Blogger Hacks

Some times the best ideas are so simple but you just can’t think of them.

I have been trying all kinds of things to change my blogger templates, I now love Blogger.com but there are a lot of things about it I would like to change.

Several of the blogger commands do not do exactly what I would like for them to.

But the way that blogger works is they have a set of instructions for each blogger command and you just run the command and that’s it, once you turn it over to blogger you just have to accept what ever they give you back.

Here is the idea I just came up with, it is very simple but I found that once I started using it I now do it all the time….  

When there is a blogger command that I don’t like, I go to the HTML output and look to see what the command did then try and figure out a way to duplicate the parts of the command that I want.

The only thing blogger commands do is a pre-set list of HTML code.  So just start with the html code and see if you can modify it.  Sometimes the code changes based on different conditions so you can’t.

But sometimes you can.  For example I really don’t care so much about the Archive page, I don’t think it is all that useful. But what I would find useful is a site map.  So I looked at the archive page and found out it is just a list of links.

Now I can modify the archive page to list all the titles like this:

<Blogger>
<BlogItemTitle>
<a href="#<$BlogItemNumber$>"><$BlogItemTitle$></a><br />
</BlogItemTitle>
</Blogger>  

Then remove the archives from the side bar and just put in a link to one of the pages and then title it site map.