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.

Modify the clone

1. If you want to test out a new theme, 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.

View and interact with it at different window 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. You can back up the theme xml directly from the Theme page.

Proceeding with caution

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

Change Log

5/12: Images on the Visual page now larger for desktop, still small for mobile.

To achieve this, I had to remove some sizing from the html on the page itself, and add some css. Also increase the /s###/ size in some urls.

5/13: Set Lora for body text, Roboto Slab for headings

The idea is this. If you screw something up, you can revert back to the most recent previous version easily, if you have those backups. 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.

Are you are modifying a new theme? If you've made any changes to the code of your current blog theme that you want to include in the new theme, now is a good time to paste them into the new theme.  

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