Blogger Hack: Adding Categories to Your Sidebar Without Losing Your Old Template
Blogger’s upgrade to version 3 made big news among Blogger (and blog*spot) users. For one, the system gained a lot of improvements over the previous incarnation. However, along with this upgrade came some disadvantages. First, not everyone had the ability to upgrade their Blogger accounts. Then, those who upgraded but had heavily-customized layouts found out that they couldn’t enjoy the new drag-and-drop layout editing features.
Most Blogger users won’t probably have the need to edit raw theme code, and true enough, most users would probably be able to understand what’s under the hood. Even intermediate users resort to cutting and pasting borrowed code, or pasting in pre-made themes downloadable over the Web. After all, majority of Blogger users seems to welcome the fuss-free drag-and-drop layout editing.
If you’re still using the old Blogger version, I suggest you upgrade if you need to use categories on your blog (if an upgrade is possible). Be sure to backup your template by copying it over to a text editor.
Now, if you’ve heavily modified your Blogger theme, you most likely want to stick with your “classic” template, at least until you get to modify a new template that conforms to the new Blogger layout standards.
Let’s say you’ve upgraded already and you want to revert the look of your blog to your old template. Under dashboard, simply click TEMPLATE and then EDIT HTML. You now have the option of pasting back your “classic” template which you had previously backed up.
Now assuming all your posts–or even just your new ones–have labels already, we will generate a list of existing labels on your site. Simply go to the “create post”, and then click the “Show All” link under labels. You will then see a list of all the existing labels you have. We will use this for reference.
Now, under your “classic” template, create a list (ordered or unordered). As contents of that list, use these links, to point to your labels.
<a href=”http://yourpage.blogspot.com/search?label=yourlabels”>yourlabels</>
For the example labels above, we will create an unordered list here.
<ul>
<li><a href="http://yourpage.blogspot.com/search?label=blogger">blogger</a></li>
<li><a href="http://yourpage.blogspot.com/search?label=blogging">blogging</a></li>
<li><a href="http://yourpage.blogspot.com/search?label=google">google</a></li>
<li><a href="http://yourpage.blogspot.com/search?label=posts">posts</a></li>
<li><a href="http://yourpage.blogspot.com/search?label=test">test</a></li>
<li><a href="http://yourpage.blogspot.com/search?label=writing">writing</a></li>
<ul>
And so forth.
When you save your settings, you will now see a list of your labels on your sidebar on your classic template. Also, when you add new labels, don’t forget to add lines on your sidebar that correspond to these new labels.
This is somehow crude, but it should work, until Blogger gives you a way to import your old-style template into the new format.
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Why isn’t it working for me? Gives me a page cannot be found error everytime.
remove the ” that does something more
Do we have anyway to do this automatically? I am using FTP publishing for my Blogger.
Thanks..
Hope you can help. Working with classic blogger template. Noticed that the sidebar links on the Main page are missing on the individual Post pages. Only the Previous Post links appear on Post Pages. How do I ensure all links appear on all blog pages?
hope you can help, going crazy trying to figure this out! many thanks in advance.
[…] Talking about blogs, I just finished doing up the categories for all my old posts, all 561 of them on my Parenting Times blog and 183 of them on my Mothering Times blog. Phew! Thats hard work! But it was quite fun too to look back at what I wrote. I’m still using my old blogger template as I’m stubborn and refuse to change to the new blogger customised ones since I’m so used to the old template. So I had to manually include the categories into my sidebar. I did it following this article for anyone who is interested: Blogger Hack: Adding Categories to Your Sidebar Without Losing Your Old Template […]
cant we do it dynamically, its very hactic to maintain such info abt categories mmanually
I read your post and explanation code but i still can’t get rid of getting label to my webblog. i would appreciate if you can help.
Thanks
Thank you for this information! I was going mad figuring this out.
Blogger upgrade to version 3? what’s that? I have a blogspot blog in New Blogger, is that this version or is it something that has been newly released?
HEY! this works if you follow the steps, in the classic template only take care of put the correct link! BYE!
Is there a way to add the number of posts in a label in brackets beside the listed label names?
thanks alot! Ive been searching the web for an html code.. and i was quite disappointed it only works in beta blogger..
I just cant afford to lose my old template and start all over again!
any chance we can show number posts as well?
good post
but this dont show all my post on specific label this show only 20 last posts