How to change a Label value

This article shows how to edit the name of an existing Label value in blogger, without editing each individual post that it's applied to.

Blogger and Labels

Previously, I've explained that labels are tags you can use to categorize your blog posts, and that the are the raw material of putting your posts into pages.

But what happens if you want to change the value of a label? For example, if you have a lot of posts that are labelled "Colour", but you find that most of your visitors are from the US and think you have poor spelling!

It would be nice if Blogger had a feature that said "change all X labels to Y labels" - but it doesn't (at moment, anyway).

One option is to edit each post individually, removing the old label and adding a new one. This works, but can be time consuming.

A better option is to use the bulk-labelling tools. This is a lot easier, though not quite as easy as you might think.

Blogger's Post-Dashboard labelling tools

This picture shows the tools that you can use to work with labels (outside of the post-editor).  They are all found on the Dashboard when you are looking at the Posts tab.

The Group tick box either selects or un-selects all the posts you can currently see on the Dashboard > Posts tab (depending on whether they're selected or not at the moment - it works like a toggle-switch).

The Label action button applies an action to all the posts that are currently selected.   You can:

• Make a new label and add it to the selected posts
• Add an existing label to posts that don't currently have that label  (by just choosing the label) and are currently selected
• Delete an existing label from posts that do currently have that label  (by just choosing the label) and are currently selected

Example Label Action Button values

The Label value selector lets you see a list of just posts with a label.

The Posts-per-page selector is where you select how many of your posts are listed in the Dashboard > Posts tab.

The Paging buttons let you move through the list of displayed posts.

How to change a label name

1 Close Blogger, and re-open it again.    (see below for an explanation of this step).

2 On the Dashboard > Posts screen, make sure that you are viewing 50 posts per screen  (or less if you don't have many posts)
Do this with the Posts-per-page selector near the top-right corner. You need to do it because Blogger's bulk-label tools will only let you work with 50 or less posts at a time.

3 Select the label that you want to rename from the Label value selector drop-down list.
This restricts the list to only posts with that label.
If you have more than 50 posts with the label, then there will be more than one screen-full of posts. You can see this in the Paging-buttons at the top right of the screen.

4   For each screen-full of posts that is shown:

• Use the group-tick box at the top of the list of posts to select all posts that are currently on your screen.

• Either choose the new value from the  Label action button drop-down menu - or use the New Label ... option in the first screenful of posts.   This will attach the new label name to the posts you have selected.

• Choose the label value from the Label action button drop-down menu to Remove the old label from the posts you have selected.

• Use the group-tick box at the top of the list of posts again, this time to unselect all posts that are currently on your screen.

After you have done this for all the screens of posts that currently have the old label value:

• You should be left on the Dashboard > Posts screen, with a message saying that there are no posts with your old label. 
• The old label will not be attached to any posts, and will not be visible in the Label-value-selector. 
• If you displaying labels with your posts, then visitors to your blog who use a web-browser will not be able to see the old label value any more, and it will not be listed in any Label gadgets you have used.

What was the catch?

The approach described here deals with two "twitches" with how Blogger works.

Firstly, closing and re-starting Blogger before you start makes sure that absolutely none of your posts are selected initially: I've found that sometimes if a post is selected, and then you page up or down, that post is still selected. And sometimes a post is selected immediately after you have edited it. It can be quite hard to find these (because there is currently no feature to list "selected posts only"), so the re-start is the safest approach.

Secondly, there is a maximum of 50 posts per label action. This is a pain: it means that if you want to re-name the label on 300 posts, you need to do it in 6 groups of 50 each times. I can sympathise with Blogger about making sure that actions like this don't take "too long" - but the 50 posts limit does seem very low.

Is the old label gone for good?

This is an interesting question.  Blogger has set a limit of a maximum of 5000 labels per blog. Once you have replace a label value is the way described above, I'm not sure if it will be removed totally, or if it still counts towards the 5000 even though it's no longer in use. (And I'm not about to manually give a blog 5000 labels just to test it to find out!)

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Related Articles:

Putting your posts into pages

Using Labels to categorize posts

How to edit a post that you have already published

Using Feedburner to Tweet your posts lets you include labels as hashtags

Custom-search-engine adds an "overlay" results layout

This quick-tip is about a new overlay results format which Google Custom Search Engines have just introduced - and which looks like it will be their new standard. 

Custom Search Engines have announced a new layout - which appears to have become their new standard option.

Search-engine creation is much the same as it was, but at the end you only get one piece of code to install, and it can just go in the place where you want it (no more messing with editing the <header> in your template).

The search results page is shown as an overlay on top of your regular page.  As always with custom-search-engines, there are ads-by-Google at the top of the page, and if you have already become an AdSense publisher you can use your custom-search-engine to share the revenue.

The big question is - will this new layout approach work in Blogger?    If I was writing an article, I'd test it out somewhere else first, and have some advice about the options, likely problems etc.   But since this is only a quick-tip, this post is my research!   Below, you should see a search-engine, which is set up to search inside Blogger-HAT.   Search for something in it, and you will hopefully see how the overlay search results work.    (If not, I'll come back and change this post as soon as I know more about the problem and how to solve it.)

See an example of custom-search-engine overlay results format

Try it out here:

Is this layout better?

If the layout works, my next decision is whether I should switch the overall Blogger-Helper-Search tool over to use it.

 What do you think?   Like the overlay search results approach, or hate it?

A quick way to keep an eye on what is posted to interesting YouTube channels

This quick-tip is about subscribing to a YouTube channel using an RSS feed-reader, like Google Reader

Most bloggers know about other blogs and websites in their niche that they want to keep an eye on, to either know what's going on, or as inspiration for their own posts.

