Blog before you Think!

A quick tip if you use Blogger and host the blog yourself:

one of the reasons I switched from Blogger to Textpattern was the agony of staring at the spinning wheel stuck at 33, 45 or 78% for minutes when republishing the blog after a minor change in the template.

A simple workaround (if your configuration allows you to do this) is to include the sidebar via PHP from an external file:

(1) copy the code for your sidebar from your template into a file sidebar.php and upload it to your server.

(2) add AddType application/x-httpd-php .html somewhere in your .htaccess file – this will tell your server to parse the HTML pages Blogger generates as PHP.

(3) in your Blogger template: replace the code for your sidebar with the PHP code to include your external sidebar file, e.g.:

<? include("/path/to/sidebar.php") ?>


if you want to display a different sidebar for individual entries use sth. like

<MainOrArchivePage>
<? include("/path/to/sidebar.php") ?>
</MainOrArchivePage>
<ItemPage>
<? include("/path/to/sidebar_item.php") ?>
</ItemPage>


(4) republish

Now you can change your sidebar hassle-free and without the need to republish.