A cautious way to change your blog

If you've been blogging for a while, you might feel both intrigued and timid about making changes. ¶ 

You might hold back from trying a new blog theme for fear of subjecting your readers to an experiment, or to an extended period of switching things around. ¶ 

Ideally, you'd test and debug things in private, and then go live with the new design once it is ready for prime time. ¶ 

You can do that. I have done it twice (for another blog).

The basic steps are as follows:

1. Clone your blog (using backups and restores)
2. Modify the clone
3. Save the final result (as a theme backup)
4. Import that backup into the live blog

It's a little tricker than that, but not much.

Clone your blog

Before you start: if you do not have up-to-date xml backups of your blog and current theme, make them. Then:

1. Choose the new blog option from the bottom of the pull-down blog menu at upper left on your dashboard. Chose a name and web address. 

You are the only person who will see these.

2. Immediately go into settings and turn off "Visible to search engines." Set Permissions > Reader access to "Private to authors."

The world does not need to see this blog.

3. Import your theme and blog backups from the live blog.

There's been an ongoing problem with restoring blog posts from backups. Sometimes they don't all get imported.

This is a serious problem generally. However, if you have imported a decent sample of your blog posts and some comments, you have a good-enough copy of your blog to proceed to the next step.

Modify the clone

1. If you want to test out a new theme, you can apply or import it now. 

2. Check out how your existing content behaves with the changes. Pay attention to widgets, images, post pages, and comments.

Try it at different screen widths, if it is a responsive theme. Visit it from your phone.

3. If you don't like the theme, you can try another. If the theme is mostly good, you can modify it.

4. Change things like fonts, colors, and widths via the Customizer. Make other changes by editing the theme xml.

I am not going to advise you about any of that. Despite writing posts about some coding hacks for Blogger (for the most part invented by other people), that is not the main focus of this blog.

I will share this: back up your theme often if you are changing any line of code in it. 

Proceeding with caution

At the same time, keep a change log of those modifications with the name of the xml file that includes them.

The idea is this. If you screw something up, you can revert back to the most recent previous version easily. The change log can help you to pinpoint how far back to go.

This log can be in an external document, or in a post or series of posts on the clone blog.

If you have made any modifications to the code of your current blog theme that you want to include in the new theme, paste them into the new theme now. 

Example: Metadata for social media (such as a Twitter card).

Save the final results

When you are completely satisfied, go to your Layout page and delete all the widgets in the clone blog. Why: these already exist in your blog and you do not want duplicates.

Then save the revised blog theme.

Import it into the live blog (the "real" one).

There might be a little cleanup you need to do, but for the most part everything in your blog will then conform to the new blog theme.

Odds and ends

Keep a private copy of your blog around to test things you might want to try.

You can also keep a change log there, if you continue to tinker with your blog.

Photo: Sean Benesh/Unsplash