What Pages Are - And What Pages Are Not

For years - almost as long as Layout Blogger has been out - bloggers have wanted the option to create static pages - pages that do not change - as part of their blogs.

We've suggested a workaround, created from backdated posts, with some success. In January 2010, Blogger gave us true static pages for our blogs.

Even as people started adding static pages to their blogs, the confusion about what those pages are, and what we can do with them, surfaced.

How do I add a date to a page?

How do I link to a page using a label?

How do I publish multiple posts on a page?

A static page consists of a title, and a single article. The article is created using a wizard extremely similar to the posts editor - but a wizard without an option to set a date, labels, or jump break.

By default, a static page is indexed through a pages index.

If you wish, you may add a page to any linklist which you setup. A page is not associated with a date, or a label, and it does not appear in an archive index, an archive retrieval, a label index, or a label retrieval. A page does not contain any posts, just static text.

If you want multiple articles of content on a page, simply edit the page and add multiple articles, separated by section headers - larger type. If you wish, you can add links to the section headers, and / or link to the section headers using anchor links.

If you want to index an article using only a static link in a post, a linklist, or a tab bar, you can publish a page. If you want to index or reference an article in your blog using a date or label, or from the main page, you can publish a post.

A Pages index, setup using the Pages gadget, will index both dynamic and static Pages>, and help you publish your posts to your pages. If you wish, you can make a custom tabs index and substitute that for the Pages index. You can examine a custom Designer tabs index above (just below the blog title), and a custom Layout tabs index in my home blog, "Nitecruzr Dot Net".

And there's a final limitation to static pages. Static pages are accessed only from links. The home page of the blog is still the main page of posts - there is no option to designate a static page as the home page - though you can substitute a static HTML / Text gadget, in place of the home page posts. And you can, similarly, make other gadgets appear only with specific static pages.

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