Saturday, February 28, 2009

Mommy's win of the week: Back up your blog template

Everyone should have a backup of their blog and their blog's template. Even if you have like four subscribers (which was me not so long ago) someone could still hack into your blog and wipe out everything you've ever written.

I won't explain how to back up your blog posts in this post, but backing up the template is easy. (If you feel you're 100% code illiterate, don't worry, I'll hold your hand. Don't be scared.)

From your dashboard, click layout,

then Edit HTML.

You'll see this:


If you click inside that box with all the code and do a CTRL-A, then CTRL-C, you'll have selected all the code and copied it. You can then open Notepad, do a CTRL-V (pasting it) and save the file.

This is the backup of your blog template.

Like I said, this is important. You see that line of buttons just under my pretty little header that say "Home", "Meet Mommy", et cetera? That's a navigation bar. Its purty, and its nice for your readers.

Next Saturday, I'll show you how you can create your own navigation bar, and you'll want to make sure your template is backed up first.

Mommy's Win of the Week is just a little thing I decided to do on Saturdays cuz I typically don't post anything. I figure it may help some of you, and its a way to share all the goodies I learned at some of the blogging conferences I've been to. Cuz, um, I'm waaaay behind on that.

9 comments:

maggie said...

Helpful tip. I look forward to your Saturdays.

Secret Mom Thoughts said...

Thanks. I'm going to do that now.

Melisa Wells said...

I think I love you.

Heather said...

Last summer I installed a plugin that wiped out every post I had written. I hadn't backed up the blog in awhile and almost lost several months of posts. Luckily the great guys at my hosting provider were able to restore my blog. You would think after almost losing the blog I'd back it up more often, but I don't.

Wineplz said...

Great PSA!

Someone hacked Justin's site several years ago and did a bad job at it. So Justin, being the over-achieving geek that he is, cleaned up our site then traced back to that idiot (it was just a highschool kid so he was a little nicer) and hacked the kid's site something bad...put rainbows and unicorns aalllll over it.

Melissa said...

cant wait for next week- I always wanted a nav bar!

the BLAH BLAH BLAHger said...

Good call!

mub said...

Blogger also has (at least in the draft dashboard) a "Download Full Template" link. I utilize it more than I'd care to fess up to since I always seem to do something strange when I'm tweaking things *L*

Karen said...

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I have been blogging for 2 years now, but still have so very much to learn! Thank you for sharing your knowledge!