2 My issues with the Blogger Nav-Bar
Tuesday, October 30, 2007 /

Although many Blogger's prefer to hide the nav-bar, I have kept mine in place for two main reasons:

  1. I blog about Blogger, and the nav-bar is a clear indication that my blogs are powered by Blogger.

  2. I find it very useful to have the "New post", "Customize" and "Dashboard" links available when editing my blogs.

Today I did a little experiment with the nav-bar, and now I'm seriously wondering whether this feature should be installed on any blog at all...






The Blogger nav-bar gives readers the option to view random blogs by clicking on the "next blog" link. In theory, this would be a great way to read the blogs of others, perhaps to discover a blogging treasure you may not otherwise have seen. So as a little experiment, I decided to flick through a few random blogs in this manner and greet some of the other bloggers I encountered.

However, I was rather disappointed (and somewhat shocked) to find that over half of the blogs I encountered were "adult" themed blogs. By this, I'm sure you'll understand the type of content I mean...

I consider myself to be open minded, and if people do want to publish adult content then that's up to them.

BUT:

  • Anyone above the age of thirteen can create a blog, and there are no age restrictions on who can read a blog. So what is there to protect children from seeing this type of content?

  • I don't want my blogs to be associated with spam/pornography! As I'm sure no other decent blogger does either!

Sure we can flag a blog to tell Blogger about the objectionable content we find, but what real difference will this make, unless Blogger can employ thousands to hunt down each and every splog to restrict the content?

Hide the nav-bar?

As I explained in this post, Blogger does not explicitly demand that its users retain the nav-bar. Indeed, when Ankit questioned the legality of hiding the Blogger nav-bar, he was told there there are no restrictions on doing this.

While I have the option of hiding the nav-bar, I wish there were no need to do this, as there are still benefits of using this. It would be far preferable if Blogger could offer the option not to include the "next blog" link, or provide optional restrictions of what can be accessed in the same manner as a Google "safe" search.

I would love to read your opinions on this issue, so please leave your comments below. For those of you who wish to restrict the content which can be accessed from your blogs, here is a working method to hide the Blogger nav-bar.

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2 comments:

February 11, 2009 at 8:33 AM hendry said...

thank your tips..I use your idea, but there way simple use this code:
#navbar-iframe {display:none !important;}

put above >>
/* Variable definitions
navbar disable..This way from my friend.thank

February 18, 2009 at 11:11 PM Tryndakai said...

Me, I want to know how to basically re-create all the links in the blogger navbar, so I can put them in my own custom navigation menu (minus the "next blog" link). The part I don't know how to do is make a link that will take each user to his/her own dashboard, for example, when they click it--rather than just hyperlinking to my own, or something, which is all I know how to do at this point.

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