In response to a comment from GodsDragon, here's some thoughts on how, why & when to make your blogger post titles clickable.

Two sets of tags that we're messing with here. blogitemtitle and itempage / mainpage. To start with the last ones, blogger calls these conditional tags & they govern which parts of your template are displayed on main & post pages. You can wrap certain elements of your template in these tags to force them to display conditionally.

As for blogitemtitle, clickable blog post titles seem to be a feature of the newer default blogger templates that I've messed with, but if you're old-school, or using a special template from blogskins, for example, then your titles won't click. All these edits are for code between the blogger tags. Specifically we're going to replace the blogitemtitle tags, and add some extra stuff between them. Please back up your templates first!!

Here's 3 reasons to make your post title clickable, & 3 ways to do it if you'd like to add the feature:

1: Make the post title click back to your main page.

Why? I don't know really. Some sort of home link from in-post is useful, but I don't think a reader will expect your post title to be it. Anyway....

<BlogItemTitle><span class="PostTitle">
<a href="<$BlogURL$>">
<$BlogItemTitle$></a></span></BlogItemTitle>

If you want this to only work on the permalink post page, wrap both the opening link tag & the closing a-tag in itempage tags, like this:

<BlogItemTitle><span class="PostTitle">
<itempage><a href="<$BlogURL$>"></itempage>
<$BlogItemTitle$><itempage></a></itempage></span></BlogItemTitle>

2: Make the post title the permalink.

More useful, esp to jump off the main page to the post page. For this one...

<BlogItemTitle><span class="PostTitle">
<a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>">
<$BlogItemTitle$></a></span></BlogItemTitle>


For clickable titles on every page, just replace the existing blogitemtitle code with the snippet above.

If you want this to only work on the main page, wrap both the entire opening link tag & the closing a-tag in mainpage tags. You need 2 seperate sets of these tags, because if you include <$BlogItemTitle$> in the wrap, your title won't show on the post page. The solution? Leave the existing non-clickable post title in your template, wrapped in itempage tags, & add the above code to your template wrapped in mainorarchivepage tags.


3: Make the post title link offsite to whatever link you put in your link field.

This makes use of the <BlogItemURL> tags. Podcast? Link to offsite media? If your post title is "Dave's Show #3: The Spielberg Interview" then you'll want to link to the MP-3 from your title field, I guess. First enable the link field in your blogger settings. [dashboard > settings > formatting]. If you want the link to appear in the body or footer of your post, you'll have to add blogitem code to your template:

<BlogItemURL>
<a href="<$BlogItemURL$>">Link</a>
</BlogItemURL>

If you want the link to appear as your post title, you can combine blogitemURL and blogitemtitle tags as follows:

<BlogItemTitle>
<span class="post-title">
<BlogItemUrl><a href="<$BlogItemUrl$>" title="external link"></BlogItemUrl>
<$BlogItemTitle$>
</a>
</span>
</BlogItemTitle>

making clickable titles that point to the link you specify in the link field.

A combination of 1 & 2 ought to be possible too, using item page and main page tags. Make the title the permalink off the main page, & the link back home from the post page. Try this:

<BlogItemTitle><span class="PostTitle">
<itempage><a href="<$BlogURL$>"><$BlogItemTitle$></a></itempage>
<mainpage><a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" title="permanent link"><$BlogItemTitle$></a></mainpage>
</span></BlogItemTitle>

Hope these are useful edits for you. I may even roll something out at Freshblog!! Code, of course, made visible by the fine people at Centricle.

See other posts in Blogger Hacks: The Series