Conversion Summary...

Recording this on the dummy blog for my own information. I first noticed a problem when I was looking up information for my Emerald City Comicon 2010 report. I learned, after a little searching, that Google had introduced a bug called "Auto Pagination" to Blogger that limits the amount of information a particular blog can display in a single page. This isn't a real problem with newer blogs that have an "older post" link at the bottom of all pages. But for my blogs, made on Classic Templates, there is no "older posts" option, and so it didn't broke my archives because only part of the information is being shown.

I went to the Google support forum after figuring this all out and wrote the following:

3/19/10
Ok. Let me get this straight. The reason my older posts are not showing on my classic template blogs is because Blogger/Google/Blogspot introduced a new bug called "Auto Pagination" that limits the amount of data sent for viewing. Because my classic template blogs do not have any of the "older posts" options available on the annoying layout blogs, those posts are permanently lost. The only way around this problem is to downgrade my blogs to layouts.

Is that the situation, or am I missing something?

Then followed with this, in response to a Google tech's utterly useless advice:

3/19/10
Upgrading isn't all that difficult, hopefully you have not tweaked your classic template too much.

Go to the Template - Customize Design wizard, and select "UPGRADE YOUR TEMPLATE".

What if we HAVE tweaked our templates a lot? What if, when they introduced the layouts downgrade a few years back we attempted to convert our blogs and realized that Layouts was too severe a downgrade? Are we really and truly screwed by Google? Is that the answer?

I don't see any "wizard" to upgrade, just a PICK A NEW TEMPLATE page. That's worse than useless. I started my blog in 2002, and spent years getting it to where I wanted. I have several other blogs that have been customized considerably. And what you are telling me is that Google is spitting on me and saying my blog isn't worth reading because I didn't move with the times.

I was extremely angry, to be honest. Actually, I still am. But anger is only any good if you direct it into a useful task, so I was determined to figure out what to do next. An answer to my post suggested that there was a design wizard that would convert blog templates to layouts, so I went hunting and discovered... no, there wasn't.

3/19/10
You have to switch to the "Blooger in draft" dashboard, which will give you access to the design wizard. Keep in mind that this is beta, so expect bugs. And if there is a simple way to switch back to the regular dashboard, I haven't found it.

So... they are providing a tool to convert, but only if you switch to a buggy interface for all your blogs?

C'mon Google, give us a sandbox to work in! Sheesh.

3/19/10
Ok, checked out the draft dashboard, and there is still no option to convert, just to pick a new one. In short, those of us with heavily customized classic templates are being punished for not downgrading to layouts when they were first offered.

As for the draft dashboard, I can get back to the regular dashboard just by changing "draft" in the URL back to "www".

So, there is no conversion tool. Only the option to pick a new template and start from scratch. Which is why many folks on classic templates are so incredibly peeved at Google right now, now that they've introduced bugs to the system that affect only classic template users.

Another user expressed doubts about making the change, to which I replied:

3/20/10
S246, If you've done a lot of work in classic templates, it will take a lot of work to get it to display correctly in the braindead layouts. If you haven't, the trip to layouts is short and easy. Once you have a successful layout formatted blog, it's easier for braindead users to change, although if you have any HTML skills it is counter-intuitive and annoying (especially when it rewrites your code).

I gave up on one blog (of six in classic templates) and moved it to a new template entirely. It didn't really require the look. Of the other five, I concentrated on my main blog instead of the group blogs, and I spent about six hours yesterday trying to duplicate the look in layouts. I'm coming close, although I'm still stumped on a few things (how do I duplicate tags for ItemPage? Why does the !&@!@ header gadget always rewrite itself back to the same useless piece of crap, not allowing me to create a custom header? Why hasn't anyone written a reasonable tutorial about moving from classic templates to gadgets?). I have four more heavily customized templates to change after this, and I'm dreading it.

If Google wants to change to another format, then I will move all my blogs to privately hosted WordPress, because I don't want to go through this nonsense again. It's bad enough I have to do it this time because they decided to introduce a hateful bug.

I realized by this time that converting to layouts was the only reasonable option, although some people were suggesting using page breaks. With a blog as old as mine, that would have required manually editing literally thousands of entries, which just wasn't practical. So I was working on changing Bloggity over, and thinking about how to do Elayne's blog next. I vanished from the forum for a couple of days to work on the problem.

When I came back, I'd done a lot more work, and had many of my problems sorted out. Another user asked what to do, so I answered:

3/22/10
audreychew, you can either use jump breaks as Legacy2000 suggests, or downgrade to layouts. I just spent the last few days converting blogs. Thankfully I'm between contracts so I have the time. I have one more to go, but the last one was a killer. It was a classic template that still used tables for layouts! But if that thing could be converted, I guess any blog could be.

I think most users aren't quite as attached to their templates as some of the folks posting here...

