Transferring blog ownership

Maybe you want to give your blog, or its web address, to someone else. Or, if you have multiple google accounts perhaps you'd like to consolidate blogs onto the same dashboard or otherwise shift ownership around.

In any case, the method is the same.

I cannot improve upon blogger's own seven-step illustrated guide to moving a blog between accounts.

However, there are a few wrinkles you may wish to consider.

The above blogger guide describes a little dance of inviting, accepting, changing privileges, and deleting, all from alternating accounts. Pay attention and follow the steps in order.

If you are transferring an existing blog, and if there are any photos or other images in the blog, in most cases the images are hosted at a Picasa web account that is linked to the Google account of the author who posted the images. Blogger sets this account up automatically if the author doesn't already have a Picasa account.

Those images will continue to appear in the blog as long as the Picasa account exists. However, if you delete that account, you delete the images and they will disapear from the blog forever.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, that Picasa account is not transferable. Images in new posts will be hosted at the Picasa account of the new author (even if that is the same person blogging under a different account).

The same is true of Google Docs, Feedburner, Google maps, and other services hosted by Google and associated with particular Google accounts.

Finally, consider that the settings for your blog do not change when you transfer ownership. This includes things like feed redirects, email notifications (including those related to comments), and options to blog-by-email and mobile devices.

If you want these to change you will have to modify the settings yourself.