In Blogger: Make blogs, not problems

In Blogger support forums you can daily read how someone has lost his post due to editor constantly autosaving the draft, or blog layout is broken after trying some hack. Can the post be recovered - no. Layout fixing - stressful work, your users see broken blog, etc. These problems can be avoided or diminished very easily. If you try to work on one blog only, chances of loosing data get higher. Appreciate your work and efforts and do not put all the eggs in one basket.

Blogger is a platform for making blogs. Blogspot blogs are free. So make blogs instead of problems. Don't use your "main blog" to try all the hacks out there. Make a blog for that, call it your "beta blog", for example. Tired of loosing a post text because of autosave? Make a blog for pre-publishing posts, "prepub blog". There you can publish already the very first draft version, after which the autosave is turned off while editing the post. After text is ok, copy text to your main blog and publish.

Prepub blog can also be a great place to develop ideas for blog posts. You can publish there your draft ideas without "filtering" them. Just pick the good ones for further editing and publishing in main blog. Your existing posts can be exported from main blog and imported into background blogs for test data. Your template html can be copied to background blogs, too, you don't have to make all changes from the start.

Note: if you upload images to your post in prepub blog, they will be placed in prepub blog's Picasa album, so you should not delete this album or pictures in it. Alternatively you can just work on the text in your prepub blog, and upload the photos in your main blog before publishing.

You can leave those background blocks out of Blogger's listings and keep search engines out. You can also make them completely private, if you want, you being the only one who can view (prepub could be like this).

Your blogs could be for example:

myblog.blogspot.com

myblog-beta.blogspot.com

myblog-prepub.blogspot.com

Specific addresses may not be available, but for background blogs the url is not so important anyway. And you don't have to stop there, at three blogs. Make blogs as many as you think you need. Do not compromise a single copy of information.

What do you think?