Hiding the space where the navBar used to be

This article shows how to remove the space that is left when Blogger's top-of-screen navigation bar display is turned off.

Removing the navBar is one of the long-standing tweaks that blogger users have been making ever since layout templates were introduced.

It caused a bit of heartache in the early days, because there were suggestions that perhaps doing so violated Blogger's Terms-and-conditions.

And the navBar is still the home of some tools that people do think are useful, including the report abuse link.


But it looks like Blogger themselves have finally settled the arguments.  They've adding an option to off turn the nav-bar to the from the Layout > Navbar - edit tab.

1. Choose the Off option
2. Click Save.
3. Click Save arrangement (top right)

(Granted they did hid the option at the very bottom of the list, and as far as I know they didn't mention it on any of the new features announcements.   But it is there, so it must be ok to use.)

Note: If you have already applied the original remove-the-navBar tweak, then your option button will be whatever it was before, even though your navBar isn't showing.

What your readers will see

If the navBar is turned off, then your blog will be drawn on the screen in the usual way, except that the space where the navBar was will be filled with a solid line in your background colour.

At least some of your readers (eg ones who use a netbook or other smaller screen quite often) will regard this as a waste of valuable screen space.

How to remove the gap where the navbar used to be

You can move the header up to cover over the area where the nav-bar was by adding a CSS rule to your template in the normal way.

The rule to add is:

#navbar { height: 0px; visibility: hidden; display: none;}

Apply that, and the space that the nav-bar was in will simply close up, so the rest of the content is a little closer to the top of the screen.

Is it a good idea to get rid of the navBar?

"Just because you can, doesn't mean you should"

I explained what features the navBar offers in my initial article about how to remove it.  I still think that there's no hard-and-fast rule about whether to keep it. It seems to me that the navBar is:

• Particularly useful to readers who use blogger themselves
• Handy for those readers who have Google accounts themselves, and understand the benefits of being logged in while browsing
• Confusing and annoying for the rest of your readers
• A Very Bad Thing(tm!) if you're trying to hide the fact that your website is built using Blogger.

What do you think:

Will removing the navbar make your blog better?

Are there any blogging friends who you should share this tip with now, because it will definitely make their blog look better?

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Related Articles:

How to add a CSS-rule to your template

The original hack for removing the navBar from your blog

Custom, layout, designer and dynamic templates - understanding which is which.

Understanding Google accounts.

Blogger and Analytics adjusted-bounce-rate

I've had interesting discussions with people about whether the bounce-rate in Google Analytics is worthwhile: one of my sites has information about local bus routes and neighbourhoods, and many visitors only need to look at one page (the one suggested by Google search) to get the information they need.  I've long believed that these people counted as a "bounce" (ie look at a page and leave), while friends assured me that Google is smarter than that and wouldn't count visits that last for a certain length of time as bounces.

I've just discovered that I was right after all: by default, Analytics counts all one-page-only visitors as bounces.

Google have now told us how to change this, and not count visitors as bounces if they stay on the site for a certain length of time (we can choose how long)

Unfortunately this option isn't fully available to Blogger users at the moment. We can either


1)  Install Analytics in a way that it works properly with dynamic and mobile templates,

Thsi approach will most likely be supported if Blogger invent any other types of templates in the future, so is what I recommend now.  GreenLava explains how to do this here. 


OR


2) Install the Analytics code in the same way it gets put into other websites.

This won't count visitors who view the blog using a dynamic template (either because you choose one or because they added a command to your URL in order to see your blog that way).
And if you have enabled a mobile template, it will only count visitors using mobile devices if you have:

• Installed the Analytics code using an HTML/Javascript gadget (I've explaiend how to do this here)
• Edited your template so that gadget is "shown" on mobile templates (by default, HTML/Javascript gadgets aren't - I've explained how to change this near the end of this article)

So at the moment, our options for Blogger are to either count visitors properly and not see the adjusted bounce-rate, or undercount the visitors but get the custom-adjusted bounce rate.

Have all your posts been added to Google search results yet?

How can you tell if Google has indexed your blog - or if it's indexed all your posts.

