August 30, 2009 By Amanda Padgett
For many months I have been tempted to add a label cloud to my sidebar, but quite honestly, I was daunted by the number of steps I would have to take to make it happen. I hated to see long label lists on blog sidebars, so instead I seriously refined my labels so there were just a select few and I showed them as a list of “categories.”
Well, Blogger has been doing some major improvements to their programing and they have made it super easy to have a label cloud (a grouping of labels in a cloud-like formation). So, I will now tackle my first real tutorial (now that it is a super easy thing to teach!).
First things first. Some of you may be beginner bloggers and thinking “what the heck are labels?” Labels are tags you give to your blog posts so that others can quickly read posts only on that subject. For instance, I am going to give this post the label “tutorials” by typing it in the box circled in the picture below. Readers who come to my blog can then click on “tutorials” in my label cloud and all posts containing that label will be shown.
Okay, onto how to make your labels a cloud instead of one long list (which I am not in favor of).
- Sign into your Blogger account and go to the Layout section of your blog.
- At the top of your sidebar there is a box that says “Add Gadget.” Click on that.
- Choose “Labels” as the type of gadget you’d like to add.
- A screen that says “Configure Labels” will pop up.
- To change your labels from a list to a cloud, all you have to do is click on the “cloud” option (see picture below).
Wasn’t that easy? So, if you have a big long list of labels on your blog’s sidebar, I strongly encourage you to switch to a label cloud. They take up less space and help your blog have a cleaner, neater look.
If this tutorial has helped you, and/or you switch your label list to a cloud, let me know so I can go ew and aw over it!
p.s. Since Blogger upgraded it’s post editor, the images have gotten smaller (even though it says “large) and of poor quality. I’ll load these to Photobucket soon so they’ll be larger.