Monday, February 25, 2008

Open links in a New Window

On my blogger sites, I like to reference links to other sources that verify information and give the reader additional tips that don't quite fit my topic. One of the problems I had was that clicking those links would take readers away from my site. Not wanting that to happen, I needed to find the code to open those links in a new window, leaving my page safely behind it. That way readers could click recipes, or tips and tricks, and then come back to my blog for additional reading. Below is the code that needs to be placed in all of your links.

Modifying Your Links to Launch a New Window

This is how it works. Say you want to link to a recipe. The site name for this recipe is http://www.recipe.com. When you use the make a link button in compose mode, the html for the site looks like this: href="http://www.recipe.com/">

Take a minute to see what I mean. Open a new blog entry and type the word recipe in compose view.

Now make a link to the site http.//www.recipe.com by highlighting the word recipe you just typed, clicking the chain link button and typing the address (www.recipe.com) on the line provided. Now go over to the Edit Html view. The address you typed will look like this: href="http://www.recipe.com/">

Note: The addresses you'll be typing will typically be longer, but you get the idea. The path starts with href= and ends with ">

Okay, between the end " and > place this piece of code: target="_blank" in Edit Html view.

Now the address should look like this: href="http://www.recipe.com/"target="_blank"> when you're looking at it in Edit Html view.

Now when your reader clicks on the link, it will open in a new window instead of the existing window (your blog). When the new window closes, your blog will be revealed behind it.

I hope this helped. Send me a note to let me know if it did.

Good luck!

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Easy Blogger Backup

It's easy to save your entire blog if it's not huge. Enter the code below, substituting your bog name in the 'Yourblogname' portion, and your number of posts in the 'NumberofPosts' portion. Then hit go or enter. It may take a while to load, but the result will be your entire blog listing, one entry after another, most current first. This will be loaded into your browser as one very long web page. Once it has finished loading, save it to your computer's hard drive. Back it up regularly.

http://Yourblogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=NumberofPosts

Don't lose your data needlessly. Always keep a backup of your hard work.
Happy blogging!

Drop me a line if this helped.

The next step in the process is to copy and save your page's design code.