Set Mobile Browser Theme Color for Blogger Blogs

Post written by Deepak Kamat
More people now loves reading on the go, be it a news article or a travel blog, almost everyone's first choice for reading blogs and browsing social media sites are smartphones. Same goes for your readers, many may love reading on their smartphones, and setting a theme color would make your Blogger blog stand out in the crowd.


The major browsers even on smartphones are very advanced and it provides a lot of options for websites to personalize how their website looks on a readers phone, they can control the icon they see in the browser as well as the color of the browser's address-bar in mobile Chrome, Opera and Firefox OS.



If you use Chrome you might have noticed that  upon visiting some websites the top bar of Chrome changes color and mostly according to theme of the website. It is not something that Chrome does magically, the website developers can set a specific color for Chrome to be themed with and that is very simple.

Bloggers on the Blogger.com platform has transitioned to a mobile-first approach, and it is a wise thing to do as the readers are more comfortable on mobile phones than on a laptop or a PC.

Setting Theme Color on your Blogger Blog

By default if you visit your blog on a mobile browser, here Chrome, you will see the default light grey color on the top bar, and that looks boring.

Doing this is very simple, it requires you to add a line of code in your template and that's it. The steps are mentioned below.

Note: It is recommended that you always take backup of your template before making any code customization. Click here to see how to take a backup of your Blogger template.

Before we proceed, copy this line of code -

<meta name="theme-color" content="#4285f4"/>

  1. Now, go to your Blogger Dashboard and select your blog. 
  2. Click on the "Template" option in the left panel
  3. Once the section is loaded, you will see a button with "Edit HTML" label, click on it to open the template editor.
  4. Inside the template editor hitCTRL+F  / ⌘ + F and search for <head>, it should be on the top already so you will find it easily


  5. Now paste the code we copied before immediately on the next line of <head>
Once the code is at place it should look similar to the screenshot above. Now click on "Save template" on the screen and then load your blog in Chrome browser on your smartphone. You will now see that the top bar of Chrome has turned into another color other than the default light grey color.

Set your desired color

You may of course want to set a color of your choice, the one that would be set in the default code provided in the tutorial you will get a dark blue color.

To change the color that is set you have to make edit in the code that you use, this is the code -

<meta name="theme-color" content="#4285f4"/>

The yellow highlighted text #4285f4 (without the quotes) is the hex value of the color, in HTML colors also has hex values. If you aren't sure what is the hex value of the color you want, go to http://www.color-hex.com/ to choose the color and get your desired color's hex value. Then replace the yellow highlighted part with your own.

For example, if we want a certain shade of green, which has the hex value #215C03, we modify our code to this

<meta name="theme-color" content="#215C03"/>

That is simple. All you have to do is replace the hex value in the code with your desired color and place it in the template by following the steps in the previous section.

It's all. Impress your readers by doing what most Blogger blog owners don't think about.

Comment on the post if you like this, share it with your friends and family for them to make their blog look pretty as well. For any questions or suggestions feel free to comment.


Where to Find Blogger App for iOS

Post written by Deepak Kamat
If you have been looking for the Blogger app on your iOS device then you are out of luck. Blogger took down its official iOS app and stopped supporting it and its been a pretty while.



There are many Blogger users who needs to update and post to their blog on a regular basis, from their smartphone and it is very inconvenient without an app to do that. And especially now that smartphone users are the majority, Blogger lags behind in providing an official app, which is not a great thing for such a popular Blogging platform.

Straightforward answer to the question is that, Blogger does not have any official app for smartphones. That's the sad and bitter truth, the good news is that there are tons of other apps on the app store available as well as other workaround to access Blogger on phones.

Use Blogger with Chrome

If you use Chrome you can access the full desktop version dashboard of your blogger account directly on your phone. The UI is the same as it is on desktop browsers thus there is nothing new to learn to get started. 

Download Google Chrome browser on your iOS device, go to this page to download Google Chrome on your device. Set it up, sign-in with your Google account and you are good to go. 

