How to Add a Gadget to a Blogger Blog

While trying to help several people get used to using Blogger, I've been distressed to realize the help page doesn't have much information about Blogger's Add a Gadget tool. Maybe the developers thought it was such an intuitive thing that nobody would need to be told? It might have seems like that to them, but if you're like me you had to just stumble upon it by accident, and simply try it out to see how it worked. That's fine for some people, but many others like the security of having instructions before they start poking around in the underpinnings of their blog.

To find the Add a Gadget tool, you go to the Layout tab of your blog's Dashboard. There are several links to Add a Gadget in different parts of the page diagram. Just pick one, and click it. This window will open in a popup (assuming you have not disabled popups in your browser. If you have, change your preferences to allow popups in your own blog using your browser's "exceptions" tool.)



If the gadget you want to add isn't available as a preset on the tool, you can use the HTML/Javascript button to cut and paste code you've obtained from another website.

It really is intuitive, but you do have to know where to look to get started!

Preferred Blogger Gadget Adding

I've realized, after using this blog site for a bit of testing, that the preferred method of adding "gadgets" or "widgets" to a blog here is to use the Layout tool. I'd been simply inserting the code created by various counters directly into the template's HTML, but as seen when I changed templates and lost my changes, that's not a great idea. Using the lovely tools Blogger/Google provide not only makes it a bit easier -- there's no need to scroll though all that code to find what you hope is the right place to insert it -- but might also preserve such add-ons even if the template is changed. This is really a pretty good blogging software. I've been using WordPress on my own websites for a long time, but Blogger is really easy to customize. I like 'em both.

Another one that works

This is the counter my friend used: BlogCounter. I'm not sure why it doesn't work on her site, as it seems to be doing fine here. It's now installed in the sidebar, between the "StatCounter" widget and SiteMeter icon. Guess I need more info from her about how she installed it.

Oops -- /me FAIL

Ouch! I changed the template for this blog, and since the blog counters were in the template file, they went poof with the old template! Back to the counter pages to retrieve the code and try again. The good news is that since the statistics are kept on the counter hosts' sites, I shouldn't have lost any numbers, but if I did it's no big deal. I think I'm the only person who's visited the site so far anyway. But let this be a caution to you -- save a backup of any changes you make to a blog template!

Counter Summary - 2 out of 5

So, of the four free counters I tried out here, two failed on Blogger because of badly formed code, but two worked fine.

The three that failed were from Easy-Hit-Counters, FreeStats.com, and BraveNet, while the ones that worked were from SiteMeter and StatCounter.

One suggested counter from the Blogger Help page that I did not try in this site was from Google Analytics. I didn't try this one because I've been unimpressed with the accuracy of Google Analytics compared to the site logs on some of my other websites.

FreeStats - FAIL

The latest counter I've tried was found at FreeStats.com. Blogger failed to parse this counter's code, too. Blah!

StatCounter - Good!

The code from StatCounter.com works fine, and they had directions explicitly for Blogger/Blogspot, as well as other major blogging software, that made installation very easy. This counter appears as an odometer right under the SiteMeter icon, at the bottom of the left sidebar.

Bravenet counter - FAIL

Another counter suggested in the Blogger Help pages, from BraveNet, requires registration for a very limited free version, or registration plus money for more features. I've already got a BraveNet account from years ago, so I'm signing on with that, but if you don't have one, be aware that signing up will subject you to considerable email from this outfit.

Even with all that, the counter from this site also failed because of invalid XML code.

Easy-Hit-Counter FAIL

The code from Easy-Hit-Counters generates an error on Blogger. Blogger wants valid XHTML, which this code is not.

Site Meter counter

OK, I've successfully added a Site Meter counter to the left sidebar. On to find another one now.

Hello world

This is my first post. I'm trying to set up a site visitor counter, maybe more than one, to see if I can figure out why my friend's counter isn't working.