The Real Blogger Status

We see an occasional sign of confusion, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger . How do I let my readers search my entire blog? or Why does my Search not find all of my posts? Both of these questions - and more - are seen, because not every blog owner is aware of the limitations, and possibilities, of each search technique.

The "Blog Archive" gadget is used, by some blog owners, to provide a date sequenced post index . Some blog owners, with smaller blogs, would like their readers to index their blogs by post title - but without the date being involved. They would like a straight alphabetically ordered list of post titles. Blogger does not have a "Title Index" gadget. It's not hard to make one, however, for smaller blogs.

One of the most useful accessories for listing posts, in a blog, is the Archives retrieval gadget. Titled "Blog Archive" in " Add a Gadget ", the archive gadget provides an automatically updated index of all blog posts, sequenced by date. It is an enhanced version of the first accessory for Blogger blogs, provided when the blog home page was previously no more than the most recent post.

One of the simplest - and most user friendly - displays that you can add, to your blog, is a custom "404 Not Found" display. A standard Blogger blog, by default, provides a terse advice, for invalid URLs. Sorry, the page you were looking for in this blog does not exist. Would it not be more user friendly, to use relevant slang, maybe. Sorry, bro - that's not on! You can do this - and more - with a little imagination.

Drop down menus, and custom sitemaps, are tools used in static websites, to help the readers find website content. Occasionally, in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , we see a question from blog owners, who are accustomed to publishing static websites. How do I upload a custom sitemap, for my readers to use? or How do I build a drop down, cascaded menu bar, to index the posts? The answer, for Blogger blogs, is that neither is truly useful. Features like cascaded, drop down menus, custom sitemaps, numbered pages, and complex slideshows ("sliders"), are excellent accessories, for static websites. Blogger blogs, however, are dynamic - and don't really benefit from either accessory.

One interesting question, which we see occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Learn More About Blogger , would be about making the blog easier to read - if the blog were static. How do I number the pages, in the blog? This blog owner does not quite understand the concept of dynamic content.

Sometimes, your readers will benefit from more than a navbar based, direct blog search, of a single blog. As I discussed some time ago, if you have a single blog, and want to provide a very simple search, you can do that using a Blogger dynamic search in an HTML / JavaScript gadget . You can provide a gadget to do a direct blog search, in addition to the search gadget in the Navbar - or (if you block the Navbar), you can do this instead of the search gadget in the Navbar. But what if you have multiple blogs, maybe in a custom domain cluster, that you want your reader to search in combination? Or maybe you would like refinements to your search? That's when you use the Google Custom Search Engine.

When your blog gets larger, you'll want your readers to be able to find the content easier - sometimes using more detail than can be found in the Archives index. You can generally use Labels for a more comprehensive index of the blog contents - but both labels, and titles, index the posts based on your vision of the blog. What if you want your readers to view your blog, on their terms? This is where the Navbar, with its search box, becomes useful.