Thursday 2 July 2015

How to link blogger posts to pages!

As a new blogger I am still busy setting up many things on my blog and learning lots of new (to me!) things. As my blog post list slowly grows I found myself wanting to add some sort of horizontal contents bar under my header.
I had already created labels for my posts which show as a long list on the right hand side. I really wanted to be able to be able to link my posts to the various different topics to make it easy for people to find them! 
 I went and did a Google search finding many contrasting posts. Some were very outdated for the sort of template I have. Blogger has simplified things for us recently it seems! Thank goodness!
The one I found that seemed easiest for me to understand was this one:
I decided to try the pages option. 
Although I followed instructions as shown I just couldn't get the thing to work! So frustrating. Although I got a nice tab showing with the name I just couldn't get the thing to link to the post I wanted!
If someone was following my blog at that moment I don't know what they will have thought of the various tabs popping up and then disappearing! "Tutorial" "tutorial" "My Tutorial" "My tutorials"! At one time I had all on them nicely lined up under the header! Lol!
An online friend Nin  gave me a hand by writing me step by step instructions. 
"GOT the label/tab for a new page thing figured out!!!
Step 1: go to your most recent post and click on the main label you assigned to it. Patricia, I clicked on “Tutorial” for yours. Your blog will show all the posts in cronilogical order for tutorials. Look at the address bar at the top of the page. THIS is the key!!! For you, Patricia, it is http://olivegrovesanddollknits.blogspot.it/search/label/t...
Step 2: click on the edit pages icon on the pages bar under your header image. For you Patricia, you have the page tabs “home” and “tutorials.”
blogger menu for posts

Click on the “Add External Link.” A new box will pop open. It will ask you to create the new page name and enter the external link. The external link is the address line that you copied for the label that you want to have as a collection page. click “save link.” Done! For you Patricia, call your new page “my tutorials.” This way you can tell the difference between the new and the old page. You can rename it after you delete the old page.
Step 3: In the “Configure pages” pop up, (see image above), you may have to put a check mark by the new page name to get it to display. Uncheck the old “tutorials” page tab. Save, then view blog and refresh your screen. Bam! It will now show.
Well that was just what I was doing it seemed but lets try again! I followed instructions, and NO it didn't show! What was I doing wrong? It had to be the url I was adding. It seemed I was doing it correctly but no! She sent me another message:

you have : http//olivegrovesanddollknits.blogspot.it/search/label/tutorial
Typo error! :) Easy fix, just go back through the steps again, but when pasting in the external link, use your arrow key to scroll to the front of the address to make sure it looks like the second one. "

     Ok try again. This time as I clicked on the external link box this time instead of just pasting the link I had copied, I first cancelled the http: that was written there already and then pasted the link! Hurrah it worked! 
Finally I got my nice little tag showing with a link that actually works when I click on it! Still doing a happy dance here!
Nowhere I had come across this error happening when adding tabs! Maybe just me being extra lacking in computer ability? Thank goodness I hadn't tried to add those pretty dropdown ones I saw on Youtube! Copying and pasting code like that sure isn't something for me to do at the moment! 
These do look so nice though! Maybe one day!
In the meantime I still need to tidy up the labels part. That is another question. Some people think it is better to have lots and lots of labels whereas others advise having just a few strictly necessary ones! Now I need to do some more research to find out what is best! 
What do you think? Lots or very few? 
Has anyone else found difficulty adding the blog post links to the page tabs this way? Which method would you say is easiest?

2 comments:

  1. Well, thank you aagin Pat! It almost makes me want to update and start mine agian..... almost! :~)

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