Saturday, November 19, 2011

How to add a custom category to the side bar on your blogspot blog, and populate it with links to selected posts

In my side bar on this blog, I have a category called STATA, below which are links to all my posts that are about STATA tips (right now, I have only one such post). Here is a link to the page that gave me instructions on how to do this:

http://www.bloggersentral.com/2010/04/list-recent-posts-by-label.html

Basically, here's what you need to do:

1. Pick a name for the category; this will be the same as the name of the label that you will apply to all posts that you want to include in the category. So your category could be something like (without the quotes): "STATA tips" (under this would be links to your posts related to tips on doing things in STATA) or "Books I am reading" (under this would links to your posts that discuss the books you have been reading)

2. In Blogger.com, click "Dashboard" and click posts to list all the posts for your the blog. Create the label that you chose in step one and apply it to all the posts that you want to appear in under this category.

3. Click "Layout" in the left sidebar and select "Add Gadget." In some templates for blogger, you might have to click "Design." When you click "Add Gadget" a pop-up window will appear.

4. In the left sidebar in this window, click the first tab, "Basics." Then scroll down and look for the Gadget "HTML/Javascript."

From here you can follow the instructions available at the link above. The only think I would do differently from the instructions at the link is that I would make the changes (e.g replace  YOUR_BLOG_URL, etc.) BEFORE saving, NOT after.

Good luck!

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