Skip to main content

Creating static pages on Blogger

As part of the process of obtaining an AdSense account for the blog I need to create some static pages to hold housekeeping information.

Fortunately Blogger already has this function in hand with 'Add pages to your blog'. The pages can contain whatever you want and Google isn't stingy about how many you can have, allowing the creation of an unlimited number of pages.

There are two steps to adding pages to a blog; creating them and adding links to them to the blog. But before we start here is the current layout of the blog,


It is pretty minimal, and that is OK. With a small title and a link to a search function at the top; and three links to the side, one for a drop-down that gives access to the archive of posts, one to the set of labels that I experimented with in a previous post and one to Report abuse, which goes off to Blogger not me. There is a mix of fonts which I hadn't noticed before, but that is a problem for another day.

The first task, then, is to create some placeholder pages. Selecting the Pages tab on the Blogger menu returns a blank screen informing us that There are no pages.

For the AdSense application process we need to create three static pages titled, About, Contact and Privacy. Hitting + NEW PAGE at the top of the menu of Blogger tabs will move you into the editor, where all the familiar content creation tools and options are present.

As with posts you have the option to Preview, Save or Publish pages at this point. However publication is required before you can add links to them on the blog. As I am not concerned with the content of the pages I'll move onto sorting how they are displayed on the front of the blog once you have the content for them.

So, off to another of Blogger's tabs, the Layout tab,

Blogger uses what it calls Gadgets to control how or whether certain types of information are presented on a blog. Some are optional, some are not (being part of the theme); most of the non-optional ones can be made invisible, but some can't (do you really want a blog with no posts?).

As we want to put links to our newly created pages onto the blog, select Add a Gadget from the Sidebar pane and choose Pages from the list that is displayed in the pop-up window,

or in the case of the theme that the blog is using (Notable Light) the Pages Gadget is already present underneath the Header but set as not visible (circled in red on the first picture of the Layout tab above).

Either way, once you have it on the layout, clicking on the pen icon of the Pages Gadget will open its' dialog box.

Here you can select which Pages to show and choose the List Order of the pages. Using a Title will allow the pages to be grouped together and multiple instances of the Pages gadget can be added to a blog giving a series of lists of pages, each of which can be grouped under their own title.

Once you tick the Show Pages checkbox and select Save the dialog will close and you will be returned to the Layout screen where you can preview your changes.


The effect of the alterations (ie adding the pages and making the gadget visible) is to add a tidy little group under the blog title. By adding another copy of the gadget to the Sidebar pane and making the first copy invisible I could have the list on the side rather than the top,


which looks better, but for some reason the font has changed. If you try dragging the Pages Gadget from the Sidebar pane to the Footer pane you get this instead.

Not good. Of course it should be possible to alter the fonts and positions of these elements but that means diving into the code for the theme of the blog (all 4,000 lines of it) and this is more detail than I want to tackle for now. So instead I'll put up with the font being not quite right and have the links on the sidebar.

As I'm providing contact details one other thing I can do is make the Report Abuse gadget invisible (as it is a non-optional Gadget on this Theme) by unticking the Show Report abuse checkbox.

For optional Gadgets taking them off a page is just a matter of hitting Remove in their dialog box.
Once your changes have been made and you are happy with the previewed result you can hit Save and the alterations to the layout will be made live.

Done.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evri-thing, Evri-where, All Over the Place

You have to wonder why Hermes went through the hassle of rebranding themselves to Evri, then you get a parcel delivered by them. Only a year ago in a desperate, and cynical, attempt to shed their woeful reputation as the worst parcel delivery company in the UK Hermes rebranded themselves as Evri. On the 14 th March 2022 they rolled out their corporate PR machine and made promises . "The new brand will also see a significant investment in its customer service as part of its commitment to ensuring that its customer service remains responsive, knowledgeable and helpful. This will include Evri opening a fully UK-based customer service team and adding 200 experts who will be based in local depots, closer to where potential issues are. It will also be upgrading its chatbot and releasing more phone lines for those who prefer to speak directly to someone." So was it a surprise when I got an e-mail about a parcel I was expecting? Well, most other couriers don't do this an...
Post a Comment
Read more

How-to: Setting up a Blogger account with a non-Google e-mail address

As I've set up an e-mail address for the blog it makes sense to be able to post from it too. To do that I will need to set up an account with Blogger for the new e-mail address. At the same time I'll create a gmail account to both manage the blog and give access to the Google apps suite without the monthly fee. Skullcinema@gmail.com is already taken (as there is nothing new under the sun), but I can take a related e-mail address. I won't publish it here as the first address will generate enough spam as it is. Setting up a gmail account really doesn't require a guide, but it is covered here if you need one. So, off to set up an account  through Blogger . First of all though, log out of Google and/or Chrome or it will pull you straight through to Blogger on the account you are logged in on. Choose SIGN IN in the top right-hand corner of the Blogger home page, and then select  Use another account underneath the list of your current Google accounts. Now ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Alexander Aircraft Company

And here we are at the Alexander Aircraft Company , a start-class rated article about a defunct aeronautical engineering company from the USA in the 1920's. As this is a subject with more interest to me I spent a little longer than usual on this article, giving it a top-to-tail polish. Starting with the lead paragraph , which consisted of a grand total of twelve words on arrival, I expanded it, if only by a bit, so at least there are now two sentences. The associated book citation was limited so this was expanded as well. Founding and Disaster subsections received a heavy dose of wiki-linking and the single reference provided across both subsections was dead, requiring a trip to The Wayback Machine to search for the given URL. The Wayback Machine is part of The Internet Archive , which is a not-for-profit set up back in the early days of the web to archive the nascent internet, as it was recognised that the content was not anywhere near as permanent as the previous forms of...
Post a Comment
Read more