Template editing, 101.

Both my sister and Gus have asked me how I put those nifty links on the side of my blog. Well, I’d tell you, but the way I do it is more complicated than Blog*Spot allows (it involves server-side includes and means I don’t have to republish when I make changes to those links.) The next best thing is to edit your template directly.

In the Blogger interface, click on the Template tab. You will be presented with some potentially daunting HTML. Don’t panic. Scroll through it until you find something that looks like <h2 class="sidebar-title">Archives</h2>. We’ll insert your blogroll right before this. In order to match the existing style, a similar syntax to the archives will be employed.

Insert the following before that line:


<h2 class="sidebar-title">Blogroll</h2>
<ul class="blogroll-list">
<li><a href="http://patrick.greentaperacing.us/blog/">Missing the Ground</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.homestarrunner.com/">Homestar Runner</a></li>
</ul>


You can, of course, expand this to as many list items as you’d like, and link to whomever you like (though if you don’t link back to me you will hear no end of righteous bitching!) One tip, if you break anything, and your template is otherwise unmodified, just go ahead and reselect it from the list. Of course if you’re like me and have a highly customized (read: written from scratch) template, back it up. But you knew that already.

Thus ends the lesson.