money, but as other people in the industry (hopefully) will be reading it, I'd like it to look professional. The default Blogger templates are either hideous or common and amateurish.

I'm a pretty terrible graphic designer/artist, so I'd like a freelancer to create a title image and then a custom template (just colour scheme, really) to match. I know basically what I want, so I can't image it would take more than a couple of hours to so.

What's a reasonable fee for a gig like this? Any gotchas I should watch out for? Also, if you're interested in the actual job, shoot me a MeFiMail and we can chat. Thanks!

CMS + Blogspot = ?

stleric — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:19:15 -0800

What sort of CMS configuration would I use to integrate the current content of a Blogspot blog with a website of basic HTML articles and photo galleries? A friend of mine and I have been talking for ages about integrating his website and his Blogspot blog's collective content into a CMS. It would be easy enough to take the standard HTML articles and add tags and such, but at least with my searching so far, it's integrating a Blogger/Blogspot that seems to be the tricky part.

The hope would be to have articles, photo galleries, and blog posts all be tagged, browsable, and searchable in equal capacity without disrupting existing blog comments or content (and ideally without having to import the Blogger content into a new blogging format). My friend has already looked at Drupal and found it needlessly complex, and I looked into Joomla, but I couldn't find any strong support for Blogger integration.

Is there a CMS or configuration thereof that would be able to do this without too many complications?

How do I embed php into blogger?

mzurer — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:16:41 -0800

Is there a way to embed php into a blogger template? It seems like the tags are getting stripped out before it gets to my site. Do I need to somehow escape the php code so the Blogger parser just skips those tags prior to publishing? I have already written the code that generates the html I want as a standalone php page (and as a perl script if that helps).

Please Help me with my Blogger Blog and Custom Domain

andoatnp — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:26:09 -0800

Why might my Blogger blog not be working with my custom domain and how do I fix it? Four days ago, I set up a blog at CUSTOMDOMAIN.blogspot.com and I own the url CUSTOMDOMAIN.com from GoDaddy. I followed the instructions here from Blogger so that people who visit the Custom Domain would see me Blogger blog. When I visit CUSTOMDOMAIN.com it just shows the godaddy.com parking page without the content from my blogspot blog.

In order to set up the domain I own with the blog I created a CNAME record for the domain (screenshot here, does this look right?) and changed the setting in my blogger setting panel to indicate that it is a custom url that I am using. I'm reasonably certain that I did everything in the blogger side ok, because when I visit CUSTOMDOMAIN.blogspot.com it redirects to CUSTOMDOMAIN.com, but with just the empty godaddy parking page.

Is there something I did wrong or something that I can fix so that my godaddy.com domain works with my blog?

Also, is it possible to set up a Google Apps account and then transfer this domain that I have purchased to that account so that blogger is handling both the domain and the blog? I see where I can purchase a new domain with Google Apps, but can I transfer one that I already own?

Also, I emailed godaddy tech support, and they sent a reply saying that it didn't look like a problem on there end.

float, padding, margins, wrappers, %0px1.2em!11!! oh my!

iamkimiam — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:03:55 -0800

I'm going crazy trying to adjust my blog template. It seems that when I change the browser window size, the body, sidebar, and header all move independently. If I make the window wider, the right edges of the sidebar and header do not align. If I make the window less wide, the whole sidebar crunches into body text (fine) and eventually gets kicked off the side by the body (not fine). Ideally, I'd like them all to line up, move/scale together side-to-side, and not get kicked around. I know this has to do with adjusting float, padding, margins, wrappers, percentages, and pixels. I've been tweaking with the variables, hitting preview, observing changes, for way too long. If somebody could please help me fix this, or point me towards an easy tutorial that won't take up too much of my time to decipher, I'd be forever grateful. Thanks!

Blog is in my profile, but I would be really appreciative if it were NOT linked to in this thread. Thanks!

How to get my posts from Wordpress.com to Blogger?

reenum — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:07:18 -0800

I want to migrate entries from Wordpress.com to Blogger. Is there any easy way to do this? I made the Blogger to Wordpress.com switch a few years ago, but love the new Blogger interface. I find that being able to label posts is a lot less restrictive than Wordpress's categories.

Migrating to Wordpress was a flash. But, going the other way seems to be a problem.

I've tried to Google this, and most of the info out there seems to say that at the moment, this is impossible to do. I've found a couple of tools like blog2blog, but none have worked this far.

Oh technically inclined MeFites, please help.

P.S. I'm not technically inclined, so I really don't have a way to write a program or anything to do this.

Is there a blog host that won't bogart my Amazon links?

RogerB — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:21:24 -0800

Book-blog hosting: Is there a free and easy blog host that allows me to use my own Amazon affiliate links? I am thinking of starting a personal book and movie blog. It should make it easy to add books (ideally with a cover image and an Amazon link) to my posts – I'm quite enamored of Vox's super-easy interface for this, but they use their own Amazon affiliate links and forbid you to substitute your own. It seems like all the big free blog hosts do this, in fact (or at least Blogger, Wordpress, and Vox), unless I'm missing something.

I would really rather not have to host my own blog, or use a paid blog host like Typepad, just to avoid giving away the three to five bucks a year my blog will probably make off Amazon referrals. Is there a free blog host or social networking site, or whatever else, out there that will do this?

High Self Esteem Meet Failure at Simple Tasks

joaniemcchicken — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 15:51:07 -0800

This is embarrassing, but I apparently am not smart enough change my Blogger template. I have always wanted to get one of those pretty free blogger templates besides the 8 dull, dull, dull ones they have had in existence since the dawn of man. But, for some reason, whenever I go to one of those template sites and download a template, I CAN NEVER GET IT TO UPLOAD. NEVER. I have done it ALL: Watched tutorials, read instructions, stared at the computer screen with my mouth open and my reading glasses halfway down with a serious look on my face. So I have tried, people.

It seems that it is very easy, but I have never been able to achieve this.

What am I doing wrong? I have a mac and OS 10.4.1, and a positive attitude.