Add a Categories Section to a Blogger Blog

Add a Categories Section to a Blogger Blog
Blogspot blogs at Blogger.com have no categories only labels. This tutorial will show you how to manually create categories from your existing labels. While this is not an ideal solution it will mean that you can display a logical grouping of your most popular articles under the one heading. This article is aimed at new bloggers and beginner bloggers although it is suitable for all Blogger Blogspot bloggers. No changes to the template are required to add these categories to your Blogger Blogspot blog.

Create Categories from Labels
One easy way to create a categories section is to simply rename the title of the labels widget as categories.
To add a categories section to your Blogger Blogspot blog follow these simple steps:
 1. Decide how you want to group your labels and what headings are your most popular

2. For the first category navigate to the individual page of the label you wish to use by clicking on the label in your sidebar. Copy the URL address of this page from the address bar in your browser (right click and select copy). For example the URL address of the label of Blogger Tutorials on this site is:

http://freefixit.blogspot.com/search/label/Blogger%20Tips

3. Navigate to Layout > Page Elements

4. Click Add a Gadget in the sidebar and select Links List

5. In the Configure Link List dialog box that appears paste the link to your label into the New Site URL box

6. Enter the name of your label or some alternative text if you wish into the New Site Name text box.

7. Enter Categories as the title

8. Choose between sort alphabetically, reverse alphabetically or don't sort

9. Click on Add Link to add the link to your new categories list

10. Click on Save

11. For every label you wish to put into the Categories Section copy the link and add it to the Configure Links List. By the end you will end up with two or more categories in your list.

Limit the Number of Posts Displayed in the Categories Section
To put a limitation on the number of posts to display in the new categories section you will need to adjust the URL's of each label as follows:

From:

http://yoursite.blogspot.com/search/label/CategoryName

To:

http://yoursite.blogspot.com/search/label/CategoryName?max-results=max number of posts to display

So for the category Blogger Tutorials on this site for example I would enter the following to have only 25 posts displayed:

http://blogknowhow.blogspot.com/search/label/blogger%20Tutorials?max-results=25

This tutorial has shown you how to add a categories section to the sidebar of your Blogger Blogspot Blog using the Link List widget.