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.

Edit the elements

Blogger's layout page, at Layout, is the powerful graphical-interface control panel for your blog. There you can add gadgets and even rearrange them just by clicking and dragging.

Perhaps you know that you can also configure those gadgets by clicking their respective "edit" links. But look over at the rectangle labeled "Blog Posts." That's right, you can configure them too.

Blog elements

In the beginning was the blog, composed of posts.

But there are many other pages and parts of your blog, some added later by Blogger (such as static pages), others generated automatically (such as label searches).

It's handy to know what you can do with these. Here's a field guide.

Tabbed navigation with Link List and Pages gadgets

Photo: Mike

Update: the improved Page List widget, sometimes called "Pages," has become generally better than the old Link List for the purpose of creating a horizontal navigation widget of links.

Most blogs should have such a widget in the horizontal area between the header and the posts. (This blog has one.) As I said below in 2011,

Navigation gizmos like this can connect readers to your content, making your blog more useful, fun, and, ultimately, popular.