Simply access https://www.blogger.com in Chrome and you will see all your blogs in the dashboard, from there on you can add new post, edit them and change blog settings if you wish. It is basically the same as use on a desktop, only on a relatively smaller screen. You need to get used to pinch-zoom in and out, it takes a while but it is worth it.

Other third party app 

We do not guarantee the performance and usability of these apps. Check the reviews before you try them.

BlogGo for Blogger 




BlogTouch Pro (for Blogspot Blogger) 





Right now there aren't a lot of high quality apps for Blogger in the app store, but these are the best based on user reviews.



If you have any questions regarding Blogger or these apps, do let us know in the comments below. 

Spoiler Content Box for Posts in Blogger Blogs

Post written by Deepak Kamat
It is difficult to warn users about possible spoilers in an article, if you are a blogger who blogs about TV shows, movies or books which are some common subjects of spoilers for its audience. Today you will learn how to implement a simple technique to handle spoiler contents on your blog posts.

Before you proceed any further you want to make sure that this is what you want to have as a feature on your blog, so try this live demo here



The best thing is that you don't have to write a lot of stuff to include it into your post every time, once you set it up, you just need the text content which is probably a spoiler, into a line of HTML which we will provide in the tutorial below.

Spoiler: This is easy to add to your blog!! See this.

It is a little addition, but we have created it to work on any kind of device a reader might be using so they get the best experience on your blog and keep themselves away from spoilers if they are unaware, following are some features worth noting

  1. Almost no work to do when adding these Spoiler box in your blog posts. 
  2. Works on Blogger, WordPress, basically it is all HTML and CSS, thus works perfectly fine on any kind of website. The tutorial is meant for Blogger though. 
  3. Your readers use mobile devices to read your blog? No problem, we got you covered, they just need to tap the boxes to show the hidden content
  4. Different colors! Match it with your blog's color scheme. 

Let's Begin The Tutorial

You are here, it means you have made up your mind and would like to continue adding it to your blogger blog (or probably other sites like WP). Before we begin these are some steps you should follow:

  • Backup your Blogger Template - In case anything goes wrong you can restore it to the way it was. 
  • Open a plain text editor in your computer (Notepad or TextEdit, if you have a code editor then it is a plus but that's optional!)
  • Coffee or tea? You choose :)
This tutorial is split into two parts, adding the CSS and then setting up the HTML, these are the only two things that you have to go through and we will give you a small hints about what's going on with each part so you don't feel lost. 

Adding the CSS

CSS is the language used on the web to style things on a website, it plays a major role in our spoiler content box, as it is the back-bone of how our spoiler content show/hide box is going to work.

Following is the CSS code we are going to use, this is the whole code, and is less than 2 kilobytes in size, that means no performance impact on your blog at all :

/*************************************
Spoiler Content Box 
 # By Deepak Kamat
 # stramaxon.com
 # depy45631@gmail.com

Get it for your blog at:
http://goo.gl/ZiJj3J
*************************************/
.spoiler {
  position: relative;
  border: 2px dotted rgba(0,0,0,0.1);
  padding: 10px;
  background-color: #ffe496;
  margin: 10px 0;
}

.spoiler {
  color: #ffe496; 
  color: transparent;
  -webkit-transition: 0.4s all ease-in-out;
  -moz-transition: 0.4s all ease-in-out;
  -ms-transition: 0.4s all ease-in-out;
  transition: 0.4s all ease-in-out;
}

.spoiler:hover ,
.spoiler:active ,
.spoiler:focus  {
  color: inherit;
}

.spoiler::after {
  content: "{Click or hover to see spoiler}";
  position: absolute;
  top: 0; left: 0; right: 0; bottom: 0;
  background-color: #ffe496;
  text-align: center;
  font-size: 0.8em;
  padding: 10px;
  color: rgba(0,0,0,0.6);
  font-weight: 600;
  opacity: 1;
  -webkit-transition: 0.4s all ease-in-out;
  -moz-transition: 0.4s all ease-in-out;
  -ms-transition: 0.4s all ease-in-out;
  transition: 0.4s all ease-in-out;
}

