Quickly find the item you need in the Add a Gadget list - quickly

This article explains a quick way to find the widget that you are looking for in the list that Blogger displays when you use the Add a Gadget tool.

When you start to add a gadget to your blog, Blogger opens a new window listing all the existing page-elements that are available (in two tabs) and allowing you to upload a widget of your own (in a third tab.)

Currently, the first tab (called Basics) has 28 gadgets listed, while the second one (called More gadgets) has 899, displayed in pages of 30.

There is a search-for-gadgets feature available on the second tab - but it doesn't return gadgets that are listed on the first tab.   And even when it did, I didn't recommend it, because sometimes 3rd party gadgets with similar names were listed before the official widgets developed by Blogger.

So, to find a gadget that's listed in the Basics tab, you have to scroll down the list until you see the gadget you want.   However there are some problems with this.

• Given that there are 28 gadgets listed, but only about 4 shown at each click (may be different if you have a larger screen), this can be a lot of clicks.
• It's very easy to miss the gadget you want, and keep clicking through to the bottom instead.

But there is a very simple way to go directly to the gadget you want, provided you know what it is called, or some words that are shown in the description of that gadget and no other.

How to navigate directly to your desired gadget

Choose Add a gadget

When the new window has opened, use your browser's "find" command.

• In Chrome and Firefox, this is ctrl /f ,   ie hold down the Control key while pressing the "f" key once.

Type in a  few letters of the name (or description) of the gadget you want.  

Note:  these can be any letter, they don't have to be at the start.  But they must appear together.

Usually, as soon as you start typing, your web-browser will start scrolling down to the first place in the screen where the letters you type appear.   So if you choose the gadget details you type carefully, you should end up scrolled down to the gadget you want very quickly indeed.

The scroll bar at the side shows how far down the window you have come, and also if there are more cases of those letters further down the page.

And once you are at the gadget you want, you can just click the name or the blue plus-sign on the right side to open the gadget configuration page.

To sum up:

Use your browser's Find tool to go straight to what your're looking for in the Add a Gadget list. 
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What to search for to find popular gadgets

The words that I search for most often when I'm adding gadgets are:

• HTM - for the HTML/Javsascript gadget
• Ads - for the Adsense gadget
• Link L - for the linked-list gadget.

What about you - what gadgets do you most frequently add to your blogs?

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Related Articles:

Backing up your gadget settings

How to add a gadget to your blog

Where to find the HTML code for popular Blogger widgets

Find things in your blog-posts' HTML by using temporary "marker text"

This article shows how to use "marker text" to help find things when you need to edit the HTML code behind one of your blog posts.

When you edit a post in Blogger, to start with you generally use the Compose mode, which shows you the formatted view of how your work will look.

But behind that formatted view, every post is actually written in HTML, ie Hyper-text Markup Language - a type of computer language that uses tags like <h2> or <a href="www.foo.com">  to say how to display the contents.

A number of articles, here and in other blogger-helper blogs tell you how to do thing by changing the HTML for the post. But if you are not used to working with HTML, it can be confusing tryign to fix the part that you need to change.

Marker-text is a technique that you can use to "mark" problem areas while you are still in Compose mode, so that you can easily find them again when you are in Edit HTML mode.

How to use marker-text to fix a problem in your post

Start to prepare or edit your post in the usual way.

Go to the place just before the problem you want to fix or change you want to make.

Add some extra blank lines.

In the middle of the extra blank lines, put a few characters or a word that do not occurr anywhere else in your post. I quite often use XXX - but you can use any letters, characters or numbers, for example PROBLEM JUST AFTER HERE or 12345.

Use the copy function to put the text you added (without the blank lines)into your computer's memory.

Optional: Go to the place just after the problem you want to fix or change you want to make, and add some more text eg PUT IT BEFORE HERE

Switch to Edit HTML mode, using the button at the top-left of the post editing window.

Start the "find" feature in your web browser:

• ctrl / f in Chrome
• ctrl / f in Internet Explorer

In the search box that opens, use Paste (ctrl / v) to put the exact marker text that you entered into the Find box, and press enter.

The post-edit window will scroll to the place where your marker text is, and it will most likely be highlighted.

You have now found the place where you need to work, so you can now make the HTML changes required.

Once you have fixed all the issues, switch back to Compose mode using the tab in the top left hand corner, and remove all the marker text and extra blank lines that you added.

Good Practise

You will be removing the marker text before you publish your post.

But just in case you accidentally click Publish before you mean to, only use text that would not be embarrassing if some of your readers accidentally see it.

Some RSS readers will see the contents of your post as they are when you first hit Publish, even if you edit them less than two minutes later.)

Leaving your Marker Text in Place

If you might need to find the same place in your post's HTML again, then instead of removing your marker-text, you may just want to comment it out.

To do this, put these characters before it:

<!-- 

and these characters after it

 -->

So it might look like this

<!-- START OF PROBLEM1 HERE -->

Make sure you get the spaces - highlighed in yellow   as well as both of the "-- characters.

If you do this, then you will not be able to see or find your Marker Text when you are in Compose Mode, but you will be able to see and find it when you are in Edit HTML mode.

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Related Articles:

How to edit a post you have already published

Using cut, copy and paste in the Blogger post editor

The Blogger-helpers search tool

Removing the label values from the blog-post header or footer

This article explains how to stop label values from showing in the header or footer lines for each post in a blog that is made with Google's Blogger.

