Editing The Template In A New Blogger Blog

The template in a New Blogger blog, when published to Blog*Spot (or to a Google Custom Domain) is written in XML, not HTML. A lot of HTML based tweaks won't work in New Blogger.

If you force HTML into your template, you may end up with one of the new, cryptic error codes

bX-lgwej

This says that your post template contains invalid HTML.

Are you seeing this error? If so, don't despair.

• Revert the template back to Classic, so your readers can access the blog.
• Build a test version of the blog, and work on a New Blogger template, while your readers are accessing the production blog.
• Take your HTML based template tweaks, that made your Classic blogs unique, and add them as HTML / JavaScript page elements. Test everything, carefully, in all available browsers.
• When you have a New Blogger template for your blog, looking as you like it, Save the template to a known location.
• Migrate your production blog to a New Blogger template again.
• Restore the saved template, developed above, to your production blog.

XML is not as user friendly as HTML was. But 90% of the HTML based tweaks can probably be copied into HTML page elements in the GUI Page Elements section of the Template. Forget about raw XML, and use Page Elements.

XML is not as forgiving as HTML. You may have to learn some discipline, when coding New Blogger template entries, and even posts.

Most HTML tags, like the Anchor tag, come in pairs.

<a href="http://bloggerstatusforrealbeta.blogspot.com/
2007/01/editing-template-in-new-blogger-blog.html">
http://bloggerstatusforrealbeta.blogspot.com/
2007/01/editing-template-in-new-blogger-blog.html</a>

is an anchor link to this article. Notice the

<a...> ... </a>

pair.

Some HTML tags, like the Break tag, don't come in pairs.

<br>

is a tag that I use a lot. There is no sequence

<br> ... </br>

A Break tag, in strict HTML, is better written as

<br />

The requirements of strict HTML you will probably have to learn from experience. An Object tag can't be written as the Break tag is written.

<object />

isn't valid. Nor is a simple

<object ... >

Here's how I got an embedded video object to work, in my Miscellaneous Musings post More Bumper Cars

<span style="text-align: center; display: block;"><object height="350" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/z9tKWzxSZ5E"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/z9tKWzxSZ5E" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="samedomain" height="350" width="425"></embed></object></span>

Note the Embed and Param tags, too. The Param didn't require pairing. The Object and Embed tags did - you'll get errors when publishing with them unpaired. I got an error when I tried publishing Object as

<object ... />

The only solution was to publish it as

<object ... > ... </object>

Apparently all tags aren't as versatile in formatting as the meta tag is. Life isn't fair, nor is strict HTML easy. Deal with it.

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