Homepage, archives, permalink, Label page of a blog

Pages of a blog

A blog has the following characteristics. Whenever you publish a post, the same post may appear in more than 1 page on the Web. It has a homepage or main page. Generally the most recent posts will appear in the homepage and by default, 7 most recent posts will be displayed in the main page. This can be changed. See Customizing your blog.

If you have enabled individual post page (permalink) in the settings (click BACK button to get back to this page), each post will have its individual post page, also called permalink. The same post will also appear in the Archive pages together with other posts, and if you have labeled (categorized) your post, the same post will also appear in the Label Page of that label.

What is a homepage of a blog?

The homepage of a blog is also called the main page or index page. The homepage URL (click BACK button to get back to this page) of my main blog is Blogger Tips and Tricks is

http://blogger-tricks.blogspot.com

Note: the addition of blogger-tricks to blogspot.com making it
blogger-tricks.blogspot.com
indicated that this is a sub-domain of blogspot.com which is property of Blogger, not your property.

Now Blogger offers custom domain where you can register your own domain and used that domain for conversion of your blog to a custom domain blog.

For example, Good Online Pharmacy is a custom domain. Its homepage URL (click BACK button to get back to this page) is

http://www.reliableonlinepharmacy.com/

Note that there no longer is a blogspot in the URL and is therefore not a sub-domain and is now the owner of the blogger, not Blogger.

Number of posts in the main page

You can set how many individual post is displayed in the homepage or main page. The default is 7 posts. You can set it from 0 to a very large number of posts. Instead of posts, you can also set it to display posts according to how many days, example 15 days. If you publish only 1 post during the last 15 days, then only that 1 post will be displayed on the main page. If you published altogether 100 posts the last 15 days, than all that 100 posts will be displayed on the main page. If you set it this way, than Blogger imposed a maximum of 500 posts. It is not wise to set too many posts to be displayed in the main page as the blog will then takes a long time to download.

There should be a link to a post on the best way to register for a custom domain for your blog later, and I hope you remind me by leaving a comment.

Archive pages

Each time you publish a post, the post will appear not only in the main page, but also in the latest Archive page. As you publish new post, the latest post will go to the top of the main page and the last post will then only ended up in the Archive page. You can set the archive to archive posts in different ways - daily, weekly, monthly. You can even choose to have no archive at all. All these only apply to the current year. Posts published in previous years will be archived according to the years.

An example of an archive page is 2007 archive for Natural Remedies. This archive page contains all 27 posts published in 2007 in the blog Natural Remedies.

Individual post page or permalink

A blog can be set to have individual post pages or none. The first is the default and is the best choice as far as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and getting your posts found by search engines is concerned. An example of an individual post page is New Blogger templates (xml). The URL of that post page (permalink) is

http://blogger-faq.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-blogger-3-column-templates-mostly.html

This is very useful when you want to tell someone of some information you have published in some particular post. For example, I want you to know that I have a FAQ for New Blogger templates and can either give you the URL above or create an active hyperlink which when clicked on will take a visitor to that particular post. This will be IMPOSSIBLE if you did not enable individual post pages.

Label pages

You can label each post with a label (category) or more than one label by typing in the labels you want for each post in the Labels field at the bottom of the post editor window:



This is what I actually see at the bottom of the window in which I am typing this post. I have typed in a label "about a blog" as I anticipate publishing most posts about a blog. If I want, I can add more labels, but each label must be separated from the other by a comma. Note that you can also select an existing label that you see at the bottom of the Label field in the screen shot above. If you don't need it, all you have to do is to click "Hide all" and the "Hide all" become "Show all". When you want it again, just click on "Show all".

A Label Page is a web page which display all the posts which had been tagged with a certain label. An example is all posts labeled "heart attack" in "Natural Remedies blog.