HOWTO: Link to All Posts of a Given Day

If you have several posts written on a given day and want to create one link to all of them, here's a little tip that will help you to achieve that.

Even though there is no direct way of getting this done, you can use Blogger's Archive feature as a workaround. All you should do is to set your archive frequency to Daily. (Settings -> Archiving -> Archive Frequency). Then the Archive widget will show a breakdown up to a single day. (see figure below)

Each day in the widget carries a link to a page that lists all the posts in that day. That's the reference you need to use to link to all posts of a given day. Even if you don't have the Archive widget, you can still make up the URL for a given day. It has the format http://<your blog address>/YYYY_MM_DD_archive.html.

Blogger Stats

Blogger has announced a feature which was long overdue, visitor stats. This will bring in an integrated Stats tab to the Blogger admin console that provides an analytics-type visitor statistics service. This will eliminate the need to install third party visitor meters such as Analytics, SiteMeter etc. in your blog.

The feature is currently in beta. Login to draft.blogger.com to experience it.

Template Designer is Live

The Template Designer which I blogged about a couple of months ago when it was in beta, has gone live!

This brings in a powerful WYSIWYG editor to tweak your templates in many beautiful ways. The features include the ability to pick from professionally designed templates, option to select professional images as background images, ability to select many different layouts such as two-column, three-column etc in a snap and much more. The Template Designer is truly a wonder tool for the non-technical bloggers who were afraid of meddling around with the HTML, CSS etc to customize their templates.

With the introduction of this new remarkable feature, Blogger has revised the buttons on the admin console as well. The former Layout button has gone out and a new button called Design has taken its place. The sub-menu for this section has also been revised with the old Fonts and Colors and Pick New Template buttons being replaced with a single Template Designer button. (see figure below)

The Edit HTML option still remains allowing the more technically inclined bloggers to dig deep. However, the template structure seems to have gone through drastic changes in order to support the new Template Designer. Don't worry, Blogger will take care of migrating your existing template to this new format if and when you modify your template using this option. One thing to note, however, is that you will lose any existing customizations on top of the current default templates.

See the official Blogger Buzz announcement for more details.

A Review of the Domain Transition

Towards the latter part of last year, I wrote few articles discussing about Blogger custom domains, some factors one need to consider when moving to a custom domain and also a checklist of things to do when moving to a custom domain.

These articles were the result of some learning I went through myself to evaluate the pros and cons of moving to a custom domain. In fact, I was convinced of the value of an independent domain, but was afraid of loosing traffic and most importantly the Google PageRank (PR) earned by the blogspot domain! As stated in the Moving to a Custom Domain article, a Google employee had confirmed that the PR values will be transferred within a couple of weeks, so after all, it was not very difficult to make the decision to go ahead with the domain transition, which was fully affected in January this year.

The transition was not really difficult. I had no issues with my AdSense account as it is not setup to limit the ad publishing URLs. My subscriber feed (via FeedBurner) also worked without a problem as it was named after the logical name of this blog (i.e. The Blogger Guide) and not the blogspot URL. The two visitor meters, namely Google Analytics and SiteMeter also did not require any changes as they are linked up using unique IDs, which do not depend on the domain name.

I did not see any drop in visitor counts after the transition. However, it took a considerable amount of time to recover my Alexa rank and also for the green PageRank bar to appear in places such as the Google Toolbar.

At the time of transition, my Alexa rank was somewhere around 230,000. Immediately after the transition, I had to resubmit the new domain as there is no way in Alexa to transfer the ranks from one domain to another. However, the rank for the new domain (www.bloggerguide.lk) quickly improved from several millions to something below 400,000 in a couple of weeks. And now, after about three months, it has reached the level it was at the time of the change.

The Google PageRank (of 4/10) which I had at the time of transition re-appeared on the toolbar only this week, a good three months later. I think the reason for the delay is this. There are two types of page ranks; one is a static value displayed in place such as the Google Toolbar, which Google updates from time to time. The other is a very dynamic value, which is calculated continuously and used to rank search results internally. So I think what gets restored in a couple of weeks of a domain transition are these internal PR values and not the externally displayed ones. It seems that even for transferred domains, the published PR values will only get restored in the periodic updates.

Finally, I can say that the decision to move to a custom domain did work! After a lapse of about 3 months, the blog has restored its rankings in addition to the pluses of the new independent domain.

Related Posts

• Custom Domains for BlogSpot
• Deciding to Move to a Custom Domain
• Moving to a Custom Domain

The Template Designer

Blogger has developed another very exciting feature called the Template Designer. With it, you can create custom template designs using an extremely user-friendly interface without having to worry about meddling with HTML code! Yes, that's right, you don't have to go through the Layout -> Edit HTML interface to get another sidebar to your template, or to add a nice background image to your blog or to do many more template tweaks.

This feature is still not released formerly and is now in testing stage in Blogger in Draft. If you log in to draft.blogger.com, and go to the Layout section of your blog, you will see a new sub section called the Template Designer. (see figure below)


From that interface, you get to choose from a set of expert designed templates, manipulate the column layouts with a snap, apply many different background images and also customize the fonts and colors. You get a real-time preview as well, making it easier to experiment.

Go on and try it at Blogger in Draft and I'm sure you will love it!

Note:
Even if you have applied any customizations such as three-columns or wider-blogs from The Blogger Guide tutorials, the Template Designer will still work. It will recognize that the template is customized, but still its changes will work.

Over 100,000 Visits!

The Blogger Guide passed another milestone today; the unique visits count crossed the one hundred thousand mark!

It's just over two years since the inception, and given the relatively little amount of time I put in, this is a great achievement for me. It's been a slow but steady growth.

Thanks for all the help in spreading the word about The Blogger Guide.

Blogazines

The blogosphere is evolving! This post is about one such evolution which I happened to stumble upon today.

Most of today's blogs are of a traditional columnar layout with one main (or post) column and one or more sidebars. This layout is what you get in pretty much every post. However, the print industry, especially the magazines, have been making good use of the basic design principles such as balance, color and fonts, to add variety to individual articles.

Some very creative bloggers out there have drawn upon this idea of varied article layouts, on to the blog posts and the result is termed blogazines. Read more about this at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-death-of-the-blog-post/ and also some tips for creative blog post design at http://line25.com/articles/tips-for-designing-unique-and-attractive-blog-posts.

This is definitely not for the average blogger as it requires lot of design skills and also effort to finish each article layout from scratch. However, I found the idea very interesting and thought you would like it too.

Pages coming to Blogger!

Update: 2010 Feb 20
The pages feature has graduated from Blogger in Draft and now is a regular service.

It is just a little over a month ago that I wrote that we cannot have pages in Blogger. However, the test bed of Blogger, Blogger in Draft, has recently announced a pages feature in Blogger.

This, no doubt, will be an exciting news for most of the Blogger users out there. With pages one can easily create static pages such as About Us or Contact Us to hold information that don't change as often, but which needs to be easily accessed by visitors to a blog. This feature will be accompanied by a widget which helps to manage pages and display them easily either as a tabbed navigation bar or sidebar links.

It is still in beta stage and hopefully will be available in the primary Blogger service soon. You can try out the feature by logging in to draft.blogger.com.

Domain Transition Complete

This is to inform you that I have completed the domain name transition from bguide.blogspot.com to www.bloggerguide.lk.

The FeedBurner feeds should work without a problem, as I have not changed the feed address.

Thank you,
ids.