The Real Blogger Status

One of the most versatile ways to organise a blog is by using a Pages index. Long ago, the only possibility, for indexing a blog attractively, was a horizontal table, with manually added links. We called it a horizontal menu bar . Alternately, a vertical linklist might be used. Then Blogger added static pages - and later, the Pages index gadget .

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.

Ever since Blogger gave us the option to add pages to our blogs - and provided the complementary Pages index gadget - blog owners have asked, periodically How do I publish my posts to pages? This is a pretty simple procedure, too - once we understand the complementary nature of dynamic and static pages .

The dynamic templates have been available for just over 3 months , and for all their usefulness, there are a number of identified deficiencies . We see, every week, naive questions about one well known deficiency. How do I add a bloglist (Followers gadget, labels index, popular posts, what have you...) gadget to my blog, with it using a dynamic template? Adding gadgets to a dynamic template display just won't be a simple project. Not to be facetious, but there is really no space on the screen, for an accessory bar (also known as a sidebar). The dynamic views dynamically fill all horizontal space.

We're getting a few reports today, in Blogger Help Forum: How Do I? , from blog owners who publish blogs with static pages , that use the new dynamic templates , and that now have no ability to index the pages in the dynamic views. We're also seeing reports mentioning some blogs which have no menu bar visible, in dynamic views. Both problems were, reportedly, first observed mid morning today, Pacific time.

Even before Blogger added static pages as a blog feature , blog owners have been asking how to make hidden or separate pages for their blogs. When static pages, and the Pages index gadget, were added, people started asking about indexing label searches and external links in the Pages gadget. There are several solutions to the need to have a Pages gadget that indexes archive / label searches, and external URLs. Each solution has its advantages, and disadvantages.

Most of us, when we setup a blog, we just write the posts, and maybe add an Archives Index gadget in the sidebar. If we want to get fancy, we can use labels, and have a Labels Index in the sidebar. You may want to make your blog look like a web site , with the new Blogger static pages editor , and an index at the top of the blog. That's not a difficult thing to do, it just takes ingenuity. Note as in many of my posts, all example code here is presented with lots of gratuitous line breaks .