The quick way is to search for site:YOUR-BLOG-NAME and see how many results are returned.   If it's roughly the same as your number of published posts, then you're about right.   But what if it's not?

For example, if I google

site:blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com

I get

About 385 results (0.26 seconds)

However I've only 226 published posts in blogger-hints-and-tips.   That tells me there's a problem with content being indexed more than once.   Looking at the results, I can see the problem immediately:  my dynamic-views have been indexed (goodness only knows why) - but also, my archive pages appear to have been indexed.  

For a more in-depth analysis, though, Webmaster Tools now has an Index Status feature, which is particularly useful if there are less pages indexed than published posts, because it shows you if it's always been like that, or if there has been a change at some time which led to a lot of your posts being removed from Google's index.

To use it:

• Log in to Webmaster tools with the Google account that has administrator rights to the blog. 

• If you haven't verified the account before, you may need to do this.
  (Google have said before that blog-owners are automatically verified, but I've found a few times that this hasn't quite worked - I've had to manually verify by installing a meta-tag that they provide)

• Look under the Health tab for Index Status. It shows a graph of the number of pages indexed vs date for (up to) the last year.

Looking at the graph, if:

• the line is flat and you havn't made posts at that time, or
• you have been posting and the line is going upwards,

then it probably means that all your posts are being crawled and indexed (and so can be found in google searches).  

But if there's a different pattern, the advanced tab might be helpful.   It shows:

• the number of pages indexed
• the cumulative number of pages crawled,
• the number of pages that Google knows that it couldn't look at because they are blocked by robots.txt, and
• the number of pages that were not selected for inclusion in search results.

These numbers are point-in-time totals, not numbers of additions.

Note the important difference: the first graph shows pages indexed (ie added to Google). The advanced one shows pages crawled. If Google crawls a page and finds it hasn't changed since last time they looked at it, then they don't bother indexing it again.

If some of your posts aren't in Google anymore, and the graph of pages indexed has a sudden drop, then most likely a change that you made at that time has caused a problem with indexing or includign your results.

Of course just knowing when things happened doesn't tell you why they happened.  In my case, I remember adding the Archive gadget into Blogger-HAT's layout.   Obviously I didn't stop the pages from getting indexed (though it does make me bitter and twisted that Google doesn't just handle this for us!)

What this does point out, though, is that if you're serious about managing your site for maximum searchability (SEO-friendliness), you should keep a note of the date and time of any structural changes you make, so that you can compare this with diagnostic tools and see if there's a link between the changes and changes in your visits, indexing etc.

How to remove the numbers in blogger post URL's

This article looks at the numbers that are in web-page addresses created by Blogger, what they mean and how you can influence them.

When you first publish a post, Blogger assigns a permanent web-address (aka an URL or a permalink) to the post.  I've previously explained how you can control the words used in this hyperlink.

And a common question from people who are researching SEO for their blog is "how do I get rid of the numbers in the post-URL?".

Unfortunately the answer is not as straighforward as most people hope for.

Numbers near the start of Blogger URLS

As described in setting the content of your post's permalink, the URL given to posts publisehd in Blogger shows the year and month of the original publication date for the post. I think this is because Blogger was originally set up as an on-line diary, with a lot of the features organised around the post-date.

Today, there are ways of giving your blog a home page, showing your posts in pages, and changing the order of the posts, which let your blog be a lot more than a date-ordered web-log.

Some blogging software (eg Wordpress) lets you choose the structure of the URLs which are used, eg leaving the date out totally, or puting it after the words.

However Blogger does not currently have any way to remove the date-part of the post URLs. And I could be wrong, but my best guess is that this will not change anytime soon.

So what options are available:

If you just don't want people to know the correct month and year of the post, then you can change the date before you publish the post for the the first time. Maybe make it something non-sensical (eg 1/1/1990). (However do remember that your RSS feed will show the actual date of publication, not the assigned date).

If you have some content where any month-and-year are particularly irrelevant, put it into a Page instead of a Post - because Page URLs don't contain a date. Remember that each blog can have no more than 20 pages, and that you need to give users a way to get to these Pages. Also remember that they are not sent out in your RSS feed, so subscribers won't see the content.

