A word of caution to all Blogspot users who are still on the old Blogger platform. There are some serious bugs in the template editing feature (introduced only recently) that will change your important Blog settings like date formats, comment moderation, etc whenever you edit and save your custom Blogger templates.
Here's a description of problem that I been seem to occur very often in the recent days:
1. While editing a template, if you preview the changes two or three times and then save the template, it will internally modify the blog archive settings such that the "Enable Post Pages" setting will be switched off. That means all your permanent URLs will be gone.
2. The above bug also modifies the Archive Index Date Format that you generally see on the right sidebar of this blog.
3. Today, it was worse. I made a small change in the blog template and it completely ruined by Comment settings. Almost all the values were toggled including the "Enable Comment Moderation" setting.
While I don't have steps to reproduce the above problems, they keep happening whenever I change my templates. So make sure you are not facing similar issues - always double check your old Comment and Archive settings whenever you change the blog templates.
Google spent so much money in acquiring Youtube, I wish they could spare some funds for making Blogger secure, stable and free of these "dangerous" bugs.
Related Reading: Blogger Templates
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/10/be-very-careful-when-editing-blogger.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
I noticed it.. I have some old blogger blogs.. It ruïned my whole templates and I had to start again. Real crazy. There are a lot of bugs lately.
Regards
Written on 18/10/06 4:31 PM
Why are you sticking with the old version? I'm sure a lot of bloggers who haven't made the switch yet would like to know your views on the pros and cons of this.
My blogname [geekfx] was taken over within two days when I deleted the blog and now redirects to some spam/search site. The old posts along with my photo are lying around coz I neglected to delete them individually before I deleted the blog and when someone tries to navigate to my main page from there- voila! They get the spam site. Blogger has a long long way to go.
Written on 18/10/06 6:21 PM
Amit
Amit,
On a related note about templates, I have begun to notice that your blog is getting cluttered with ads and is losing that feel of simplicity. I visited your blog yesterday and noticed that ugly ad of Click Jobs on the right side of the template. It's an eye sore. You had written an article about ad rates on top blogs and I visited Lifehacker which has a simple yet excellent design and still pulls in viewers. If you have plans of doing a template upgrade, I would suggest you do away with the clutter, revamp the entire template and stick to a more professional design to suit your image as a top class pro blogger.
Regards
Andy
Written on 18/10/06 7:20 PM
I totally agree with andy, you ought to do something about your template. Its getting cluttered day by day. I have already mentioned this once i believe.
As far the bugs go, the only thing that i ever had to tolerate was that sometimes when i modified the templates the whole template gets erased and twice i had to start from scratch again. So i have started saving my template designs just as a precaution.
Written on 18/10/06 10:32 PM
Mr. Amit,
A great article! It seems not only the bugs that modify the archive index or comment settings, but also Publish Site Feed. I changed some bits of my template days ago, since then my posts has never been updated in Technorati, which prompted me to check the sitefeed in the setting after reading your post. It turns out Publish Site Feed set at NO.
Written on 24/10/06 11:18 AM
It would also be helpful to remember how you were able to create the problem. Now it sounds like someone crying wolf.
Written on 25/10/06 9:32 AM
That might explain my problems. I changed the navbar and lost my blog.
Written on 26/10/06 5:19 AM