And got someone asking me about how I converted a classic layout with tables into a new layout. So I decided to give some general advice:

3/23/10
I ended up cheating and using some tables in the page format. The trick is to get the layout of the page correct, then work on formatting the posts and sidebar. I used a lot of "view source" to figure out what classes to style. You can do the layout of the page in a dummy blog, because it doesn't rely on gadgets, but once you start putting the real sidebar information in you'll want to have the layout live and active. Each gadget saves the interior code in a database on Google, so you can't edit the HTML in gadgets directly, which is extremely annoying. But you'll have to put in "sample" gadgets in the dummy blog so you can style the sidebar the way you want.

Once you have the dummy blog layout looking correct, you export the code from the HTML page, then import it into your real blog. Then add the gadgets.

The problem with this particular classic template was that it used different background images (custom corners in a liquid layout) and that cannot be done in the version of CSS currently in use. I ended up putting the background images into a table and putting the elements of the CSS inside table cells. It took of lot of fiddling to make it work, but it ended up ok, even when tested on BrowserShots.

If you need advice... well, I've just converted three heavily edited classic templates, so I have a little bit of advice on converting. Ask away. As for the answers to my three questions... one) duplicating conditional tags is a matter of inserting two lines of code into the expanded widget code on the HTML page, two) the default header cannot be edited in HTML, delete it if you need a custom header, and three) I doubt anyone has the time to put together something that would help all users of different expertise levels, but it's still annoying to those of us who still had classic templates.

This answer got some positive response, but someone questioned my use of the term "downgrade" to describe the move to layouts. My response:

3/23/10
S246: It's a downgrade if you like having full control over your template. Because part of your code is stored elsewhere, you cannot take a layout and develop it offline (which is how I developed my original templates). Technically, it's an upgrade from HTML to XML (XHTML). But taking control of the code away from the users seems like a major downgrade to me, which is why I didn't move to layouts when they first were offered. Well, that and the stupid widget code kept rewriting itself.

Look, I've still got time before my next contract, if you'll link to your blog I'll take a look and try to give you some specific advice. If you want to see my main blog, it's just my username dot blogspot.com.

Legacy2000: "he"? Otherwise, pretty good information there. The problem with layouts is that they were introduced years after we started blogging, and had used those years to edit our classic templates. If I'd had a choice between the two when I started I would have gone with the layouts because that's obviously what we were being pushed to do. If I'd had years to play with the layouts first I no doubt would have preferred them to classic templates. People don't like change.

Finally, I decided to write a quick summary that would give more people an idea how to start the process of moving their blog from a classic template to a layout.

3/24/10
S246, and anyone else who is confused about the difference between Classic Templates and Layouts,

Here's what you need to do. Go to your dashboard. Click on "Create a Blog". Follow the steps, but use a name that's a random string of characters for the location of the blog... or even a statement like "dummyblogforS246.blogspot.com". Something that's not likely to be desired by someone else, since this is going to be your blog layout playground.

Pick a layout for it. It doesn't matter which one. Just a layout. Enter a few blog entries. I suggest using lipsum.com to generate some dummy text, and possibly put in a picture if you often use images in your blog.

Now, look at the Layout tab of the blog. You should see "Page Elements" as the default. Look at how the "Gadgets" are arranged. Move them around a little to get a feel for what happens. Remember, this is a dummy blog, so make whatever changes you want to make freely. It won't affect your real blog. Go to "Edit HTML" and look at the HTML. Compare it to the HTML in your real blog's template. If you are familiar with HTML and CSS, you will probably start to pick up on the differences fairly quickly. If you aren't... well, there are a lot of tutorials out there that can get you started.

Once you have a good grasp on the differences, it should become a little easier to make the change, or decide if it's worth making the change. If you decide to not make the change, you probably need the Jump Break solution: http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2010/02/auto-pagination-and-read-more-solutions.html

If you do decide to make the change, use the dummy blog you just created to try to duplicate the layout of your blog. Not the specifics! The stuff in the sidebar will all end up in "Gadgets" in the layout, so just make the skeleton of the blog look the same. Think of the page without any words, then start adding bits in one at a time.

Once you've got the layout correct, then you can download the code from your dummy blog and upload it into your real blog (by first selecting a random layout for your real blog, then uploading the code). Then you need to put stuff back into your sidebar by adding "Gadgets" that contain the stuff you want to work on.

As I said before, some of the "Gadgets" or "Widgets" will rewrite themselves if you try to change them in the HTML section. Don't bother editing the Header Gadget. To delete it to make way for a custom header, you need to delete that bit of code in the HTML and then confirm that you want to delete it. I recommend using the HTML/Javascript gadget for most of your needs if you are proficient in HTML. This gives you the most control. Once you are familiar with how they are laid out, you can start using and editing other gadgets offered by Google.

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You may want to work on the dummy blog quite a bit, or you may realize the change will be easy and do it right away. But I do recommend creating a dummy blog if you are at all confused. Having a safe playground to work in will help. If you are a stickler for tidiness, then delete the dummy blog when you are done with it. I prefer having one around to try new things in, personally.