The third - and least attractive - option:  accept that this is how Blogger works and that you need to live with it or switch to another blogging tool.

Numbers near the end of Blogger URLS

Blogger puts digits at the end of post-URLs to make sure that each post ever published has a unique address.

Notice that I said "ever published": if you publish a post, then delete it, and then publish a second post with the same year, month and either title or customized-URL-words, then the second post's URL will have some digits put on the end, to stop it being the same as the first one.

Once a post is published, you cannot remove the digits. The only way to avoid them is to make sure that your post-URLs are unique. So if you publish a post and notice that it has digits on the end of the URL, your only option is to delete that post, and replace it with one which has a different publication date (don't forget to copy the post contents before you delete it!)

For example, if you publish and find that you get

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-07/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes01.html

you may want to delete the post, and republish the content in a post with a different date like

www.all-about-cats.com/2012-06/vegetarian-cat-food-recipes.html

Does it really matter?

Personally I'm not convinced that having numbers Blogger URL's is a problem.

If the content is so weak, and poorly linked to by other sites and social media that the presence of numbers in the URL is affecting visitor numbers, then it seems to me that there are more important things for you to be worrying about.

On the other hand, if your blog is already popular and well-optimized, and you're looking to get the last possible bit of SEO benefit - you'd be better off using your time to write even more good quanlity, unique, content so that your exisiting subscribers visit more often, instead of fussing over something that you cannot control.

Or am I mistaken?

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Related Articles:

Setting the custom-URL for a blog post

Giving your blog a home page

Putting Blogger posts into pages

How to set the date for a post

The difference between Posts and Pages

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Removing a post from your blog

Copy the contents between blog posts - and keep all the formatting.

How to set the URL for Blogger posts

This article shows how to use the Permalink options to control the URL used for a post in your blog.

URLs and Blog Posts

When you first publish a post in blogger, an URL (called a permalink in blogger) is automatically generated for that post. It looks like:

www.yourDomain/yyyy/mm/WORDS-ABOUT-MY-POST

In this URL:

• yourDomain is either your custom domain (eg fred-fish.com) or your blogspot domain if you aren't using a custom domain at the time (eg www.blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com)
• yyyy/mm is the year and month of the post's original publication date.

Until now, Blogger chose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-MY based on the title, or the first words in the post if the title was blank. They used some rules eg leaving out "the" and other common words, and putting numbers on the end so that every post has a unique URL (called a "permalink" in Blogger).

However Blogger have now provided a tool that lets you choose the WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST separately from the post-title.

How to change the customisable part of the URL for a post

1  Edit the post in the usual way.

2  In the Post Settings area (currently at the right hand side of the editor), there is a section called Permalink.

3   Click on Permalink to show the options in it.

4   Click the custom URL radio button

5   Type the words that you want to use in WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-POST into the Custom URL box

6   Click Done.

7   Finish the post, and Publish it.

Restrictions:

This is a one-time option for each post - you if you use the wrong words, or make spelling mistake, then there is no way to change it.

The only characters you can use are:

• lowercase letters (ie a, b, c ... z)
• uppercase letters (ie A, B, C ... Z)
• digits (ie 0, 1, 2 ... 9)
• underscore (ie _)
• dash (ie - )
• full-stop, also known as a period (ie .)

It looks like there is no restriction on the number of characters you can put into the URL.  For example, I was just able to make a post in my test blog, with this URL:  
http://bhat-draftarticlestore.blogspot.ie/2012/07/123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-123456789-.html
(you cannot see the post, because that particular blog isn't open for public reading.)


If the combinaton of yyyy-mm from post-date (which you can change - see Setting the Post Date) and WORDS-ABOUT-YOUR-BLOG is not unique, Blogger will leave out the last character(s), and put in numbers to make it unique.

It only applies to Posts, not Pages:  the only way to influence the URL / permalink for a Page on your blog is to choose the initial words in the page-title very carefully.   (Ref:  the difference between Posts and Pages)

Why should you bother? What words should you use?

Firstly, it's only worth changing the custom words in your post-URL  if SEO matters for your blog.

If you think the change is worth it, then you need to think about what specific words
1) accurately reflect the content of your blog, and
2) are likely to be the words that people search for.

