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Blogger Magic - Make A Static Main Page

Some blog owners want to publish posts, and display a static main page - and want to view blog content, in one or more tabbed pages.

It's not difficult to create the tabbed pages. The difficulty would come, long ago, when setting up the main page. We had several workarounds for making a static main page - none of them equally easy to use, effective, and elegant.

Then, Blogger created Custom Redirects - and gave us static main pages, that are easy to use, effective, and elegant.

Like a selected posts main page, it's not difficult to publish a blog with a static main page.

  1. Create and publish a static page, with appropriate content.
  2. Setup a custom redirect, for the Home page to the static page.
  3. Link to the blog posts.
  4. Add content.

Create and publish a static page.

Use the Page Editor, and create a static page, containing what you like. Use "Configure Page List", if you like, and change the "Home" caption.

If you want a useful page title, and browser tab label, you need to enter the page title into the title window, when the page is originally published, using Roman alphabet letters. If you enter the title using characters in a non Roman font, such as Chinese, Russian, or Thai characters, the page will have a URL created as "... /p/blog-page.html" (or "... /p/blog-page_30.html", for a page published on the 30th day of the month).

Also, the page editor does not have the Permalink option - that is only provided in the post editor. The page URL will lead to the page title, when the page is initially published.

Redirect the main page to the new static page.

Add a custom redirect, that targets the static page just added.
From: /
To: /p/Home.html

Link to the blog posts.

Make the static home page part of the blog - and make the rest of the blog accessible.

Add content, to the blog.

Having setup your pages, dynamic and static, publish posts, to "Blog" and to any other labels. That's why you build (dynamic) pages, using label searches.

Comments

Sasha A. Palmer said…
Hi Chuck,

thank you for all the info you post.

My ultimate goal's to have a static home page and several tabs for dynamic pages, to which I'll post using different labels.

First I need to create a static home page. I know how to create a new page, but I'm stuck on step 2.

How do I redirect? Where do I find the 'From' and 'To'?

Thank you for your help,
Sasha

Nitecruzr said…
Hi Sasha,

Thanks for the question.

Create a new static page, "Home" (for this example).

Then, Edit the "Custom Redirects" wizard at Settings - Search preferences - Errors and redirections, and add a "New redirect".
From: /
To: /p/Home.html

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2013/01/blogger-magic-redirecting-url-in-your.html
Sasha A. Palmer said…
Hi,

thank you, Chuck.

After I posted a question yesterday I realized I'd missed your link to the how-to on redirects. I was able to create a static home page, but ran into another problem :-)

Now I had two identical static pages and no dynamic blogging page.

I couldn't figure out how to add a blogging page. You mention "/search/label" - where do I type this?

Also, some Blogger blogs have posts organized by categories. I thought this could be an alternative to tabs linking to dynamic pages. I don't know how to sort posts by categories, either; if you could point me to this info on your blog it would be great.

Thank you again,
Sasha
Sasha A. Palmer said…
Hello again,

I posted another question earlier, but I've finally figured out what to do.

Thank you for your help,
Sasha
Nitecruzr said…
Thanks for the update, Sasha. Custom redirects have so many possibilities, it's not easy to describe all of them. I'm glad that you were able to find your solution.
ProMinded said…
Chuck,

I'm having the same issue Sasha was having, I redirected to a static home page but cannot figure out how to find/link to the dynamic blogging page.
I know you mentioned "search/label" but I'm not sure where to use that.

Thanks,

Dan
Nitecruzr said…
Hi Dan,

Thanks for asking the question! Can you post in The N Zone, so we can explore your question?

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/nitecruzr-dot-net-blogging

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