When Blogger [or another bloghosting] send you away

Someday, you receive an email telling you that your blog is no more welcome on our platform, like what happened here or you just don't find your blog at all like what happened to this guy.

I'm going to describe some of the benefits of third party tools to make you up even if you are fired, or your blog is delete, this is mainly for newbie bloggers, advanced blogger should have know these workarounds already.

• Why a personal domain name is useful:

Well, in such cases, when your blog is flagged or closed, you can simply change the hosting platform (if we suppose you have a backup of course), then redirect your domain name to the new hosting platform, and everything will continue working transparently without anyone noticing anything.

• Using third party comments / social networking providers:

If happened and your blog is closed, then having a backup of posts wouldn't be the ultimate step you should take, comments also have a big role in your blog popularity and content.

Obviously blogger comments platform isn't so extended as other platforms -like wordpress- but still so useful and especially secure, there are third party platforms that provide a very rich and extended way to include comments into your website and into blogger specifically, for example the one I'm using in my blog now; Disqus.

It is so useful because it allows you to moderate comments, delete, add moderators, filter and have per-user replies, and all this could be done through one interface, if you have installed it in more than one blog/website.

It also allows users to login using twitter, facebook, opedID and a lot of other features.

Why it's useful? Once your blog disappear, all your comments still there, just plug it into your new blog.

• Doing posts backup :

Actually, I'm just sharing my way here to deal with such situations, for posts backup, I use Wordpress :), it allows you to import posts from blogger, blogroll, LiveJournal, TypePad, Yhaoo 360 and even other wordpress blogs, it also import comments within posts, but not images.

it also imports posts from different blogs you own, like that you can merge all you content in one blog

After that, everything is done; you can just download the xml file from wordpress.

With that being done, you may at least pass to a new blog with transparent changes your visitors might notice.

Still the problem of pictures, I'm not sure if the deletion of the blog from blogger evolve the deletion of the Google account as well or not, this is likely not to happened, so your pictures are always in your Picasa online account, you should just do some linking in your new blog.

• Downloading images:

There are utilities that just do all what I mentioned before in simple mouse clicks, you can use for example Blogger Backup or DownloadThemAll. The later is a Firefox extension to download the images on your blog, this is a very detailed tutorial about how to backup your posts directly from blogger using the RSS feeds http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-backup-blogger-blog.html.

Just to mention that whenever you have your own domain, you can’t refer to images on blogger that are bigger than 400px height or width, take a look at here to understand why.

How to add [a free] contact me form to your blogger:

Most of websites and blogs have the Contact Me form, which let users leave you comments or feedback and even ask you private questions and requests. Unfortunately blogger doesn’t have this functionality built in (as far as I know), so you have to walk your way with third party plug-in.

There are many third party providers that make this functionality so easy to have but most of them are not free.

Today I’m going to show you how to add a contact me form to your blogger and receive the messages on your email directly, you can try mine here Contact me.

A very good website offering such service is http://creator.zoho.com/ which offer very advanced database application that can be implemented in few clicks.

As you see you can sign up for free and login with you Google or Yahoo account directly.

After logging in, choose Zoho creator from the list of services provided

You’ll be asked to choose a plan, you can stick with the free plan for now, since our contact form doesn’t need anything special.

The following step, is to create the application and configure it as in the following picture :

Fill in the application name and the form name and choose “create from scratch”, you may also want to take a look at the templates provided. Finally choose “public” for the application type, and hit “Create now”.

Now you’ll be redirected to a page where you can design your form, you can drag and drop lot of elements you may someday need in a form.

In our case, we will use a “single line” control for the name, an “email” control for the email, a “url” for the webpage location, and “multi line” control for the message body.

When you drag and drop a control to the form, you will be asked to provide some configuration settings for the control as follows

In our case, all the fields are required except for the url which is optional.

You can also check to deny duplicates, in fact those forms are mutli purpose, you can built even very advanced applications with for your business without the need to design your own database or to handle the form input and errors checking.

Our end form looks like this

Ok now we will configure the form to send us the messages once users submit the form for that, hover on “more actions” and choose “send mail notifications” :

(that far if you use google chrome it won’t show up, so try a different browser)

In the form that will show up, fill in the email that you want to receive the notifications on, and check “include user submitted data” so that you won’t need to login to zoho in order to see the messages, and you might also add a subject for your notifications so you can make filters for then in you email.

Now everything is ready, hit “access this application”

At this point you are on the form your users will see to send you messages, click “more actions” and choose “embed in your website”

Now you can see the code of the form that you can embed in you blog, there are advanced options to customize your form too, like the success message and the Next url that the form will be redirected to after submission, colors, width…

Now all the work done just login to you blogger create a new post and copy past the code above to your post, you may also want to disable comments and backlinks for that post.

Of course you can imagine many advanced uses for such a plugin, from making simple feedback to date time managmenet and meeting, I'll leave that to you creativity :).

You can see the end result here Contact me.