Can I tweak my blogger templates to add true permalinks?

As a sometimes user of Blogger, I know what you mean about its limitations and occasional oddities! It turns out that you can tweak the so-called templates on your Blogger account to add just the feature you want, though it's a bit tricky.

To get the exact details, I'm going to turn to Sarah King, who has written up a nice tutorial of exactly what templates changes are required. First, though, you need to know how to get to your template so you can edit it.

Fortunately, it's easy. Log in to your Blogger account and look at the tabs along the top of the screen. They are Posting, Settings, Template, and View Blog. Click on Template. Now, for good luck, select all the text in the box and paste it into a spare Word document or other spot where you can recover it if needed.

Now, near the top is a section that looks like this:

<blogitemtitle>
  <h3 class=”post-title”>
    <$BlogItemTitle$>
  </h3>
</blogitemtitle>

To make the title of the articles clickable through to the permanent URL, add the following (highlighted in bold to make it easier to see):

<blogitemtitle>
  <h3 class=”post-title”>
    <a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" title="<$BlogItemTitle$>">
    <$BlogItemTitle$></a>
  </h3>
</blogitemtitle>

That fixes the top title to link to the permanent page. While we're at it, let's also add an explicit permalink near the bottom too. This one's a bit more complex, though. Ready?

<p class="post-footer">
  <em>posted by <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> @
  <a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>"
    title="permalink"><$BlogItemDateTime$></a></em> &nbsp;
 <MainOrArchivePage><BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
   <a class="comment-link"
   href="<$BlogItemCommentCreate$>"<$BlogItemCommentFormOnclick$>>
  <$BlogItemCommentCount$> comments</a>
   </BlogItemCommentsEnabled></MainOrArchivePage>
<$BlogItemControl$>
</p>

Let's give that some tweaks to have the title reappear (which is good for search engine findability too) as part of the permalink, and also have an explicitly named permalink entry too:

<p class="post-footer">
  <em>posted by <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> @
  <a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>"
    title="permalink"><$BlogItemTitle$>: <$BlogItemDateTime$></a></em> &nbsp;
 <MainOrArchivePage><BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
   <a class="comment-link"
   href="<$BlogItemCommentCreate$>"<$BlogItemCommentFormOnclick$>>
  <$BlogItemCommentCount$> comments</a>
   </BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
  <a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>">permalink</a>
  </MainOrArchivePage><$BlogItemControl$>
</p>

Rather impossibly complex, but if you take your time and step through these tweaks, you'll find that you've just made a couple of very useful and helpful improvements to your Blogger template!

My thanks to Sarah King for allowing me to republish and tweak her Essential change to Blogger templates.

Updated February, 2006 to fix an error with the first use of $BlogItemPermalinkURL$ in the code example.