Oct 14, 2009

How to really remove the Blogspot Navbar

The Blogspot Navbar is meant to provide some functionality to the Blogspot users, but let's face it: we don't want it there. It was probably placed at the top of all these blogs for people that don't want to read something in particular and are just browsing. And even if it can bring new users to your blog (very few indeed), it can also take users away. That, added with the fact that it just looks bad, forces many Blogspot blogs to remove it. And here are the ways you can do that.

The "hidden" way

Using this method you are not really removing the Navbar, but you are hiding it so people visiting your blog won't see it. What this involves is adding a CSS rule at the top of your CSS. Here's how to do it: on your blog's Dashboard, go to "Layout" and then to "Edit HTML". Scroll to the beginning of your CSS and on a new line, immediately after 

 <b:skin><![CDATA[
write the following: 
#navbar{display: none;}

The Navbar will still be loaded, but it will not be displayed. If you look at the source of your page you will notice that it is still there. I didn't like that so fortunately there is another way.

The better way

I believe this method to be a little better because the code for the Navbar is not loaded anymore. Using this little hack, the template engine will understand that you want to remove it, and will even ask for confirmation. Here's what you need to do: go to Layout and Edit HTML again. Scroll down to your closing 

</head>
tag and just before that, on a new line paste the following: 
<!-- </head><body> -->

When you click "Save Template" you will be asked to confirm if you want to remove the "Navbar1" widget. Click on the orange "Confirm & Save" button and that's it. If you look at the source of your page now, you will notice that the Navbar is really gone, not just hidden. Well actually something still remains, but it's just a comment line that is completely harmless. This is the line that actually tells the template engine to display the Navbar. The reason you don't see it when you edit your layout is because it gets added later and this way you "trick" it into getting loaded into an HTML comment. Because of that it won't be parsed, hence it won't be loaded.

And that was my quick "how to" for removing the Blogspot Navbar. I hope someone finds this useful.

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1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you!
It eliminate 4 errors!

December 6, 2009 at 10:41 PM

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