If you have used the Labels / Page-gadget approach to putting your blogposts into separate pages, then each of your posts will have one or more Labels attached to them.

Most Blogger templates are set up so that these label values are shown with the posts, too, in either just underneath the post-title or in the post-footer. And when a reader clicks one of these post-specific label values, they are shown a "post-listing format" blog page, which includes (the first part of) all posts which have that label.

However some people want to stop their blogs from displaying this these label values perhaps because:

• They want their blog to look more like a real website
• They are using some labels which are meaningful to them as administrators but not to readers (eg at the moment, I'm using a label "ZZZ - needs 2013 review" to identify posts that I need to check to make sure they're up to date.
• They just don't like having the label list shown for each post.

Note that you can select which Label values are shown in the Label gadget, but there is no way to do this in the label list shown for each post.

How to turn off the list of labels shown with each blog-post

Log in to the Blogger dashboard with an account that has administrative rights to the blog


Choose Layout from the options for the blog


Locate the Blog Post gadget in layout screen, and click the Edit link for it.


In the list of options that is shown, un-tick the Labels option


Save the changes, using the Save button (currently in the bottom left corner)


Click the Save Arrangement button for the layout (currently in the top right corner of the layout editor).



Job done! The next time anyone looks at your blog, the list of labels for each post should not be visible.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes, changes that are made in the Blog Post gadget don't appear to have been applied when people look at your blog. For example, the labels may still be shown for each post, even though the Labels check-box is turned off.

If this happens, the most likely cause is that your post template (ref: parts of a blogger blog) has become corrupt. The only ways I know to fix this are to either

• Change to a different template:
  This needs to be a total change, eg Simple to Picture Window, not just changing from one to another option within the same template.
• Resetting the blog-post gadget - described in detail here.

The disadvantage of of either of these approaches is that customizations you have made to your blog are lost - this can be easy to forget when your customizations include important-but-more-subtle things like ensuring your Analytics profile gets Adsense data or installing Facebook Open-Graph tags - or just plain annoying if you have put sharing buttons into individual posts, and have to re-instate these

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Related Articles:

What are the components of a Blogger blog

How to put posts into pages in blogger

Labels: a way to categorize Blogger posts

Posts and Pages - navigating while you are reading a blog

Making a blog look like a real website

How to link posts together in Blogger

This article shows how to link from a new blog post to one that you have already written. It is part of the Blogger-Basics series.

Sometimes, when you're writing a blog-post, you want to refer to a post you wrote before.

• It means that you don't have to repeat information, and can focus on writing it really well in just one place.
• It encourages visitors to read more than one post, and doesn't bore people who already know the related information..
• It's good for SEO (encouraging search-engines to give your blog a good place in their result lists)

For example, many of the posts here on Blogger-Hints-and-Tips are about how to get other tools (eg Facebook, Feedburner, AdSense) to work with Blogger:  in general these posts describe how to get some HTML code from the "other" site, and then how to install it into your blog. Originally, I repeated the "how to install" instructions in every post - but when Blogger changed how this was done, this meant I had to update dozens of posts.  To make this simpler the next time, I just wrote one post about installing third-party code into Blogger.

Follow these steps to link two posts together

1   Write the first post (the one you want to link to), and publish it. (You cannot link to it until after you have published it.)


2  Copy the URL / web-address of the first post.
The URL will start with https:// and then have your blog's url and the post information, like this:

http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2010/04/adding-separator-line-between-your.html

You can see the URL at the top of the browser in the address bar, when you choose to View the post from the list of posts in the Dashboaurd. Or you could right click on the View link and choose "copy target".

3  Edit the second post, ie the one where you want to put the link.


4  Find the text that you want to put the link on, and select it.

• This is called the "anchor text", because you attach your link to it.
• It's best if you use descriptive text like "worn with a formal dress" rather than words like "click here", because they help visitors and search engines know what the other article is about).

5  Click the Link icon in the toolbar: it's the one with the word  "link" on it - or in older versions of the Blogger software, it had a pictures that looked like a chain.   It also shows the word "link" if you hover the mouse over it.

6  In the window that opens, paste the address of the other post into the Web-address field.

7  At this point you can also choose whether clicking on the link shows the other post in the same window, or in a new one, using the "open in a new window" checkbox.
(Some people think it would be good to always open linked posts in a new window - but it can be very annoying for a user if they end up with a lot of open windows. Personally, I usually make links to my own site open in the same window, and links to other sites open in a new window.)


8  Click ok

What your readers will see

When someone reads the post that you put the link into, they will see your post in the normal way. The anchor-text (ie the linking-words that you chose) will be formatted in the same way that other links in your blog are formatted.

This is true for readers who are looking at your blog through a web-browser, and for ones who subscribe to your blog by email or who read it in a feed-reader.

When they click on the link, it will be opened in the way that you said - either in the same browser or in a new window.

Linking to or from other things?

In this article, we've talked about linking from one post to another post, using text.

You can also go back and re-edit your first post, and put a link to the second one in it - in exactly the same way as described above. (If you look at some more Blogger-Hints-and-Tips posts, you will see that I use lots of an lots of links to all sorts of posts.)

Or you could put the link onto a picture instead of onto text.

Or you might want to link to an email address, so that people can easily send you a message.

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Related Articles:

Getting started with blogger

How to edit a post that you have already published in Blogger

The follow-by-email gadget: a quick way to offer email subscriptions to your blog

Why do some blog-visitors use feed-reader software

Using a picture as the link-anchor in Blogger

How to show a working email address in your blog