Unless you're a spammer, there is no point in making your post url www.myBlog/2012-07/hot-and-sexy-topic if your post doesn't have any content about hot-and-sexy-topic. (And if you are a spammer, you may as well leave Blogger now, before you get kicked off anyway.)

Leave out smaller filler words like "the" "a" "and" - unless they are relevant to the post-contents. For example include "the Who" if your post is about the band called The Who, but leave it out if your post is about the cats who can fly.

Lastly, many SEO experts (self-proclaimed and otherwise) say that dashes are better than dots or underscores. Only Google and Bing know if they'are correct or not. But it's probably a good idea to use xxx-yy-aaaa instead of xxx_yy_aaaa or xxx.yy.aaaa, just in case they are.

Changing the post-title after publication

Google's help-article about the custom-permalink feature says:

"because Blogger automatically creates the URL from information from your post title, your URL would change should you decide to edit the title. This would result in broken links, and fewer visitors to your blog"

This isn't the way Blogger worked before: until now, I often published a post with one title using the words I wanted in the URL, and then very quickly edit it and change the title to the words I wanted in the title. For example, for a recent post

• the URL is  http://blogger-hints-and-tips.blogspot.com/2012/07/html-code-for-popular-gadgets-in.html
• the post-title is now:  Where to get the HTML code for popular gadgets in Blogger

I just tried this again in my test-blog, and found that it's still true: even if you change the title, the post URL doesn't change.

Changing the custom-URL words after publication

After you have hit the Publish button for the first time, there is no way change the permalink:  if you click on the Permalink option in Post Settings, you are shown the custom value that you chose, but you cannot change it.

Your only option in this case is to:

• move the post-contents to another new post, 
• set the custom-URL that you want for the new post
• delete the original post.

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Related Articles:

How to change the date for a post

What is RSS and why it matters for bloggers

Use a private blog to get your posts right before publish them

Linking your blog and the social networks

Moving material from one blog post to another

Stop AdSense showing you the ads you hate the most

A year ago, I planned a trip to New Zealand. I Googled "NZ camper vans" and similar things a few times, found a company and had a great trip (thanks, Jucy Vans)

For about three months after I got back, Google remembered that I'd looked for this and kept showing me ads from other van-hire companies. Not only were they irrelevant (since I wasn't looking for a hire-van anymore), they really reminded me that I in the office on the other side of the world in wintertime, instead of on the beach in the sun at home. This didn't exactly generate warm-fuzzy feelings towards the advertiser (NZ Van Hire, I hate you with a passion .. and you didn't even do anything!)

This was a lose-lose-lose-lost situation:

• The advertiser was wasting ad-impressions showing me ads even though I was no longer in the market to hire a camper-van. And they really annoyed me to the extent that they're unlikly to get my business next time I go home, because I've linked their brand to negaive feelings.
• The publisher - was wasting valuable screen-space showing me ads that there was no chance I would click - so they lost potential income.
• Google: there was no chance that I'd click those ads for something I didn't want any more, so they didn't get a cut of the revenue either.

To help address this, Google are introducing a “mute this ad” icon on AdSense ads. This will let us tell Google which ads we don't want to see.

How will it work:

• A small [x] will be put in the corner of some display ads on the Google Display Network.
• When a website-visitor clicks the [x], sees confirmation page shows, explaining that the advertisement has been "muted", and linking to the Ad Preferences Manager. And after that, ads from that campaign aren't shown to that person in future.

This is being rolled-out over the next few weeks, and won't be applied to all ads to start with. (And I'm describing it based on Google's description - haven't actually seen it myself yet.)

It's not a guarantee you won’t see that ad again -- the ad could be shown by a different company or in a separate campaign. But it's a start.

Google Video being retired - impact for Blogger?

If you upload a video through the icon in Blogger's Post Editor, it is stored in Google Videos - and AFAIK the only way to access it is via Blogger.

Google have now announced that :

Later this summer [August 2012], all remaining hosted video on Google Video will be moved to YouTube. Google Video stopped taking uploads in May 2009 and now we’re moving the remaining hosted content to YouTube as private videos.

