Share Posts from your Blogger NavBar

I guess most of you have removed the NavBar from your Blogger Template if you are using some custom versions of the template for your blog. Well, its now time to get back the NavBar again in your template. But not really if you don’t like to use this new feature of Blogger, which allows you to share posts directly from the NavBar. NavBar of the Blogger starting from august 27, 09, includes a “SHARE” button. This button will help you to share posts to popular social networking sites and even e-mail them directly. Social Networking sites have been really popular and a lot many people use those medium to gain readers by sharing posts on such sites. Social Bookmarking widgets are really popular in the blogosphere and now it seems easier when the blogger itself comes with idea of including that in its NavBar. And I know many of you don’t like this blogger’s idea of feature being introduced in the NavBar. Anyway, you can learn how to use this feature and things you can do with it in this post.

To use this feature it’s essential that you have the NavBar in your Template. Don’t worry if you have removed the NavBar already but still interested in this feature, here is how you can add the NavBar again.

1. From your Blogger Dashboard go to Layout > Edit HTML.
2. In most of your templates, the Blogger Navbar is not displayed just because it’s hidden. Now search for this code within your Template

3. Delete this code from your template and now Blogger NavBar should be appearing in your template.
OK if you now have the Blogger NavBar in your template, you can see the “Share” button yourself in your blog.
Now if you want to use this feature, you need to click on that “share Button”, a pop-up menu appears with links to popular networking (sharing) sites “Facebook” and “Twitter” and also the “Google Reader”. (see the Image Below). If you happen to use this feature on the item pages of your blog, you shall gain access to the “Email” feature too.

If you use this New feature of Blogger there’s a hack you can try. The blogger buzz notes the hack as
“Here’s a fun hack: each URL that gets shared has a specific parameter appended (?spref=nn, where fb=Facebook, tw=Twitter, and gr=Google Reader). If you’re using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your blog, you can search for those strings to see how much traffic you’re getting from each source.” Via Blogger Buzz

This is one more feature announced from Blogger as a part of its 10th Birthday. It’s really good to see ongoing improvements in Blogger with often addition of new features. Frankly this feature is not great though. At least, not for users like us who choose to hide the Blog NavBar. But in case if this feature persuades you to keep the NavBar back, then its sure going to be of your benefit. Or for users who are displaying the NavBar, this is sure going to be an additional important feature for their blog.

Did you really find this feature useful? What could have been done to make it more useful? Or did this feature really persuade you to keep the NavBar back for your blog? Let us know by adding comments in the box below.