Major Changes! POLL INCLUDED, VOTES AND COMMENTS WELCOMED

As revealed Here and HERE, two friends (SykoShadow, an online friend, who is a great, borderline insane, sharp and hilarious guy; an unintentional badass who Jumps out of second story wndows and Claudio, my very best friend in 'real ife'; a rogue badass who's profession is so dangerous they made a web series about it and who is in my top 3 greatest people of all time list), both recently joined the blog as authors, taking The Thoughtful Gamer and transforming it into its older brother, The Thoughtful Gamers, which, as signified by the sexy and dignified brand new pluralization, can get into clubs without presenting ID, can drink at least  a glass of wine and a half without worrying about its figure, and now has a confirmed IQ of 67, which is a whopping (especially at this elite end of the spectrum....Mensa will be knocking on the door any day now, baby!!!) 23 points higher than the stellar IQ of 44 it held up until this point.

How to Backup your Blogger Blog Template in 5 Easy Steps

Note: HERE'S a tutorial on how to quickly and easily backup your entire blogger blog in 5 easy steps!

Want to backup your blogger blog's template? Excellent idea. You never want to encounter a situation where you lose your template, let's say in the course of making changes to it, and you make irrevocable edits and find yourself stuck with a broekn blog template. I'll show you how to backup your template in 5 easy steps.

1) Sign in to Blogger.com. Once there, click layout.

Note: The following pics can be clicked to zoom in for much easier viewing. You may find them a bit small at default.

2) Click the edit HTML button in the middle top (between fonts and colors and pick new template).

 3) Click download full template

4) Click save when prompted.

5) Save to your computer. I suggest creating a seperate folder for this and other blog files (I use one called Blogspot blog) and save it to there. The format will be in XML (.xml file) which can be read by the blogger software.

Once saved, you can access the file at any time to re-upload if your template happens to get lost. Good luck, and I hope enjoy your simple and easy template backup experience!

Easiest, Fastest Way to Backup Blogger Blog

Note: HERE'S a tutorial on how to easily and quickly backup your blogger template.

Want to backup your blogger blog? Excellent idea. You never want to encounter a message informing you that your blog is lost. I'll show you how to do do it in 5 easy steps.

1) Sign in to Blogger.com. Once there, click settings.

Note: The following pics can be clicked to zoom in for much easier viewing. You may find them a bit small at default.

2) You will see the options for import, export an delete blog. Click export.

3) Click download blog.

Note: These next two steps are pretty self explanatory, but I will include them for anyone who may be newish to computing. Please do not take the inclusion of these two steps as an insult or condescension. Most users will be able to simply skip them :)

4) Click save.

5) Save to your computer. I suggest creating a seperate folder for this and other blog files (I use one called Blogspot blog) and save it to there. The format will be in XML (.xml file) which can be read by the blogger software.

Once saved, you can access the file at any time to re-upload if your blog files happen to be lost, and you can also use this file to import to another blog, say if you're moving to wordpress or creating a secondary backup blogger blog. This makes transfering your blog or re-uploading it as easy as a few mouse clicks. All you'd have to do at that point would be to select import blog (see step 2) and away you go.

Good luck, and I hope enjoy your simple and easy backup experience. I wish I had found this option a lot sooner, as I ended up playing around with a few different 3rd party programs which were making offline copies of my blog, but not giving me one simple file which contained all of my blo content, which is all I wanted from the get go, not some website index (which is nice, don't get me wrong, and I have kept it for possible future use). If you happen to be interested in this process, I was most successful with HTTrack which is free and not necessarily convoluted, but not nearly as easy as this method which I just recently employed.

Either way, bon fortuna! (not sure what language that is lol).

AutoSave Saved Over Your Work? Recover Data Lost By Blogger AutoSave

The fact that Blogger autosaves your draft on a supremely regular schedule is incredibly reassuring. However, it's also a potential disaster waiting to happen, as I recently discovered. I accidentally deleted a huge chunk of my draft, and then watched in horror as the autosaver did its thing, thereby cementing my newfound problem, losing my work forever in the annals of internet ghostdom. You see, there's no way to revert to a previous draft (why, I do not know, but I assume this will be added in at some future date). Nor is there a way to decrease the autosave frequency from obsessive-compulsive to anything ranging from still too often but at least somewhat more reasonable to every five or ten minutes.

And so, one wonders if it is possible to disable the autosave. Well, unless some computing genius discovers some seemingly unintuitive workaround, the answer, for now, is no. So, no draft recovery, no decreasing the autosave frequency to something less....manic, and no disabling the damn thing altogether. Once you get in a relationship with the blogger autosave feature, you're not getting out. Funny thing is though, I don't recall taking any oath.

So what is a blogger to do?

Well, I have a solution for you. Unfortunately, I did not possess this knowledge at the time of my great loss. Which really sucked, as I lost some pretty damn salient points, and my ad hoc replacements for them were.....not as fulfilling or poignant.

Anyways, enough of my troubles. Let's get on with the damn solution already, shall we? Well, fear not, humble reader. Here it is:

Ctrl + Z.

Yes, that's it. Ctrl + Z is an all purpose Undo command, which works in quite a wide range of programs. I thought to give it a try a few minutes ago, after purposely deleting some text and then pondering my unfortunate recent loss of (salient) points. I was considering how easy it was to delete things, and lamenting the fact that it was impossible to undo such a disastrous event (I'm not over dramatic in the least, I know) when it dawned on me. UNDO!!! That's it!

Try the Undo command! And I did, and the rest is history. Well, of sorts.....kind of.....? Okay, fine, the rest is.....a blip on the pimple of history. Better? 

Anyways,  the idea behind the undo command is that you undo any recent mistakes at the push of a but-well, two but-, er, keys. Say you type a sentence and then decide that you do not like it. Or you add a number to a figure and then realize you did so erroneously. Well, you could hit that undo button at the top of your program toolbar, or you could hit Ctrl+ Z. The beauty of undo is that it works for any recently transpired event. Even deleting something. So, in some weird double negative faux pas je ne ce quais sort of way (what the hell did I just say?) you can undo a deletion. You're basically undoing your undo, or redoing your do. It's like a sneaky misuse of the undo command that can't get you in trouble with anyone, but probably won't get you a job or get you laid, either.

So, in a stroke of pure geniu-ah, okay, even I recognize that I'm going too far here.....in a stroke of ordinary but useful thought, I stumbled upon the idea of undoing your undo, and it worked!

I hope this is helpful to anyone who loses a part of (or their whole) blog. I know what that feels like, and it's not fun.

Bye, and happy blogging!

(and may you get more comments on your blog than I do on mine)