.spoiler:hover::after,
.spoiler:active::after,
.spoiler:focus::after{
  opacity: 0;
}

/* Colors */
.spoiler.green { background-color: #c8fbb8;}
.spoiler.green::after { background-color: #c8fbb8;}
.spoiler.blue { background-color: #bfe1ff;}
.spoiler.blue::after { background-color: #bfe1ff;}
.spoiler.red { background-color: #ffbfbf;}
.spoiler.red::after { background-color: #ffbfbf;}
.spoiler.purple { background-color: #e4bfff;}
.spoiler.purple::after { background-color: #e4bfff;}
.spoiler.black { background-color: #222; color: #fff;}
.spoiler.black::after { background-color: #222; color: #fff;}
.spoiler.white { background-color: #fff; color: #222; border-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.8); }
.spoiler.white::after { background-color: #fff; color: #222; }

Looks like a large piece of code? That's a very small snippet in comparison to what other plugins for these kinds of features takes.

Now follow these steps:

  • Copy the entire CSS snippet above and place it in a Notepad/TextEdit application
  • See how to add CSS to your Blogger Blog or,
  • Go to your Blogger Dashboard - Template - Customize - Advanced - Add CSS 
  • And paste the CSS in the text box on the right hand side, now click on the "Apply to blog" button
Once you have the CSS code in place you can proceed to the next section to learn how to make use of the CSS we added in a blog post. 

The HTML 

We have to tell the browser "Hey web browser, this is a spoiler box, please hide its text content!", unfortunately we can't tell it in English, so we use HTML, that's the markup language, if you have been working on Blogs for long you might have come across it many times, because it's what makes everything on the web!

Without further lesson on HTML, here's the markup we need, copy it, we'd need it in a moment:

<div class="spoiler">
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
</div>

This is the base code we need, of course you want to replace The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. to anything you want to appear inside the spoiler box, you can put images, text, headings, even videos!

Using the HTML

Follow these steps properly to learn how to add it to a blog post, you just have to carefully understand the process once and afterwards you would be able to easily modify the code as you like and add it to your posts.
  • Open a post or a draft in your blogger dashboard
  • On the top left corner of the post editor, you will see two buttons "Compose | HTML", click on the HTML button OR 
  • You could skip the above step by enabling "Interpret typed HTML" in the options in your post editor, on the right sidebar under Post Settings, click on Options and then choose "Interpret typed HTML"
  • Paste the HTML in the post where you want it to appear. That's it, if you pasted the code in "HTML" mode, switch back to "Compose" and you will see the text in post editor with no styles, don't worry, when you load the post on your blog the spoiler content styles will be applied automatically.

Applying different colors

If you like you can apply different colors to the spoiler box, there are 7 color styles, namely

yellow (default) | green | blue | red | purple | black | white

You can easily change the color of a spoiler content box by adding the name in the  class="spoiler" part. How? See the example below:

Default color:
<div class="spoiler">
...
</div>

Blue:
<div class="spoiler blue">
...
</div>

Green:
<div class="spoiler green">
...
</div>

And so on. You just have to add the supported colors name next to spoiler in the class attribute. If you know how to code CSS.

If you want to add new colors please let us know in the comments on this post and we will be happy to consider it if it is a good fit.

Generate Spoiler Content Box Code

Don't want to write the code each time you proceed to add it in your post? Use this generator to enter your desired content and get the code right away, works on mobile phones as well!



A small tool to make your life easier :)

What else?

A similar functionality that you might want to take a look at which also can be used for spoiler content show/hide effect: Expandable Section in your Post on Blogger

Stuck with something and don't know how to proceed? Please leave us a comment on this post and we will get back to you as soon as possible. Or found a bug in the generator? Send me an email at depy45631@gmail.com

Like what I am doing and want me to make something similar but more customized for your blog/website? I am a web developer and you can hire me.

