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Make A Static Home Page For Your Blog, #2

The ability to have a static home page for our blogs has been on the wishlist for many blog owners, for a long time.

The wish, for a static home page, became even stronger when Blogger released the static pages option, and the Pages editor. With the tweak to index label searches and other dynamic pages, some folks really wanted a static home page, to accompany their indexed label searches and other dynamic pages.

After Blogger continued to ignore our pleas for a static home page, we found a 2 step workaround for this omission.This gives us a home page with nothing but a static text gadget displayed - and links (where provided) to other dynamic and static pages.

Recently, the option to "Show 0 posts" changed, and we would see
Number too small: must be greater than: 1
if we dared to try "Show 0 posts". This really put a damper on the ability to make a static home page.

Today, we noted that omission was partially corrected. Now, you can go to Settings - "Posts and comments", and set "Show 0 posts". However, if you then edit the "Blog Posts" gadget in "Layout", and try to change any of the settings there, you will continue to see
Number too small: must be greater than: 1
when you try to change any post template settings, with "Show 0 posts" selected at the top of the window.

It's not terribly difficult to work through the limitation.
  • Change to "Show 1 post".
  • Make any changes to "Blog Posts" settings, and Save.
  • Go back to Settings - "Posts and comments", and change back to "Show 0 posts".
That's just an extra minute - if you're slow. But, it's still an annoying detail.

It looks like the guys in charge of Settings - "Posts and comments" didn't talk to those in charge of "Blog Posts".

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Comments

Gary said…
I am using the blogger in draft to manage my blogs.

I would like to have a static homepage. I have set the number of posts to 0 but still get a pesky message saying "No posts" within a grey box.

Do you know if there is a way around this?
David Arditti said…
Thanks for these instructions. There remains one drawback with all this, I think, which is that the text gadget containing the static front page text still takes up space in the blog layout even when it is invisible. So the formatting of the front page won't ever correspond to that of the other pages. This is only a minor annoyance, but it shows that what we really need is for the option for the home page to be one of the static ones.
Ross Wooldridge said…
Hi,
So, if you make your home page a static page with "show number of posts at 0," that means you forfeit the idea of having any of the pages on your blog acting like a blog.
What I mean is, you would no longer be able to create new posts and enjoy the publication features such as having new posts automatically emailed to subscribers via Feedburner. You can only do that on the Blogger home page. Am I correct?
The solution I really need is to somehow change my default home page to become one of the other static pages I've made, and then the user has to click to go the page with the posts. Is that possible?
GB
Nitecruzr said…
Ross,

You can make a static website by setting Show to "0 posts", and not having any dynamic pages. Or, you can set Show to "0 posts", and have other dynamic pages indexed from a menu bar, or from an archive or labels index. It's your choice - and the limitation is mainly your imagination.

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2012/04/blogger-limits-pages-dynamic-and-static.html

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2011/11/make-custom-pages-index-for-your-blog.html
E Doherty said…
Thank you! All of your directions are easy to understand if you have basic HTML knowledge - and they work beautifully!

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