Controlling certain elements visibility, usually widgets, in your blogger pages can a bit confusing if you are not familiar with coding or with the blogger template. In this post, I will note down the things I learned in using the if/else tag for hiding or showing elements in specific pages in blogger.
I'll be focusing in using the if/else tags in your template - how to use it and where you can use it. Anyway, just let me know in the comments section if something isn't clear.
I thought I'll just share with you guys how I setup my test blog here in Blogger. Well it's a reminder to myself too cause there's a couple of things I sometimes forget when putting up my test blog.
In case you are wondering what a test blog is, it's basically a site where you do all your testing especially if you are unsure of the outcome. It could really be risky to apply updates directly to your live blog especially if it's a major change, unstable or experimental.
This post is meant for existing blogs in which you want to put up a test site for. You can still follow this if you haven't got a blog yet but some of the steps used here won't apply.
So let's begin!
UPDATE [2013.05.01]: Simplified steps and updated code and sample. As a dear reader pointed out, the old post wasn't beginner friendly (and yes I confused myself as well).
By default, at the end of each Blogger post, we get the "Newer Post" and "Older Post" navigation links. As I have seen in other sites, it looks better if it showed the next and previous post titles instead. So in this tutorial, I will show you how to customize your post navigation links so that it will display the titles of your next and previous posts.
Replace "Newer Posts" and "Older Posts" with post titles.
Labels in Blogger, if used correctly, are a great way of categorizing your posts. So now I will show you how to use them as navigation in your blog.
If you plan to use or are using the AddThis widget on Blogger, you may find that you cannot easily control where to make your AddThis share buttons appear.
When installing AddThis for Blogger, normally you would use its Blogger widget. I find this too bulky as it uses javascript to parse your template to render the buttons. Sure you can modify the script so that you can position your buttons elsewhere but I don't find that solution flexible enough.
Instead of using the Blogger widget, I will show you how to use the AddThis website code on your Blogger template.
Often times I would come across videos (especially online) whose volume is way too low. I don't really know much about tweaking audio and stuff so here is a quick and easy way to temporarily amp up the volume.
UPDATE [2013-03-14]: It looks like Blogger has updated a lot of things on its Template Editor since the time of this writing so, I've added some updates on the notes that needed updating (??). I've marked them with "UPDATE" or a strikethrough and I hope this won't confuse you (or myself).
I've always wanted to create my own Blogger template and tried so many times before but couldn't really get it right. I think I finally understood a somehow large chunk of it. I think.
Anyway, here in this post, I will note about the things I have learned/will learn in creating your own template. I won't be getting into much detailed stuff on HTML and CSS how to's. I'm assuming that you already have basic knowledge on these subjects and that you know your way around Blogger. Still, if you have any questions or there is something I didn't explain well, just feel free to leave a comment, and hopefully I can answer it.