Fix Blogger Tracking Your Pageviews

Post written by Deepak Kamat
Your blog's quick stats on the dashboard reflects the number of page views your blog received in a given time window, the stats can be inaccurate as it might also be counting your own pageviews.

Blogger does provide an option to stop tracking your pageview, though it doesn't work properly for many Blogger users.

Of course many blog owners might not want to track their own pageviews, especially when even low number of page views from their side may affect the overall stats, so it makes perfect sense that you may want to tell Blogger to stop tracking in on your account.

We recently started getting a lot of queries about "why blogger is still tracking my pageviews" and similar, on Twitter and in the forums in large quantity. Here's a tweet from a Blogger user with the hashtag #gHelp seeking for help with the issue



The most straightforward option is to set the option in your blog's dashboard, that can be done by following these steps (these are optional steps, you may have turned it on already):
  1. Go to your Blogger Dashboard
  2. Select the Stats -> Overview tab & then click on "Manage tracking your own pageviews"
  3. You shall be now taken to a new tab with the following URL format: https://[yourblog].blogspot.com/b/statsCookieManage
  4. Check the box that says "Don't track my views for this blog.", and that's it.
This is supposed to stop tracking your pageviews on the blog, but if you test it you will find that it doesn't work. You can check this if it works or not by refreshing your blog in the browser, and after that refresh the stats on your blogger dashboard - you will see that the views are still being counted rendering the option to turn it off completely useless. 

A Valid Workaround

We know that it doesn't work, and Blogger engineers are still on it to fix it, but meanwhile many blog owners are affected and this has to be fixed somehow. 

To tell Blogger to not count your pageview is not a magic, the technique is to set a cookie on your browser so that whenever you load your blog the server knows that you do not want your pageviews to be counted, if the cookie, which is nothing but a small text file saved for websites that contains data used by the browser and server, is not available it counts your views.

What the problem is

(You may want to move to the next section if you want to just know how to fix it)
The error is with where the cookie is set when you go to the options page that let's you choose if you want the blog to stop tracking your pageviews. 

The URL is: https://[yourblog].blogspot.com/b/statsCookieManage

The cookie named "_ns" with the value of "2" is supposed to be set on blog address, but due to an error on the Blogger system the cookie is only set on the /b whereas it is supposed to be set on the "/" path which signifies that it must work on every page of your blog, but due to the error it is not.

Here are some screenshots with the information of cookies that is set while we toggle the option



Everything seems to work okay. As you can see, when the option in the second image in unchecked (highlighted in orange), the cookie named "_ns" disappears. That is how it is supposed to work, the problem actually is its Path value set to /b

And as the path is set to /b the cookie appears no where on the blog except for the page that starts on the path /b

The Workaround

To make this work i.e to have Blogger stop counting our own pageviews we just have to set a cookie on the blog, but this time manually as the options page that Blogger provides us doesn't work properly. 

That can be done with a simple JavaScript snippet. All we will do is set a cookie with the name "_ns" and the value  "2" on the root path of your blog. 

Without any further delay here's the code we need (copy it to your clipboard):

function createCookie(name,value,days) {
    if (days) {
        var date = new Date();
        date.setTime(date.getTime()+(days*24*60*60*1000));
        var expires = "; expires="+date.toGMTString();
    }
    else var expires = "";
    document.cookie = name+"="+value+expires+"; path=/";
    }
    
    createCookie("_ns", "2", 999);

The snippet will create a cookie with the passed values in createCookie("_ns", "2", 999);, you do not need to understand anything about this for it work, only thing you might be interested is the number of days this cookie will be valid for, in the code we have set it to 999 days, after that the cookie will be removed itself from the browser. You can set the value higher or lower if you like.

