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Putting A Post At The Top (A "Welcome" Post)

Many people have asked how they can have a Welcome or Index page in their blog. I have a Welcome page, on PChuck's Network, or on this blog, for instance.

The most obvious way to do this is to set the post date far into the future, so it always displays above any other posts, including ones which you may make in the future.

This is, fortunately, not hard to do. You can change the post date on any blog post, any time you feel the need.

Thanks to the ability to schedule the publishing of posts in the future, publishing a Welcome post with a future date is just slightly complicated. You'll have to add the Index / Welcome post, in two steps.
  • Publish the Index / Welcome post, as normally.
  • Edit the Index / Welcome post, and give it a date well into the future.
With a Layouts template blog, you can create a special post, and have it always appear at the top. That won't be an actual post though. Fortunately, there is a better solution.

>> Top

Comments

Richard Mercer said…
This is a variation on the above question.

I have a blog about climate change and energy solutions. I have two main articles which I would like to have always displayed first.
They are the basic message I want people to read. I would like to add more posts, like the one on Bioplastics, and have them appear after, or on another part of the page, like maybe on one side. I can't have two welcome posts, I would imagine.
My URL is http://energysolutionswecanbelievein.blogspot.com
my email is capt-rick@sbcglobal.net

Thank you
Nitecruzr said…
Actually, you can have as many Welcome posts as you like, subject to how much room you wish to take up, above the posts. Remember that every view of the blog will include these posts at the top.

But try it. You may need to check settings for the main column, but having done that, you can have 2 or more text gadgets above the posts.
Chris S. said…
Couldn't you write a dynamic meta item for the description? (In the head element, of course.) If you do that, Google (at least) uses that for the description.

<meta content='Blog Description Here' name='description'/>

There are some things in blogger you can use for a dynamic header. For individual entries ("post pages"), you can use the following code to insert the name of the blog and the title of the entry.

<b:if cond='data:blog.homepageUrl == data:blog.url'>
<meta content='Generic Blog Description (Main Page)' name='description'/>
<b:else/>
<meta expr:content='data:blog.pageTitle' name='description'/>
</b:if>

You can add " + "" to add more words (inside the single quotes). I haven't figured out how to add more dynamic content. If you figure it out, let me know! I'd like to add the author's name as well...
Nitecruzr said…
Chris,

Meta data is visible to the search engines, but doesn't show visually on the blog. A welcome post is a visual display, to invite your readers. The two are completely different.

And the Description contains straight text, no HTML.

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