Tricky Blogger stumbling blocks

Some things about Blogger are not obvious. They make sense once you get the trick of how they work. ¶ 

Your account: 

Even if you never exactly signed up for one, even if you sign in with an email address from someplace else, your blogging account is a Google account.

It is tempting to think of your blog as the hub of your Google world, with other things (gmail, photos, account) stuck onto the blog.

Ptolmey thought the Earth was the center of the universe, too.

The trick: It's more accurate, though, to think of your account, and its user ID, as your hub, with Blogger as one of many services linked to the account.

That's why you can transfer a blog to another account, but you can't change an account's user ID. That is hard-wired in.

Note: If you have more than one Google account. you have to be signed in to the right one to administer your blog at www.blogger.com.

Sorting by category

Google has a feature called "pages," but you can't put posts on them.

The trick: Instead, if you assign labels to your posts, you can view all the labels from each post on a label-search page that Google creates for you automatically.

Pages don't appear

Speaking of those "pages": unlike posts, they won't show up on your blog unless you link to them.

The trick: A blog is a collection of posts by date. By design, "pages" have no dates. They exist outside the chronological feed of blog posts that unspools automatically on your blog.

How you link to pages is up to you, but a popular method is to put the link in a sidebar widget that shows up on every page.

See, for example, the Pages widget.

Reusing a web address

The free web address that comes with your blog can't be reused if you delete the blog. It can be recycled under limited circumstances.

• You can always repurpose the blog by deleting the contents and giving it a new name and theme. Same web address, new stuff.
• If you ever changed the web address, you will always have the option of reverting the blog back to its previous address.

The trick: Even if you change the name, web address, contents and appearance of a blog, to Google it is still the same blog with the same unique Blogger ID number.

Your options to reuse an address are confined to the blog identity that first used the address.

You can transfer the blog to another account if you like, but it remains the same blog.

Don't delete a blog thinking you'll get to reuse the address for another blog. Recycling within the same blog is the only way.

The above does not apply to custom domains, just the free blogspot.com subdomains that come with each Blogger blog.

Tricks?

These are "tricks" in the sense of how to navigate something that is unintuitive. Not things that Google has set up to trick you!

Links

• a blog is a collection of posts
• static pages
• label-search pages
• sidebar widgets
• pages widget
• parts of Blogger
• blogspot web address
• custom domains