Changing the case of your Label values

This article is about how to change the case of the Labels in your blog. For example, from lower to initial case ("cats" to "Cats") or even all capital-letters ("CATS").

When some people start using Blogger, they apply labels to posts without much thought: they just type "cats" into the label field, and don't consider how it will look later on. Even worse, they type in "Dogs" for the next post and "FROGS" later on.

This gives an untidy, unprofessional-looking labels gadget.

And it's a bit hard to fix: you can change the labels on individual posts, but if even one other post has "cats" as a label, it doesn't matter how many times you add "Cats" to new posts the label will always be recorded as "cats".

The only approach I've found is to apply a unique temporary label to all posts with the value you want to change, then to delete the initial label and use the temporary label to select the posts to apply the correctly-formatted value to.

How to change the case of existing Labels

Log in to Blogger, and go to the Posts > All tab.

Display all the posts with the label you want to change (eg "fred"), by choosing the value from teh drop-down list near the top right of the screen.

Select the posts by clicking the checkbox above the first column in the list of posts.

Use the Labels drop-down menu (the one with a picture of a luggage-label on it, just above the list of posts) to:

Give them a new temporary label that's not already in use (eg "xxx-temp") - when you have done this, they will all have at least two labels.

Remove the label that you want to change

Select all the posts with the temporary label

Give them the label that you want to change to (eg "Fred")

Remove the temporary label that you added in the 2nd step.

Warning

Blogger blogs have a maximum of 5000 labels. Some problems that have been raised in the Blogger-Help-Forum make me think that this is a life-time limit, and that a label is still included even if no current posts have it, though I haven't tested this personally. I suspect that applying the procedure above will use up to three labels: the original, the temporary one and the new one. You may not want to use it if you think that your blog might ever reach the limit.

Using Labels to Categorise your Blogger Posts

Posts, Pages and Navigation.

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Sunday, July 25, 2010