You can manage the videos uploaded to Google Video using http://www.google.com/video/upload/Status

Consequences:

My first thought was that if you have a blog with videos uploaded before the Post-editor switched over to use <<whatever else>> for videos, then these will stop working, because the location will be incorrect when your videos are migrated.

But some initial testing makes me think this isn't right,  I just tried loading this video to a test blog.

Looking at the Google Videos status page referred to in the article didn't show it - or any videos, even though I know there are a few on my travel blog from 2007. Examining the HTML behind the post didn't give any clues, it just looks like this:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <object class="BLOG_video_class" contentid="4b6e060e39565a4a" height="266" id="BLOG_video-4b6e060e39565a4a" width="320"></object></div>

But then I viewed the page and examined the source.   It has gems like this:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><object width="320" height="266" class="BLOG_video_class" id="BLOG_video-4b6e060e39565a4a" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/get_player"> <param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"> <param name="flashvars" value="flvurl=http://redirector.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?id%3D4b6e060e39565a4a%26itag%3D5%26source%3Dblogger%26app%3Dblogger%26cmo%3Dsensitive_content%253Dyes%26ip%3D0.0.0.0%26ipbits%3D0%26expire%3D1343576696%26sparams%3Did,itag,source,ip,ipbits,expire%26signature%3D81F0B23AAD667B6DFA253D870F9291421C511D1.14E0BA9FA0741AD193482CC06CEA121F670BDBE%26key%3Dck1&amp;iurl=http://video.google.com/ThumbnailServer2?app%3Dblogger%26contentid%3D4b6e060e39565a4a%26offsetms%3D5000%26itag%3Dw160%26sigh%3Djlmosd6i-dm_mUe5oOEcYFhrGm4&amp;autoplay=0&amp;ps=blogger"> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/get_player" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="320" height="266" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashvars="flvurl=http://redirector.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?id%3D4b6e060e39565a4a%26itag%3D5%26source%3Dblogger%26app%3Dblogger%26cmo%3Dsensitive_content%253Dyes%26ip%3D0.0.0.0%26ipbits%3D0%26expire%3D1343576696%26sparams%3Did,itag,source,ip,ipbits,expire%26signature%3D81F0B23AAD667B6DFA253D870F9291421C511D1.14E0BA9FA0741AD193482CC06CEA121F670BDBE%26key%3Dck1&iurl=http://video.google.com/ThumbnailServer2?app%3Dblogger%26contentid%3D4b6e060e39565a4a%26offsetms%3D5000%26itag%3Dw160%26sigh%3Djlmosd6i-dm_mUe5oOEcYFhrGm4&autoplay=0&ps=blogger" allowFullScreen="true" /></object> <a href="rtsp://v4.cache5.googlevideo.com/ChoLENy73wIaEQlKWlY5DgZuSxMYDSANFEgDDA==/0/0/0/video.3gp" type="video/3gpp"><img width="320" height="266" alt="video" src="http://video.google.com/ThumbnailServer2?app=blogger&amp;contentid=4b6e060e39565a4a&amp;offsetms=5000&amp;itag=w160&amp;sigh=jlmosd6i-dm_mUe5oOEcYFhrGm4" class="BLOG_mobile_video_class" id="BLOG_mobile_video-4b6e060e39565a4a"></a></div The bit I've put in bold ( flvurl=http://redirector.googlevideo.com/videoplayback  ) makes me think that they've coded around this, so (a bit like Friend Connect) Blogger users are the one exception to the "Google Video is bring turned off" rule, and that we don't have to worry about suddenly losing videos from pre 2009.   I'd like a bit more detail though, since this issue isn't covered in the Google announcement at all. Fingers crossed it all works ok. I'm very interested in hearing about any more research / answers you find about this change.  You know where the comment form is, please use it and share what you know! One last thought:

Videos that you added to Google Videos yourself

If you do have videos on your blog that you manually loaded to Google Videos and then put into your blog, you  can either:

• Download them yourself, move them to a new location in YouTube, and edit your blog-post to use this new location, OR
• Wait for Google to move the videos, then go into YouTube and make them public (not private), and then edit your blog-post to point to the new location.

