Before, to make separate pages for special sections of your Blogger blog (About, Contact, Sitemap, etc…) you have to make posts with the page names as titles. This was a big nuisance because these posts appeared in your main page and archives and hiding them meant using special tricks and hardcoding. On January 20, the Blogger team introduced pages in Blogger in draft. Now you can make static pages that do not count as posts.

To make a new page, go to the “Posting” tab* and click Edit Pages. Write the new page and publish. For your first page, you will be given an option to choose where to put the Pages list. “Blog sidebar” is the same as adding a new widget in your sidebar through “Add a Gadget.” “Blog tabs ” creates a new tab under the header with the page links. This may not work in custom templates. Read here for instructions in making your custom template compatible with Pages Tabs. The address of the new page is http://blogname.blogspot.com/p/pagename.html with hyphens replacing spaces.

In addition to the new static pages in Blogger, I also noticed some other features. These may have been available for quite some time. When writing a post, the Post Options just below the writing area gives you more control over some elements of your post.

You can disable comments for a particular post, show HTML literally in Compose mode (lets you type HTML code “as is”) and publish the post at a specific date and time in the future (scheduled posting).

For your current posts, you can now edit the time and date of the posting. What a neat feature! I tested this and it actually lets you change the order of your posts.

*I encountered a bug wherein Edit Pages is not visible. To solve this, go back to your dashboard and click New Post again.

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