Thursday, March 24, 2011

The amazing "Configure Blog Posts" controls

Nested away in your blog settings is a control panel for blog posts.

I don't mean the screen for editing individual posts, of which you surely know already; this lets you change the uniform way all of your posts are rendered in your blog.

At stake are things like whether and where to show the date, labels, even title of posts.

Not every feature here is going to be important to everyone. However, there are so many options (Move "posted by" to the top? Or suppress it altogether? Change jump-break-link text?) that I think every blogger should know about these controls.

The only way to see these options is at Layout > Blog Posts > Edit.

The resulting screen has three parts: two generic "Main Page" settings, followed by a long list of sub elements, some enabled by default, that you can turn on or off, followed by a layout section.

In this third section you can arrange those elements by dragging them (mirroring the way you can rearrange sidebar gadgets on Blogger's layout page).

This is one hefty control panel, and you should check it out. Maybe there's some change you can make there that will make your blog even better than it already is.

9 comments:

  1. You forgot to mention one important thing. Here you can also configure your Adsense ads. matching the ads colour scheme to merge with your blog.

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  2. David, thank you! Adsense is a blind spot of mine since I have not deployed it (as of this writing anyway).

    Much appreciated!

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  3. An unrelated question to you Adam: how can I put categories (blog / about / journey...)at the top of my blog as you did. I used labels as lists, it looks similar as yours but when you click one of the categories, the size of the fonts reduces and the text moves to up... which does not look very nice... but in your blog, nth changes when you click a category at the top...

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  4. Adam I solved the issue asked for so dont bother to answer it... Used links instead of labels... Thanks for this great site anyway...

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  5. Sorunlu, I am glad you figured out your problem. If you get stuck again, I have found the Blogger help forum (link in sidebar at right) to be a very helpful resource too.

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  6. Nice info... But question is: can we add something else under post setings, like, for example, post ratings?

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    1. KK, that option seems to have disappeared from the Blog Posts template. I'm not sure when that happened.

      It was only ever available through blogger in draft.

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  7. Is there a way to remove the dates completely and just have the post title with no dates?

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