Archive and Title

Blogger Reborn Part 3 set up is required for "part 4: Reverse Archive Order" and leads to an easier set up for "part 5: Expandable Summary". The focus of this section is to turn on the ability for all your post to have a title. Title is important because we will use title to make the link for your archive lists. Furthermore, having a link makes your content easier to grasp by both readers and web-crawlers. In your main posting page, your current articles is without title, it might look something like below:


Notice how the article started with a date which doesn't tell the reader much about the story. Also, without a proper title, Blogger grabs the first sentence plus date in your article and make it into its post link. So now you have "http://rounder4.blogspot.com/2005/06/149-am-another-sleepless-night.html" The format is especially messy when you have a long first sentence. Let's see what we really want.


Notice how I made a new line with white words "Does Future Equal Past?". That is the title for this article. Blogger has a nice simple guide on how to turn on your title feature, there is no actual coding required. Once you turn on the title feature and put a title in all your postings, the side bar for "Previous Posts" will change.


Next we need to change the date formate in your archive links to the right, below "previous posts" side bar. Once again, the good people at Blogger has a nice guide to change the format of the dates displayed in your blog. Follow the link and make "Archive Index Date Format" to be "Month Year" format. You also want to make "Date header Format" to be "Weekday, Month Date, Year". For example like the first two picture in this post "Saturday, June 18 2005". Republish your blog and you should see the changes below.


The right archive is definately a better looking list than the left one. However, the list goes from oldest on top and work its way down to the newest article. It is not very intuative and it is slightly annoying. We are now ready to go on to "part 4: Reverse Archive Order".

[Blogger Hacks]