How to center-align Pages/Pagelist gadget in Blogger

Thanks to Vanessa Morgan who had recently visited this blog and wanted to know how to center the horizontal page tabs below the blog's header. That spurred me to google for answers after several hours of failed attempts to do it on my own.

I'm terribly happy to have learned much from GreenLava, the guru at Blogger Sentral who's most helpful and generous in sharing his knowledge and expertise. THANK YOU!

By default, the Pagelist or Pages gadget is left-aligned in Blogger blogs but can be easily aligned to the center if you so desire.

Learn how to center the Pages or PageList gadget,
that's located below the blog's header, by following these simple steps:

Add Numbered Page Navigation for Blogger Blogs

Wow! I'm terribly excited as I've just added the numbered page navigation to my blogger blogs. Something that I had desired for a long time but didn't pursue earlier due to other priorities. Pagination is an essential feature as readers will have easier access to our blog pages and randomly or selectively delve into the archived pages.

I've observed this pagination feature installed in many blogs but the most outstanding of all that got me smitten was seen at Rasa Malaysia, an awesome foodie site, maintained by a Penangnite residing in USA. As I googled to learn how to include this feature for my blogger-powered blogs recently and experimented with the few tutorials available, the closest that matches the one I liked was the script authored by Abu Farhan. His blogger hack will result in the lovely presentation as seen in the above screen shot, which includes both the first and last page numbers.

Display a blog button with text box for code in Blogger

Bet you've often seen blog buttons of varying shapes and designs being displayed on websites or weblogs, together with its Html code in a text box beneath - something like my blog's button and its code as illustrated below and wished you know how to create one for your own blog too, yes?

A blog button is a hyperlink thumbnail image that when clicked on will lead the reader to your blog, usually the homepage or to any desired destination. Providing a cool blog button is an interesting alternative way in promoting your blog by others rather than just an ordinary text link.

When you add your blog button or logo at the sidebar or footer with its HTML code in a scrolling text box beneath, then interested parties can easily copy and paste its code if so desire, to display the button at their own blogs or websites. Thus providing easy access to your blog which is another way of advertising for you and probably increase traffic to your blog when their readers click on the button.

Creating your blog's button with its code is quite simple really. You just need to create your button, apply some basic HTML to make it clickable and provide its code for copy and paste.

Add CSS in the Template Designer to restyle your blog's appearance

My first attempt at modifying the appearance of this blog after a makeover with the Blogger's Template Designer, by editing its Template via Design | Edit HTML, was quite a handful! But armed with the extra knowledge acquired since and further experimenting with the Designer for my other blog, Peacockflower's World, I'm extremely happy to have discovered the easier alternative way to do it.

No need to go about the long and winding way of editing the blog's template (i.e. Edit HTML) which can be quite intimidating and may risk messing up the codes! Just use custom CSS (cascading style sheets) to restyle the feel and look of your blog! Once you've learned how-to, it's really quite simple, fast and fuss-free!

Follow these steps to
add custom CSS to your template, using the Template Designer :

Related Posts with Thumbnails widget for Blogger

Yet another awesome Related Posts widget by Aneesh of Blogger Plugins, a seasoned author of widgets for the huge Blogger community! This one is real cool with thumbnails for extra visibility, like that of LinkWithin. Though every one of these widgets serves the same function to bring forth related posts for your readers' further interest or absorption and probably an increase in site's traffic, I personally prefer Aneesh's to LinkWithin's feature for the various reasons:

• the thumbnails' size is cuter, not overly large
• you can easily customize the widget yourself to display as you fancy
• the number of related posts can be decreased or increased beyond the default 5. Experimented successfully with 10 and more! :-)
• traffic is not directed elsewhere when thumbnails are clicked, so download speed of blog's contents is not hampered. Different from LinkWithin that directs traffic to its own site before redirecting back to our site, and thus slows down page download.

If you're interested, simply follow these easy steps on
how-to install the Related Posts with thumbnails widget :
(script code replicated from Aneesh's tutorial at Blogger Plugins. Thanks and God bless you, Aneesh!)