Showing Only Post Titles in Blogger Category & Archive Pages

In today's blogging tip, we will see how we can show only post titles on the monthly archive pages and category lists on Blogger. An individual post page will be displayed normally.

Before going into the tweak, let's analyze its benefits. If you are a prolific blogger, you may write at least one post daily, sometimes more. There are bloggers who post five times a day. In a month, thus, you may have at least thirty posts published. When search engines rank pages, they often return Blogger monthly archive pages as results.

Gladly, since the label pages on Blogger are excluded from search engines, they are not returned as results.

These category pages and archives consist normally of the entire post content and tend to be extremely large. With this tweak, you will be able to reduce the size of these posts to that of a mere link list.

Imagine if you have posts of a thousand words and a lot of images on certain days. These posts individually take a lot of time to load in browser. Together in the monthly post archive, they simply will continue to load for minutes after minutes. A slow Internet user may have quit the blog by this time. Also, when a reader looks for category pages, they don't like to see text content, but only linked titles. They can then choose whichever title they want to read.

For these users, showing only a link list on label pages is pretty convenient. This is what we do now.

Go to Layout editor in Blogger and expand the widget templates in HTML edit view. Replace the code, <p><data:post.body/></p> with the following:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'> <p><data:post.body/></p> </b:if>

That's it. Now you have only the post title links on the label pages and archive pages. With this code enabled, view the entire post history of CuteWriting for 2009 January. It now loads in seconds. Without the tweak it would attempt to load full text content of over 30 posts, which would take minutes after minutes to load!

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