Static Pages In A Renamed Blog

It's possible that Blogger takes the term "static", as in "Static Pages", very seriously.

I've been hearing rumours of odd URLs in blogs that are renamed - ie, published under a new URL - where static pages are present. Today, I setup a brief experiment.

You may see the result of my experiment, in my test blog "Nitecruzr Test Pages In Renamed Blog". The blog started out as "nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-rename.blogspot.com". You are welcome to click on that link, if you wish. It won't get you anywhere, though.

After I setup the blog, I published a couple Static Pages - "About Me" and "About This Blog", with a tab bar below the header, as the Pages gadget.

After publishing the pages, I renamed the blog to its current URL "nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-renamed.blogspot.com". Do you see the name change?

nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-rename.blogspot.com
nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-renamed.blogspot.com

A very small change, but it's significant.

And now, please examine the blog itself. Observe the URL of the first post, "Lorem Ipsum".

nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-renamed.blogspot.com/2010/03/lorem-ipsum.html

And look at the Pages gadget

Home    About Me    About This Blog

The 3 static links:
nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-rename.blogspot.com
nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-rename.blogspot.com/p/about-me.html
nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-rename.blogspot.com/p/about-this-blog.html

That's a problem. What we should have is

Home    About Me    About This Blog

The 3 static links:
nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-renamed.blogspot.com
nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-renamed.blogspot.com/p/about-me.html
nitecruzr-test-pages-blog-renamed.blogspot.com/p/about-this-blog.html

So, try it. Click on an link in the first example, above.

The blog you were looking for was not found.

What have we observed?

• Static Pages get a new URL, when the blog is renamed.
• The links in the Pages gadget are not changed.

I think somebody has some work to do, yet.

Fortunately, if you know that this oddity exists, it's not hard to correct it. Just delete the Pages gadget. Then go to "Layout", and add a Pages gadget again. The re added Pages gadget will now have links with the correct URLs.

But please, only delete the Pages gadget - please, do not delete the individual pages. It appears that pages are given the same duplication prevention treatment, as are posts. If you delete the pages, you'll end up with suffixed URLs, when you re create the pages.

There is more to consider, when we examine a blog published to a custom domain, and the blog In Transition. We will examine that, later.