Previously I've explained that RSS was invented to make this simpler: you can get a summary of changes on all interesting websites in the one place (called a feed-reader), rather than having to regularly visit each site individually.

Video is increasingly popular: many bloggers are putting videos in their posts or their posts into videos, and some have even abandoned their blogs and are only publishing new content to a YouTube channel.

I've just found that it's very easy to subscribe to a YouTube user or channel in RSS / Google reader, meaning you can see a list of new videos from you reader, without having to go to the channel in YouTube.

Follow these steps:

• Find the channel or person you want to subscribe to in YouTube

• Right-click on their name or icon, and copy the URL / web-address / link location (the precise name depends on the browser you are using - you want the place that clicking the link takes you to, not the location of the image-file used to make the link)

• Go into your feed-reader, and subscribe to that link (in Google Reader, this is done using a red button near top left corner of the screen labelled "subscribe" - just click it, paste in the link and click the Add button).

The link will be something like  

http://www.youtube.com/user/MariahIsTheQueen  or http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX9_dIohJBxlizx14AozTng

If it has something else after the name (eg   ?feature=watch), then delete that part before you subscribe  you just need a link saying whether it points to a user or channel, and the name of that user channel.

Example of subscribing to a channel about rocket-science in YouTube

Stop Blogger offering to share your posts to Google+

This article describes Blogger's share-to-Google+ feature, and shows how to stop Blogger offering to share to your Google + circles every time you publish a new post, and what you cannot (yet) do with the feature.

Automatically updating Google + from your blog

If you have linked your blogger-account to your Google+ profile, then by default you are shown a pre-filled Google+ share box with details of your post in it, every time that you publish a post, including times when you edit a post that has already been published.

The share box has a snippet and thumbnail picture  based on your post, and section where you can add a comment, remove the description, choose the circle(s) to share it with, and say to also email people who are not in your circles.

You can change the picture associated with the shared post using the arrows (hover over the top left of the suggested picture - the arrows circle through the other available pictures. Or you can remove it using the cross button (hover over the top-right of the suggested picture).

The top right corner shows whether the post is being shared to your personal profile to the the Google+ Page that you previously linked with the blog.

This is one of the easiest ways of sharing your blog posts with any of the social networks: it lets you customise the content of the message and target it carefully, without having to leave Blogger to do so.

Don't bother me: stop Blogger offering to share to Google-plus

If you don't want to see the "share on Google+" option every time post, you can turn the feature off for individual blogs. To do this:

1   Go to the Google + tab.

2   Untick the "Prompt to share after posting" button, currently found underneath your list of Pages

(Unlike some tabs, changes on this tab are automatically saved.)

Why would you want to do this?   After all, if your accounts are linked, then surely you want to share your posts to Google+?

Actually there are a number of reasons why you might want to disable this feature.   Some that I can think of are:

• If you make frequent edits to existing posts it would probably annoy the people in your circles if you shared all of them - and it slows you down, because the share screen takes a few seconds to load every time you publish.

• If you use a private blog to prepare your posts before publishing them - obviously there's no need to share these posts with yourself! 

• You might just want to do the share, but at a later time than the initial post, to spread out the new-post impact.

Even if you've turned off the "offer to share" option, you can still Google+ share individual posts by selecting "share" from underneath the title in the Blogger Dashboard > Posts tab.

Troubleshooting the Google + share option:

You only see this option if when you publish a post, if:

• You have connected any of the blogs owned by your blogger account to Google+

• You have not previously turned it off for this particular blog

• Your blog is not private.
  If you try it on a blog with restricted readership, instead of an error message you are given the not-very-helpful option to share the Blogger sign in screen, like this:

Doing more with the Blogger / Google-Plus share feature

Currently there is no way to:

• Totally automate the share, so it happens without you pressing Ok in the "Share this on ..." box.

• Show the labels from your post in your shared item

• Schedule the share

• Automatically share posts published with mail2Post or which are scheduled to Publish in the future.

• Change whether the post is shared to a selected Google+ page or your personal circles
  This is controlled by a global setting that you can edit on the Blogger Dashbaord > Google + tab, but you cannot alter it on the fly.

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Related Articles:

Post-snippet and post-thumbnail: where do they come from

Linking your blog to the social networks

Prepare Posts in Private, so you can Publish when they're Perfect

How to edit posts that you have already published

Mail2Post: post to your blog without using Blogger

Using Labels to categorize blog-posts

Remove sidebar background in the Travel template

This quick-tip is about removing the coloured section that is in the background in Blogger's Travel template.

Recently, I've been using the Travel template a lot:  it just seems to line things up more sharply on the page.

Today I noticed that there is an option for setting the Sidebar background colour under the Template Designer > Customize > Advanced tool.  However it doesn't seem to work.

Investigating the template shows that as well as this sidebar background colour (which is correctly set by the option above), the template also specifies a background image (ie not a colour) to use in the sidebars.    This isn't removed when the overall background image for the template is removed, and cannot be controlled from the template designer.

But it's simple enough to get rid of it, by following these steps:

1   Edit the template in the usual way.

2   Tick the expand widgets checkbox.

3   Find this code:

background: $(widget.outer.background.color) $(widget.outer.background.gradient) repeat scroll top left;

4   And either replace it with this code, or delete the line entirely.

/*  background: $(widget.outer.background.color) $(widget.outer.background.gradient) repeat scroll top left;  */

The first option just comment its out, meaning you could re-instate it again by removing the /* and  */. But if you are certain that you never want it back, just delete the whole line instead.

Depending on the sidebar layout chosen, there may be one or more places where the background image is.   Make sure that you do all of them that you want the background removed from.

Also, if you later choose a different layout, you make need to remove the background image again even though you haven't actually changed templates.