Easy Blogger hack for scroll boxes for labels and such

I blog about a lot of different things, and I like having my labels visible for others. But, with 300 or so labels, that makes for a long list.

When Blogger came out with “Beta,” now new Blogger, in 2006, all sorts of people started inventing hacks. One was a multistyle way of displaying labels. I didn’t want the zoom version, though. I actually wanted a version of a collapsible/expandable list, similar to what Blogger lets you do with your list of archived posts.

But, nobody invented such a hack, despite me e-mailing a couple of people about it. So, I did nothing. But, as my labels list continued to grow, I needed to take action.

I tried CumulusBlog and Hackosphere’s hacks, and tried tweaking them to get something that would just let me do a scrollable list, but theirs weren’t working. Then, via some blog, I came on this page about how to make a scrollable box for a MySpace page.

Works like a charm.

Note: ALWAYS back up your template before doing something like this!

For “labels,” go to “edit HTML.” Click “expand the widgets.” You’ll want to copy everything from the “

” to the “

” and paste that in the “your text” box on that page I linked just above. You’ll also need to know how wide the box needs to be to fit in your sidebar column, and then you’ll need to decide what depth you want it to be. (My sidebar is about 240 pixels wide, and I set the depth at 300 pixels, which displays about 16 label links.)

Don’t worry about the colors or anything else, as Blogger’s codes for the whole sidebar will override that.

Get the new code, paste it in to replace what you just copied from your Blogger template, and save.