How to set comment option for individual post

"Is there a way to not have comments for a post in the body of the blog or post? I would like to have a "comment" page that readers can go to and comment there, but not on the post itself."

You can easily set any individual post to either allow or don't allow comments. You will have to first go to Dashboard, click SETTINGS > COMMENTS and set the blog to show comments:

Comments (.) Show ( ) Hide

All you need to do now when publishing a post is to click POST OPTION at the bottom left corner of the post editor and select one of the 3 options:

( ) Allow
( ) Don't allow, show existing
( ) Don't allow, hide existing

Required field must not be blank - solution

Any blogger who recently have tried to add or edit a gadget (page element) which did not have a title for the gadget must have come across this problem - the gadget cannot be saved without a title. Error message - "Required field must not be blank"

How to change post title background color with template designer

"And how can I give my post title a colour background?"

The first thing I thought of trying is to go to LAYOUT > FONTS AND COLORS as described in my previous post Changing fonts and colors for New Blogger (xml).

However, Blogger for better or for worse is constantly evolving and the LAYOUT tab is no more, replaced by a DESIGN tab and apparently have moved the template designer from Blogger in Draft to standard Blogger.

I believe that it is still possible to edit the template direct to add CSS (Cascading Style Sheet to control the post title background but found that Blogger Template Designer has provided a "Advanced" option to do that via the template designer with INSTANT PREVIEW. And apparently some of the functions of the new Blogger Template Designer can be used even if the template you are using for your blog has not been designed with Blogger Template Designer

Recover blog deleted as splog, TOS violation

Blogger is really going all out to delete blogs which are splogs (spam blogs) and those not confirming to their Blogger Terms of Service which unfortunately is resulting in many false positive (blogs deleted which are not splogs). I was a victim too when one of my environmental blog - Aerator - an environmental blog was deleted for supposed "TOS violation" which it is not. It is an environmental blog with an original innovation Method to increase efficiency of wastewater aerator

If yours too had been wrongly deleted, follow the steps below which I used to get my blog restored:

How to enable comments for pages

"I have created new pages and would like people to be able to leave comments"

To enable comments, go to Dashboard, click EDIT POSTS, then EDIT PAGES and you will see the pages you have added to your blog:



Click EDIT for the page which you want to enable comments, then at the bottom left corner of the resulting "page editor", click POST OPTIONS and in the options under READERS COMMENTS:



tick (.) Allow to allow readers comments, then click PUBLISH.

Tool - Cover live events with blog

Here is another very useful tool for blogger which will enable you to conveniently cover a live event such as a sport event, court trial proceedings, elections, disasters etc. This can be done either in person, invited panelists, Twitter accounts, XML feeds, readers comments so you have lots of choices for its content. That tool is CoverItLive.com which can either be a free tool with ads or a paid for tool.

To see an example, surf over to Anil Netto: Live - Polling day for Sibu by-election. Apparently, one can select either chronological order (newest events first) like in the above or reversed chronological order (oldest events first) like this post which covers the same event - Bintulu.org: LIVE Sibu By-Election On Polling Day. And if you want to compare how different bloggers can cover the same event, see also Lina Soo: Sibu by-election live coverage (same event but content different among others, due to different feed).

Recover accidentally deleted post Part 2 with original permalink and comments

The earlier post How to recover accidentally deleted post described 4 methods of recovering deleted post of which the first 2 methods are applicable if you happened to still have access to the computer where you had prepared the deleted post or you have not closed the browser or browser tab where you had viewed the the deleted post.

Method 3 of recovering deleted post require you to find a cached copy of the deleted post on the Internet and assume that you would be satisfied with reconstructing your deleted post from scratch using the information from the cached copy. You would not be able to restore the comments or recover the original permalink, but will end using the content from the cached webpage to reconstruct the post which will probably have a different permalink from the original.

Below is described a fifth method which can considered to be an improvement to the above in the sense that you can recover the exact post as it was before it was deleted together with comments and the original permalink. Credit should be given to Tom who blog at TED Image tests for hitting upon this method of recovering the post ID from cached copies to restore deleted post.