Pages in Blogger

Blogger has (finally) added the concept of Pages to the mix.  Pages, often referred to as “static” though they can be edited at any time, are best used for information is outside the normal chronological flow of a blog.  “About this Blog” or “Contact Me” are perfect examples.  When comparing blogging platforms, Bloggers lack of Pages was a gaping hole in their feature set when compared to WordPress or TypePad.

For now Pages are only available on Blogger in Draft, Blogger’s beta-testing platform.  Eventually Pages will be migrated to the standard Blogger platform.  In the meantime, simply replace “www” with “draft” when viewing your blog and you’ll be good to go – those who have their own domain name will need to log into Blogger in Draft first and access their blog through the Dashboard.  You may notice a few other features available in Draft, including Thesaurus and Spell check features in the editor’s Compose mode.

Don’t let the “beta” designation scare you off, tools released to Blogger in Draft are quite stable and changes made in Draft show up on your blog as if you made the change using Blogger’s released tools.  Google, Blogger’s parent company, kept Gmail in “beta” for over five years, even with over 146 million users per month.  Personally I don’t think Google really understands what the term “beta” means…

To add a Page to your blog, go to Postings –> Edit Pages and click the New Page button.  From here, things should look pretty familiar.  You get most of the same options as if you were editing a blog entry.  The only real difference is that Blogger adds a “/p/” to your Page’s URL.

Once you’ve added your first page, Blogger asks you where you’d like to place the new links – basically, it’s asking where you’d like to place a new widget.  Currently there are three options: below your header, in your sidebar or no widget at all.  Best option is to select “No gadget” until you’ve added all your Pages, then add the Pages gadget (Layout –> Page Elements –> Add Gadget).  That way your readers don’t see your partially completed work.

You can also customize the location and look of the Pages widget if you’re willing to fiddle with your template code.  (We can get into that during the tech Q&A, if you’re interested).

Blogger limits the number of Pages to 10 – a reasonable limit to prevent people from using Blogger as a content management system.  Blogger is a blogging platform and lacks many of the features needed to provide true content management.