Using the code snippet

After you have copied the code open your blog's homepage. To run this code you need to access the JavaScript console, there are different ways to open the console in different browsers, I am mentioning how to do it in Chrome and Firefox

Google Chrome

 You can open the console using the keyboard shortcut CTRL+Shift+J / F12 on Windows or CMD+Option+J, or you could right click on an empty area in the web page, then select Inspect and switch to the Console tab.

Following screenshot shows the code entered in the JavaScript console on Chrome.




After pasting the code in place, hit enter and that's it. The cookie is set and now until the cookie expires or is manually removed (by clearing cookies off your browser) Blogger would not count your page-views when you access your blog from the browser.

Mozilla Firefox

To open the console in Firefox: CTRL+Shift+K on Windows or ⌘+Option+K on Mac. Or you could Right Click, then choose Inspect Element and then go to the Console tab.

Enter the code in the console window and hit enter. Here's how it must look like in Mozilla Firefox:



On Safari

On your Safari browser click on the Develop menu and select "Show JavaScript Console" to open the JavaScript console where you will be entering the script you copied above. 

If you don’t see the Develop menu in the menu bar, choose Safari > Preferences, click Advanced, then select “Show Develop menu in menu bar.”.


Important note: If you are on .blogspot.com URL then check which version of your blogspot has loaded, Blogger mainly redirects .blogspot.com URLs based on the visitors country, so if you are in the UK it will change to .blogspot.co.uk. Setting the cookie on .blogspot.co.uk or your country specific TLD won't work on other country specific TLDs. You can set the cookie on all of the variants if you like. 

The Cookie's now set. That's it.

Now that you have run the code the cookie that we have been mentioning throughout the post will be set on in your browser. As long as the cookie stays in the browser any visits to your blog from that browser would not be counted towards the pageviews of your blog. 

If you use different browsers, you may also use this code in those to stop tracking the pageviews from those as well. 

Note that it is possible in browsers to set an option that deletes any cookies on a site once it is closed, so I recommend you to look for the option for cookies in your browser if this doesn't seem to work, if problem continues please post a comment on this post.

HTTPS Will Be Available by Default on Blogger Blogs

Post written by Deepak Kamat
It was not long when the users were given the super-heroes like powers to serve their blogs (on .blogspot.com) over the secure protocol https which is good in many ways, but it was something not always liked by the masses and there are reasons behind it (which we will discuss soon.)

A little background on the matter if you are not sure what this is about:
Last year in September Blogger announced the support for enabling HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) on their blogs. Blogger has now been sending notification to Blogger users with the following message:
Coming in late April! 
All visitors will be able to view your Blogspot domain blogs over an encrypted connection by visiting https://<your-blog>.blogspot.com. Existing links and bookmarks to your blogs will continue to work. As part of this change, the HTTPS Availability setting will disappear, and your blogs will always have an HTTPS version.
If you were unaware of the updates of support for HTTPS encryption this might come as a surprise.

A lot of blogger users who were not using a custom domain for their blogs tried out the setting to serve their blog over https many didn't see any change, but most of them didn't like it, the reason are many, HTTPS encryption is secure, it is the preferred protocol for any website that transacts important data over the internet to keep it safe.

It is that security which disturbed many users when they used the feature to enable HTTPS, it resulted into errors in the functionality of many blogs which was caused due to mixed content.

Please also see this pinned post on the official Blogger Help Forums which explains the matter with more details:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!topic/blogger/JGcHNmtIPiE

How does it affect my blog?

First of all coming back to the message: There have been no announcements on the blog with detailed explanation of what is going to change. The notification message on the Blogger dashboard implies that the settings for enabling https will go away as starting late April everyone can visit your blog over the encrypted protocol i.e https://.

To begin with, you may want to learn more about HTTPS

Are custom domain affected?

No, blogger blogs with custom domain can not be accessed on the https:// protocol. Only the blogs on <your-blog>.blogspot.com will see this change.

My Blogs will always be served over HTTPS?

