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Backup Your Template
I know this sounds like such a newbie question but you would be amazed at how often people ask me how to go about doing it. It’s really extremely simple and only takes a couple of minutes to do, there’s no excuse for making mistakes in your code without having a back up copy to repair a mistake. As a webmaster and web designer I always make backup copies of everything that I do and then keep them on file for my customers in case they bork their web page. I have a copy of every webpage that I’ve ever done, backed up on 2 different computers!
To get started I’m going to be showing you how to save your code in Wordpress but this same method will work on any template no matter whether it’s Blogger or any other blogging platform.
The first thing of course is to open your theme editor or your template editor from your blog’s control panel or settings area. Once you have that open all you have to do is “right click” with your mouse inside the area where the code is and a small menu will pop up like in the image below. The item you need to click on is “Select All”. Notice the cursor in the image.
Doing that will highlight ALL of the content in the window, even the sections that aren’t visible to you, just like in the image below. Once you have all the content highlighted you need to “right click” inside the area again and that same small menu will pop up again, but this time you want to select “Copy”.
What you have just done is copied the entire contents of that window to your computers “clipboard” to allow pasting into a text file. You do not want to save your backup code into a Word document (.doc) because it will add formatting to the coding that will corrupt it for use as HTML. What you want to save it into is just a plain old Notepad (.txt) file. Never, never use a .doc file to save HTML code. For most people the easiest place to create and store that file might be on the desktop of your PC. I use special folders where I copy mine into but I have to organize hundreds of them and keep them easy to find. Once you’ve saved it you can move it to anywhere on your PC for safekeeping, but for now we’ll just save it to the desktop in this tutorial.
Next step is to minimize your browser windows so that you can see the desktop of your PC. Remember you still have the HTML from your template copied to your “clipboard” at this point so we have to create a place to store it. What you want to do now is “right click” anywhere on the desktop of your PC and again a menu will pop up silmilar to the one in the image below.
On that menu you want to click on “Text Document”, and doing so will create a new, empty text file on your desktop ready to be filled up with your HTML code. Before you double click on it you may want to name it, something like “mycode.txt” but make sure the name still ends with .txt as the file type. Now double click the file to open it and inside the text area you want to “right click” again and again a small menu will pop up, but this time you want to choose the command “Paste” which will paste the entire contents from your “clipboard” into the empty file like in the image below.
Once you’ve done that, just close the file by clicking on the “X” in the upper right hand corner and it will ask if you want to “Save the Changes”. Click yes. Hurrah!! You’ve just made a back up copy of your entire HTML page ready to be used whenever you need it!
To restore an HTML file to repair mistakes or a lost template just reverse the steps but you will first have to delete all the contents of the template editor that you wish to repair. Once you’ve done that, just “Select All” inside the file you saved on your PC and “Copy” and then “Paste” it’s contents into the template editor at your blog or website, save the changes and you’re done! You can also use this method to copy a template or skin from one blog or web page to another. That’s all! I hope this will be helpful, you can ask questions in the comments!
Technorati Tags: template, backup, saving
April 20th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
wow, I wish I had known about how to do this a few months ago! I wound up deleting my old blog!! Accck!
May 5th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
I have a mac and cannot figure out where to paste the template to in order to dave it. i right click (cntrl apple click), but no menu comes up. when I do a search on the computer nothing mnamed test document comes up. Any help? - not very computer saavy!
May 5th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
that should say “in order to Save it” and… “nothing Named teXt docuement comes up”
May 5th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Barb, you have to create a new .txt document yourself, so that you can save the file into it. Then that will be your backup copy of your template file. It’s not already on your machine.
June 13th, 2007 at 3:54 am
what about only backing up your custom widgets… how is that done?
June 13th, 2007 at 8:17 am
The best way I’ve found to back up your widget data is to use View Source on your actual blog page from the browser itself. Then copy and paste the entire template into a new text document.
Blogger’s new XML templates make it easy to put new stuff into your template, but the tradeoff is that it’s now harder to do a proper backup. The guide on this page works best when using the “classic” templates.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:28 am
I finally figured out how this works.
My html/css/coding skills are between non-existent and mediocre so I was really happy to see this site that somehow helps people like me with their customization problems.
Thank you so much!