Blogger dashboard navigation sidebar

The blogger dashboard navigation sidebar links to pages that allow you to edit everything from individual posts to the whole blog.

There's too much in it to cover in a single post, so at this point I will only describe the major role of each of the pages and come back to investigate their functions in more detail later.

At the top of the sidebar is the name of the blog that you are currently working on. The drop-down arrow next to the blog name allows you to switch between blogs, if you have more than one, and the View blog link opens the live blog in a new browser tab.

Underneath that is a list of the ten function pages.

Posts. The default option when you load the dashboard is to display the Posts body, which is essentially a file list of the posts on the blog. It has three options to view All, Drafts or Published posts; the number alongside each is the number of posts in the category.

Stats. Selecting this will display an Overview of the viewing stats associated with your blog. It is then possible to look deeper into the popularity of individual posts (Posts), where the readers of your blog are coming from (Traffic sources), and where in the world and on what platform they are viewing the blog (Audience).

Comments. Presumably this page allows you monitor comments that others have made. As I have received no comments so far (the web-spiders are not a chatty lot), how the page actually works isn't completely clear to me. I may have the settings for comments set incorrectly or, more likely, there is nothing in the blog worth commenting on.

Earnings. Allows you to access Google's Adsense program for monetising your blog content.

Pages. These allow you to create static or infrequently updated content pages. They aren't presented in the main flow of the blog, but can be linked to or displayed in a sidebar by using a Gadget. As with the Posts page, different views for All, Draft or Published posts are available.

Layout. Contains options for how individual items like the sidebar and footers will be presented, and what information or gadgets will be displayed on them.

Theme. Blogger supplies a range of free design templates for use. However it is possible to design and upload a custom theme if you choose.

Settings. This option covers a wide range of settings for the blog. From how posts and comments are dealt with to more under the hood things like the how the blog interacts with search engines.

Reading List. Displays a list of posts from any blogs that you follow to help you remain current with your interests.

Help. Brings up a pop-up box with links to and a search bar for the Blogger help pages. It also links to the Help Forum.

As you can see there is a lot of content, most of which I haven’t yet tackled. The final section of the Blogger dashboard interface to look at is the footer.

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