Editing Existing Posts

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Summer 2020 Blog Fest

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One of the best things about using blogs as writing spaces is that you can encourage a process of continual revision. Editing existing blog posts is easy on any platform; below are some tips about editing existing posts at Blogger.

Open a post for editing. To open any post for editing, just click on it in the Posts view of the dashboard. It's that simple!

In the old dashboard, there is an actual edit link if you hover over the post, but you don't have to use that link; just click on the post title and it opens that post for editing:

In the new version of the dashboard, posts look like this; just click on the title to open for editing:

There are no longer edit/delete/view hover links; instead, you just click on the item to open it for editing.

Clear Formatting: Tx. One of the most common problems with formatting is when you copy-and-paste from another text editor like Word or GoogleDocs. When you copy-and-paste, that often brings in formatting that does not work in the context of the blog. If you have a dark template with light font, for example, the dark font from another application might become invisible. The solution is the "clear formatting" option in the editor, or Tx.

In the old editor, the Tx button is at the far right of the editing menu:

In the new editor, the "clear formatting" option is under the three-dot menu to the right that expands the editing menu:

Just highlight the whole post, then hit the Tx button, and that will strip away the formatting. You might need to go in and remove extra line breaks that get added, along with any bold, italics, etc. that you wanted.

The "pencil icon. One of the reasons I continue to use an "old" Blogger template (one that predates the latest templates which use mobile-first design principles) is that those templates feature a pencil icon in each blog post (visible only to the blog author) which allows you to instantly open the post for editing.

This feature is turned on by default in posts for that generation of templates; it is not available in the newer templates. I'll have more to say about the different generations of Blogger templates in a later post.

Spellcheck. Finally, this is not exactly related to editing an existing post, but you might be wondering about a spellcheck in Blogger. There is not a spellcheck feature; instead, you need to turn on the spellcheck feature in your browser, which will then provide the red squiggle for typos when you edit in Blogger.  So if I type spellcheckk here in Chrome, I get the red squiggle, and if I then right-mouse click on that word, I get the following menu options:

The specific spellcheck features vary by browser; I have some notes for students about that here: Week 1 Orientation: Tech Tools (see "Browser Tune-Up"). If you can get students used to using the spellcheck features in their browsers, that will help them in all the typing they do online: email, blogging, anything they type in a browser-based text box.

Next up: editing post dates and labels for navigation purposes!