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 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.

• In Settings - Formatting, we set "Show" to "0 posts".
• With some clever custom template code, we make a text gadget that only displays on home page.

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 - Formatting, and set "Show 0 posts". However, if you then go to "Blog Posts" in "Page Elements", 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 - Formatting, 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 - Formatting didn't talk to those in charge of "Blog Posts".

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