The Real Blogger Status

Last week, Blogger Engineering announced their latest feature, "Featured Post" . Whether you’d like to re-share that delicious holiday recipe from a few years back, spotlight a can’t-miss promotion you’re running, or just revive something quirky from the archives, the Featured Post gadget is a simple way to show off the content that matters most. This is a quick and easy way to highlight a specific post in your blog, that will be enjoyable or useful for your readers. I hope to use mine to provide useful advice, as "Read, and Learn" - once the Followers gadget has been updated , and is fully operational.

Blogger blog owners, like dogs, always want more. Cue the super annoying commercial currently running on some USA TV channels. More, please! And when I suggest using an HTML / Text gadget, tweaked to show only when the "home" page is displayed , I hear cries for "more". But how can I show my latest posts for a given label, on my home page? Surely, I can do that too? The answer here is that yes, you can do this - and fortunately, it's not difficult. It simply require a little more thinking.

Many people have asked how they can have a Welcome or Index message in their blog. I have a Welcome message, at the top of Nitecruzr Buzz , or on this blog , for instance. This blog uses a text gadget, positioned above the post gadget, which leaves a gadget that shows up on every page. On Nitecruzr Buzz, I used a future dated post , so my "Welcome" showed up only on the "Home" page. Neither solution was optimal. A true "Welcome" message should show up only on the "Home" (first) page. A text gadget shows up on every page. A future dated post shows up only on the "Home" page, but it shows up in the Archive index with a future date.

Layouts template Blogger blog posts are sequenced as Classic Blogger blog posts are - by date, in reversed sequence. This means, again, that the newest post will fall at the top - and every time that you make a new post, it will be visible above any previous posts. Just like a Classic blog, you can make the posts display in any order that you like - just change the date of each post. This is called a work around. With a blog of any size, and activity, and lots of posts to change dates on repeatedly, you'll find it to be a very painful workaround, too.

When you write posts in your blog, generally you'll want them to show the date / time when they were written. A blog is a journal, and sometimes you will want to insert posts with a different date. You may want a post to show a future date, to bring it to the top of the blog . You may want a post to show a past date, to reflect a past experience. Or maybe you want to make a new post, and keep it off the main page, as a separate section of the blog. Maybe you want all of the posts to be in forward chronological order, instead of (normal) reverse chronological order.

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.