There hasn't been any updates regarding this on the official blogs but from what we can see in the notification message it means that both versions will be available, a visitor would be able to either visit the HTTPS or the HTTP version.

Depending on what the user type in the protocol part of your blog address, for example if the users type: https://blogname.blogspot.com  the secure version would be served, or if http is used, then the traditional http version. 

It is difficult to say what the actual behavior would be, as Google wants to make each of their products available on the secure protocol, it is possible that the default protocol for all blogs may be changed to HTTPS. 

Impact on old URLs and Search
As for bookmarks, old URLs etc, it may come in as a relief that those would continue working, as HTTPS availablity is the choice of the user, if they want they can visit the blog over HTTP by simply typing http:// before the URL, however there is still no information how would search engines treat this change, the question is that what version would be by default indexed by the search engines?

We do not still have much information on this, when the changes are rolled out and we have more details we will update our blog with more insight on this, so please follow our blog.

What are the benefits?

There are certainly benefits in having your blog served over HTTPS, most important of all is a sign of trust, HTTPS protocol as the name suggest is the secure way of serving content and having that on your blog as well gives the readers a sense of genuineness.

Here are some benefits of using it (mentioned here on this official BHF thread)
  1. It helps check that your visitors open the correct blog and aren’t being redirected to a malicious site.
  2. It helps detect if an attacker tries to change any data sent from Blogspot to the visitor.
  3. It adds security measures that make it harder for other people to listen to your visitors’ conversations, track their activities, or steal their information.

The disadvantage

Mixed content warnings are common to websites and blogs which has sub-resources on the lesser secure or as Google likes to call it insecure protocol, HTTP.

What this has to do with Blogger blogs? Well, if you like to add widgets and other stuffs on your blog from different sources it is quite possible your blog may be a victim of mixed content warnings if those widgets/scripts refers to any resource that is on the HTTP protocol, as these resources can be possiblity used by the unethical people to steal data even from sites with HTTPS encryption.

This is a disadvantage if your need of HTTPS has less importance than the widgets/scripts you use on your blog. Anyways it is not recommended to include these from sources you do not trust, and mostly the third-parties who provide these must be wise enough to serve their content over HTTPS too if they really want to help the users. 

These are some resources to prepare yourself for any mixed-content warnings you may possibly get on your blog when these updates from Blogger regarding HTTPS changes rolls out. You may consider it doing now to futureproof your blog.

Blogger Help: Fix mixed content on your blog

What's next

There's nothing you have to do in order for this change to take effect, later near the end of April this will roll-out to all the blogspot blogs. 

Furthermore there might be some extra measures that needs to be taken once the changes are rolled out. We will keep updating this space for future updates on the topic, you can also follow StramaXon Blog & Gioogle Blogger Official Blog


Responsive Videos In Posts on Blogger

Post written by Deepak Kamat
YouTube. Dailymotion, Vimeo.. who doesn't like to spend time on these sites. Chances are you embed videos from these platforms on your blog, but the worst thing? It doesn't fit on mobile devices, that too even if you are using a responsive template.



Why is it important to make sure videos fits properly on mobile devices? If you would have asked this question about even just half a decade back we would said that it is not important, though times are changing a lot faster, majority of your readers maybe on some kind of mobile devices and that is why responsive web is such a big break-through in the internet World. 

Question arises: How do I make sure videos on my blog, from either YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion (.. or other sources) properly fit on my blog page when viewed from a mobile device.

Before we begin the tutorial, we would like you to understand that this tutorial is meant for those blogs which uses a responsive web design approach, mostly the default blogger templates aren't those, and following this tutorial would bring nothing good, it would not bite, but wouldn't bring you any good either.
Tutorial Begins
FitVidsJS is a lightweight jQuery plugin that works very well in making videos fluid i.e fit with the width of the container, from many popular platforms (..and also other platforms that you can specify).
Demo - Fluid Videos
Demo it didn't happen.
While you are on the demo page, try reducing the size of your browser window and see how the video responds to the re-size event and adapts itself accordingly.