That said, if you happen to have transferred ownership of your blog from another account to yours, and you no longer have access to that other Google account, then you have a problem: You cannot access them now through the link (becasue it's not your current account that owns them), and they will be transferred to YouTube as private videos under that other account: you will still have no way to access them, and the link will change.

The only option would be to somehow make a copy of the video using the existing vid in Google Videos via your blog - and do it before 20 August. Good luck.

Where to get the HTML code for popular gadgets in Blogger

This article explains where to find alternative code for many of the gadgets provided by Blogger - and why you might want to do this, and how to back up your HTML gadgets.

Gadgets in Blogger

Blogger makes it  easy to add a gadget to your blog: you pick the one you want from a list, enter the details on the gadet-options screen, click ok and save. Voila, a gadget doing "just what you want" appears where you put it.

But there are some issues with this simple process.

1  Controlling (and even knowing) what the code does

You don't control what the code does - and you can't even see it, so you have to believe that it does what it says it will do, and nothing else.

For many people this seems obvious:  of course a gadget will do what it promises, or people won't use it.   But maybe it does what it promises and more, eg if you use the poll-gadget, the results are shown on your blog. But does Google keep a record of them anywhere else?    You can't tell, because you cannot see the code behind the gadget.

2  No more customisations

You can only customize the gadget using the options in the gadget screen - and sometimes these are limited or out-dated..   For example, if you have signed up with Adsense and use the AdSense gadgets, then there is no way to restrict them to only show image ads, even though the option is available in AdSense itself. And you can only choose from the limited the ad-unit sizes and colour-schemes availabel in Blogger

3  Keeping a backup copy

You can't back up the "widget settings" that you put into the gadget-options, besides manually writing a note to yourself or taking a screen shot.

Is there a way around these issues?

The answer to these issues is to not use the gadgets that Blogger provides.   Instead, replace them with the HTML code for the gadget which you need to "find somewhere", and install it into your blog as code.   (And if you install it into a HTML/Javascript gadget, make sure you keep a backup copy in a documentation blog or similar).

This table lists places where you can get HTML/Javascript code equivalents for many of the popular Blogger gadgets.  In general, this code is not restricted to Blogger - it can be installed into any blog or website that accepts HTML / Javascript gadgets.

Gadget	Where to get the code?
Any of the AdSense gadgets	Log in to your AdSense account at www.adsense.google.com, and get the code from there in the usual way.
The Amazon Affiliates / Associates gadgets	See Amazon/Blogger integration is finished - what are our options now for information about these
Search	Use a Google Custom Search engine
Translate	Go to  https://translate.google.com/manager/add, enter your website name and the language it is in.   Then on the next screen, choose the options you want (all languages vs specific ones), and press Get Code. You are given a meta-tag to add to your blog in the usual way for adding meta-tags, and some HTML/Javascript which you add in the usual way for code.
Labels	You can build your own linked list (see below) and put the label-search value into them (eg  http://YOUR-URL/search/label/LABEL-VALUE).  This isn't quite the same, because it doesn't give a count of posts by label, but may be good-enough for some cases
Link List - and Unlinked list.	Make your own, by using the post-editor to make the code, and creating a linked-list there.
Google Plus	Get code for a range of gadgets from http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/
Offering an RSS subscription to your blog	See offering an RSS-subscription service, using Feedburner.
Follow-by-email	See Offering an email-subscription to your blog, using Feedburner
Recent Posts	If you have used Feedburner to make an RSS-Subscription option (see above), then you can also get the code for a Recent-posts gadget from Feedburner:  go into the Publicize tab, choose BuzzBoost.  Choose the settings, Save, and Feedburner gives you the HTML code  to display your feed.
RSS	Make an RSS feed for the site you want to display, then use Feedburner's BuzzBoost tool to get the code to display the feed.
About Me	Make your own, by using the post-editor to make the code eg you might like to include a picture etc. Or you can just type the plain text into the Contents field of an HTML/Javascript gadget if you won't want any formattting or links
Archive	I haventt been able to find any way to do this - apart from making your own in a page and linking to it.
Picture	See getting the HTML-code to put a picture into your blog

I'm sure that there are others too - what gadgets would you like to find the code for?  Drop a comment below, and I'll see what I can find.

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