Pages

May 29, 2020

Posts and Pages




In this post, I'll be talking about Posts and Pages. Posts is the usual term for the content you publish at a blog, and posts are generally displayed by date, newest to oldest. Pages, on the other hand, are a way to create content at a blog that is not date-based, and which usually has a separate navigation system. You can create Pages at Blogger and at WordPress; it's a pretty standard feature in blog platforms.

I'll confess that I don't use Pages a lot because I prefer to do my blog navigation by way of labels, and also by hacking the date/time stamp. But I have used Pages at some of my blogs, so I'll give an example of that below, and then explain how Pages work at Blogger. The Pages ecosystem at WordPress is way (WAY) more powerful than at Blogger!

Pages at my Myth-Folklore UnTextbook

The UnTextbook is one of my biggest blogs, with thousands of pages to support the 100 reading units that I've prepared for students to choose from. Pages were useful to support semester navigation, as opposed to content navigation. So, across the top I have Week-by-Week Pages for navigation, while in the sidebar there is content navigation (short titles for all the units). You can see how that works here: Myth-Folklore UnTextbook.


Here's what that Pages area looks like in the Settings: Layout.


Below are some specific tips on creating Pages and designing the Pages navigation.

Pages Content

The Pages area is accessed through the left-hand navigation, and in the new Blogger interface, you add a new Page with the plus-button in the lower right-hand area (I'm still getting used to this new interface, but it will be useful for my students since it has a lot of design features in common with Google Sites, which they also use, like this plus-button).


The editor for a new Page works just like the editor for a new Post, except that there is no date/time stamp and no labels. The only settings for a Page are comments, and yes, you can have comments on Pages, like for a Post.


I'm using "About Me" as a sample Page here because creating an "About Me" area at your blog is typically the kind of thing you might do with a Page instead of a Post.

Pages Navigation

In Blogger, the Pages are something you add to the blog Layout. For some of the Themes, the Pages widget is already part of the default Layout, and for other Themes, you need to add Pages like you would add the other gadget options:


After you have added Pages to the Layout (and you can put the Pages cross-column along the top OR it can go in a sidebar), you can then click on Edit, and you will see a variety of options, turning pages on or off in the navigation display, and dragging-and-dropping for the order in which they appear:


Note that this is also how you can add links to external webpages as part of your blog navigation, organizing those links together with the Pages links.


So, in addition to the labels-and-dates way of organizing Posts, youcan also use these manual methods for designing the navigation of your blog site with Pages.


Okay, those are the basics of blog Pages... and next up is some housekeeping: how to back up and/or export your blog.