Back it up: Before you begin with the steps, I recommend you to backup your blogger template as we will make changes to the template, and if anything goes wrong you can always revert back using the backed-up template file.

Adding jQuery

It is a JavaScript framework that is used for various tasks like DOM manipulation, AJAX and other technical stuffs that helps make it easier to make a website interactive with JavaScript. The FitVids plugin is a jQuery plugin which means it would not work if you do not load jQuery.

 Check if you already have jQuery added Chances are that your template may already contain a version of jQuery (many do), it is not recommended to add jQuery twice, so check if you have jQuery already installed. How to do that :-

Go to the Blogger Dashboard -> Template -> Edit HTML -> Use CTRL+F or ⌘+F and search for the keyword 'jquery', go through the found instances and see if you have something similar to this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://....../jquery.min.js"></script>

If you do not have jQuery, add it - To add jQuery from Google's CDN, follow these steps:

  1. Go to your Blogger Dashboard -> Template -> Edit HTML
  2. Use CTRL+For⌘+F search for </head>
  3. Copy the following line of code, which is the script tag to include jQuery library in your blog -
    <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.12.2/jquery.min.js"></script>

    That's it. Now it must look something like this in the template code editor
    Adding jQuery's code snippet in Blogger template.
  4. Press the orange "Save Template" button to save it. 
Once it is done you may proceed to the next section to add the FitVids plgun. Adding it is almost similar to adding jQuery. Keep the template editor open, we need it for the next two steps too!

The main FitVidsJS plugin

It's time to add the JavaScript/jQuery plugin. We will add it from a CDN, that makes sure that the files load fast and doesn't impact on the performance of your blog.

Before we go on further, copy this script tag which we need in the steps mentioned next:
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/fitvids/1.1.0/jquery.fitvids.min.js"></script>
  1. Go to your Blogger Dashboard -> Template -> Edit HTML
  2. Use CTRL+For⌘+F search for </head>
  3. Paste the copied code immediately before line where </head> is.

    It is important that we put this script tag after the jQuery tag (wherever it is in the template), so if you already have jQuery somewhere else in the template consider putting this tag below it. These tags can be added anywhere, in the head, or even at the end of the body.
  4. Following is an example of how it must look like after you have added it to the template. Note that the plugin code i.e Fitvids script tag must always be placed after jQuery's for it to work.

Save the template. Yay! We now have jQuery & FitVids plugin added in our template. The final part is initializing the plugin so that it works upon the videos in your posts, and also other parts if you intend to use it for advance purpose.

Initialize the plugin - Fitvids

Once we have the script tags in place we have to tell it to initialize the function on the videos, the plugin can't guess where do you have your videos, or which videos do you intend to make responsive so we have to specify it.

We will provide different initialization code for different applications i.e if you want the plugin to work on all videos on your posts, or if you want it to work on some some that you can specify. It gives you more control over what you want to be handled by this plugin.

Choose the right initialize code and continue with the step to add it to your template (which is same as adding the script tags in the above steps, you just have to put the following codes below any script tags we added)

1. All videos in posts, or (recommended)

The code uses the class of the body of the post to identify which part of the page it must handle, mostly blogger templates include the class name "post-body" in the container of the post and assuming that your template does the same you can use this to initialize the plugin on all the videos in every posts.

<script type="text/javascript">
  $(document).ready(function(){
    $(".post-body").fitVids();
  });
</script>

On the line 3 you can change .post-body to the class name you want to target. Most blogger templates this class name for posts, so this code may work right out of the box without any changes.

2. Only some videos, or

If you do not want every video in your post be handled, then you can specify the ones you want to. 

<script type="text/javascript">
  $(document).ready(function(){
    $(".fit").fitVids();
  });
</script>

This version of the code works only on the videos wrapped inside a container with the class fit. It gives you a control over the videos you want to make responsive. As it has been said it needs to be wrapped inside a container, it means that your embed code must be put inside an element like this:

<div class="fit">
    <iframe src="...[embed code]" width="xxx" height="xxx">
</div>

So while you are including a video somewhere in your post you always have to make sure you wrap it inside this code.

