August 11, 2005 / PHP & Web Development

Essential change to Blogger Templates

I love blogs, love reading ’em. However Blogger blogs have a major flaw in their templates when it comes to the links to the single page posts. Some of the templates have addressed it but in the older blogs the problem still remains.

Take a look at Spam Bank and you’ll see that the heading for every post is a link and the footer information includes the heading. Take a look at most other blogger sites and it won’t be. That causes problems when the posts are long, you want to make a comment, or return to read comments and it’s really hard to find the end of that post.

Well, read on for the solution…

Minor change to snippets. In the snippets you will find < $ this needs to be changed to remove the space.

The heading sections start life as plain text, big and bold for sure but the template code looks like this:

[code]

< $BlogItemTitle$>

[/code]

when they should be clickable links into the post. The template needs to be changed to look like this
[code]

posted by < $BlogItemAuthorNickname$> @ posted by < $BlogItemAuthorNickname$> @

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CategoriesPHP & Web Development Search Engine Optimisation

Tagsblogger blogspot dave-taylor footer link snippets template templates

25 Comments

  1. Qiu
    August 21, 2005

    Nice code you had!!

  3. David Daniels
    September 9, 2005

    Sarah, I cut and pasted the template changes tsuggested but the permalink on the heading section didn’t work. Am I missing something?

  4. sarahk
    September 10, 2005

    Hi David

    I’ve revised the template a bit and sent you an email with the changes…

    Sarah

  6. Ron Johnson
    September 18, 2005

    Sarah , I also tried it and it didnt work do your above instructions contain the “revised changes “

  7. sarahk
    September 19, 2005

    Yes they do!

  8. Andrea
    September 22, 2005

    hey sarah, i also tried this, and the first set of new code works, but the second part for the footer in doesn’t, its showing like this

    posted by @ : > comments

    -andrea

  10. sarahk
    September 22, 2005

    Red Alert

    I’ve just realised that the codes are being saved with a space between the < and the $. Please remove these when adding to your templates.

  11. mcfox
    October 7, 2005

    Thanks for this really simple code change! 🙂

    One of those jobs I’ve been meaning to get around to but never quite finished (em, started).

    Works a treat so long as you watch out for the gaps from cutting ‘n’ pasting (“

  12. Joe
    November 4, 2005

    Hi I am fasanated by you coding! I no beans about it but would love to learn! Got to keep this old brain sharp! LOL! Have a good week!

  13. […] A kind lady called Sarah encountered my blog, was horrified by what she saw, and and proffered this suggestion for tweaking the standard blogger template to add the readability of long articles by adding the heading to the footer section. […]

  14. Gary
    November 16, 2005

    Thanks for the tip, Sarah. I am currently putting together a new blog, which I am building using Blogger, and this is just the kind of “tweaks” I am incorporating.

  15. dreamweaver
    November 17, 2005

    Thanks so much for this… I hardly recognise my template now with all the tweaks – yours is just the latest in my efforts to create a “good” blog (at least, code wise, the writing… dunno)

  16. IncognitoJoe
    December 30, 2005

    Sarah.

    Thanks for the breakdown on how to do this. My issue is that I cannot seem to find that exact code in my template. Maybe it is the template itself or perhaps an addition I’ve made, but I cannot seem to find those snippets of code that I need to edit.

    Any ideas on what I can do other than hire a coder??

    Thanks for your time.

  18. […] Blogspot-hosted blogs can duke it out with the best of them, but to get the most out of your site, you need to tweak it a bit. Here are some onpage template optimization tips you can use if you want to optimize your Blogspot site. […]

  19. jclick
    February 4, 2006

    Nice tweak. That’s one thing I always hated about blogspot was not being able to click on the title. Thanks.

  20. […] Simple SEO ? Essential change to Blogger Templates I did a search on Google for ways to optimize my two blogspot sites (jasonclick.blogspot.com and sam-squirrel.blogspot.com). I found the above site which shows several things but the one I’ve done so far is make the post titles “clickable”. That’s one thing I noticed about Blogger or Blogspot is that each post title is not clickable. We’ll I’ve made the changed suggested in the first part of the tutorial and now my post titles are clickable. Try them out! […]

  21. QT
    February 17, 2006

    Just wanted to say thanks for the great code.

  22. Edwin
    July 20, 2006

    Great tip. I was looking for this information.

  24. jc
    April 28, 2009

    hi sarah

    please help

    i wanted to tweak my blog

    ive already search my html template but i cant find this code

    i dont know
    why

    ive already done lots of tweaking to my blog, but i cant find this code

    help

    im using a 3-column minima blog template

    ive already expand the html yet i cant still find the codes i need to tweak

    thanks

  25. Sarah King
    April 28, 2009

    Hi JC

    This post is almost 4 years old and I haven’t kept up to date with Blogger changes and templates. I’d suggest talking to the template designer.

    Sarah

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