Blogs are great formats for sharing information. When you create a blog entry, the typical blog setups, Blogger and WordPress, put your most recent entry at the top. The older entries are moved down the page. After awhile, the older blog entries typically move off the main page of a blog, and they’re archived. The older posts can still be accessed, but they’re definitely not as prominent for readers or search engines as the most recent post.
Sometimes you want to keep a piece of information in one place, normally at the top of your home page. Often you’ll want to keep a summary of your blog or an important notice at the top of each page on your blog. This is referred to as keeping the information sticky. The “sticky” post or block of information doesn’t move from its position on your blog. Here’s how to do it.
Blog posts are included on a Blogger account using what’s referred to by Blogger as a widget. A widget is a piece of code included in a Blogger template that tells the Blogger system to include some text or some kind of functionality. If you use one of the default templates from Blogger, you will find this section of code in the XML file for your blog setup, which can be accessed by going to Layout-> Edit HTML from your Blogger control panel.
(div id=’main-wrapper’)
(b:section class=’main’ id=’main’ showaddelement=’no’)
(b:widget id=’Blog1′ locked=’true’ title=’Blog Posts’ type=’Blog’/)
(/b:section)
(/div)
These lines of XML tell the Blogger system to include your recent blog posts in the main section of the page for your blog. When you are creating posts, there is really no way to convey to the widget that you want a particular post to stay at the top of the page. Instead, you have to use a different widget, separate from the main “Blog Posts” widget described above.
For a blog I recently created, I wanted to have such a setup – a sticky post that would keep an overview of my blog at the on top of every page. I accomplished this by using a Blogger widget that actually doesn’t deal with what’s normally considered a “post” at all. Blogger has a widget called “Text” that suits the purpose well. If you click on any of the “Add a Gadget” links from the Layout page of your Blogger control panel, you can select the Text widget and enter the information you want to show up in your “sticky post”. After you click Save, you are returned to the Layout page, where you can drag and drop the new widget so that it appears above your blog entries.