3. All, but not some

The third option is to have selective videos not being handled by the plugin, all videos will become responsive i the posts except for the ones you specify.

<script type="text/javascript">
  $(document).ready(function(){
    $(".post-body").fitVids({ ignore: '.not-fit'});
  });
</script>

When you do not want a video to be handled by the plugin, you can just wrap its code inside a div element with the class not-fit (notice the .not-fit in the code above). This is how you can wrap the embed code for the video inside the element, and then paste it in your post:

<div class="not-fit">
    <iframe src="...[embed code]" width="xxx" height="xxx">
</div>

And then put and code in place,

Choose an initialization script from any of the above sections and then include it in your Blogger template. To do that:

  1. Go to Blogger Dashboard -> Template
  2. Edit HTML
  3. Now search for the line where we added the FitVidsJS <script...></script> tag. Paste the initialization code just after it. Here's a screenshot of how it must look once you have it in place.


Make sure the scripts are in this order: jQuery -> FitVids -> Initialization Code

If it looks fine save the template and try it on a post.

Questions or comments?

It is quite possible that this may not work properly for every blog due to different reasons, even if one part of the guide is not followed properly the chances are high that errors may come up during the set-up, so if you have any questions regarding this you can post a comment on this post (include your blog address) and we will try to help you set it up.

If you have suggestions and comments on this tutorial please post it in the comment form, we would love to hear from you! This post may not cover every aspect of the jQuery library, or the FitVids plugin, as it would have made the post enormously large, to help others any bit of information that you think is vital would be appreciated.


Changing The URL Of Blogger Posts Even After It's Published

Post written by Deepak Kamat
With small advancements in Blogger, users were provided many new options to customize their blog and blog posts for a better search experience, like adding search description and changing the permalink.

But there's a catch, once you publish your post and then try to edit the permalink, you can not! In this tutorial we will explain how you could change the permalink even after it has been published.


Note: Editing of permalink means the older links that points to the post would no longer work. And the customized post would be seen as a new post by the search bots, with the content that was located at another URL before.

Changing the permalink of the post after it has been published is not allowed, as long as the post is in the published status it wouldn't let you do that. That is for obvious reasons, but sometimes you might feel the need of customizing the URL of a post.

Change The Permalink

Let's get to the point, but before that let me warn you again that doing this is similar to creating a new post, copying the content of another published post, pasting it in the new one, setting the date and changing the permalink as per your need and then deleting the old one.

1. Reverting the post to draft

It is only possible to edit the permalink of the post when it is in the draft mode, so we have to first revert our post to draft in order to be able to edit it.

  • Go to your Blogger Dashboard
  • Navigate to the list of Posts and open a published post in Post Editor
  • In the post editor, click on the "Revert to draft" button on the top right of the post editor page right next to the orange button that must read "Update".

  • Now that the post is back in the draft mode, you might now be able to use the "Permalink" option under "Post Settings" to change its URL. Click on the "Permalink" tab on the right sidebar, select the "Custom" radio button and then enter your desired URL for the post.

That is it. Once you have input the desired permalink for the post you are set to publish the post again.

Redirecting Old URLs to the New

If your aim is to just change the URL for presentation purpose while keeping the old URLs still active (considering you have shared the blog post at a lot of places, or others have shared it on social sites and their blogs) then the best option for you is to set a custom redirect.

Blogger has a tool for setting custom redirects for URLs on your blog, and it is very easy. You may find this article by Help Blogger helpful to understand how custom redirects work and use it correctly.

How to Set Custom Redirects in Blogger http://helplogger.blogspot.in/2014/07/how-to-set-custom-redirects-for-blogger-post.html


Facing difficulties in going through the steps? Let us know in the comments below. 
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