Hello Friends,
From certain site tracking services, I have been looking at the way people come to know about my blog and I realized that only few of them access my blog directly (using its main URL). Most of them come looking for some hack (like social bookmarking, Google Translate etc) and land on an individual post page. When they land on such a page, a lot of space under the article + comments section goes waste as my blog’s sidebars (in most cases) are longer than the length of the post + comments section. This is also the case on label, archive and search pages. I was wondering how to make efficient utilization of this wasted space so that such first time readers (of my blog) get enough information about my other posts and I am able to convert them to returning readers/visitors.
I turned to instabloke for ideas and found that Blogbloke has made very good use of this space by posting a list of other articles, newsfeeds of his blog and adsense code. Inspired by his ingenuity, I decided to implement the same for blogger beta. To understand what I am talking about have a look at these pictures:
1. Bottom of the “main” section on my blog’s main page:
2. Bottom of the “main” section on a label page:
3. Bottom of the “main” section on a individual post/comments page:
You will notice that certain sections that do not appear on my blog’s main page appear on the label, archive, post/comments and search pages (I refer to them as “non-main” pages). See this image below. The highlighted widgets in the following image do not appear on the main page but appear on all other pages (i.e. non-main pages):
Here’s how you can also make a widget to appear on all other pages except the main blog page.
1. Add a page element
First add a page element (widget) of your choice from you blog’s page element (Edit Layout) section. Don’t forget to give it a unique title as it becomes easier to search for the widget in the template code.
2.View template code
Then go to the Edit HTML section of your blog and view the expanded widgets template code. (Please make a backup copy of your template before you proceed)
3. Search for the newly added widget/page element
Now in template code search for the widget you just added using its title.
4. Modify the Widget code
Modify the code as shown below by adding the “if” condition (in bold). Make sure you add the “if” condition just after the <b:includable id=’main’ section> and the closing “if” code just before the </b:includable>.
<b:widget id=’AdSense1′ locked=’false’ title=” type=’AdSense’>
<b:includable id=’main’>
<b:if cond=’data:blog.homepageUrl != data:blog.url’>
<div class=’widget-content’>
<data:adCode/>
</div>
</b:if>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>
5. Now save the template and you are done.
A special mention here for an Ajax-based hack by Hoctro which I used to display a large number of posts on my blog’s “non-main” pages. I did not use the feed widget for this purpose as Blogger limits the list to a max of five posts.
So go ahead and fill up those spaces and feel free to drop a line if you face any issues.
Update-01: To learn how to display widgets only on the blog’s main page click here.
Update-02: To learn how to display a widget only on a particular label page or any other URL (from the same blog), click here.
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