Lesson # 11 – Aspirin for Two Widget Headaches

If  you bring up your blog, and compare Blogrolls in yours and mine, you can see you have more categories.  I suggest you look at them and get ready to delete those you don’t want (you can always change back later).  How to delete them?   Well, one would think you would go to the Links (Blogroll) category that you dragged into the Primary Widget Area and delete what you don’t want…….but even though that would make sense, it doesn’t work that way.

Instead, you look at the laundry list of stuff beneath the Dashboard to your left and click that Links.  There you will see a list of URLs your blog is linked to, including all of those included in your Blogroll.  So, look for the ones you want to delete (categories, like Blogroll, are also shown which might help if your memory is bad like mine).  If you hover over the link name, you’ll see choices, and one of them is Delete.  Press that for each link you want to break and they will no longer appear in your Blogroll.

So, that’s one headache avoided, I hope.  Now you know a little about reconfiguring a category, what if you want to create a new category, like I have with:  Example Blogs? Well, essentially you want to create a new Widget, but the road to doing that lies through the same Links we went to for Blogroll deletions, not in the Widget area.

Hover over Links and then click Link Categories.  Once there, you’ll see:  Add New Link Category.  Below that type in the name of your category (Examples Blogs, or whatever) and click Add New Link Category.  You will see it pop up amidst the other categories.   And this is where it could get confusing, as you have not finished activating that Widget yet.  Note to the far right of it, no links are listed:   The category will not appear on the side bar on the front side UNTIL YOU CREATE A LINK TO SOMETHING.

Soooo……  Go back to Links, but this time click Add New, and you will see a box at the top to add the name of the Link, e. g. Kyle’s Blog, and a little below that a box to type in the URL.   There’s a whole lot of other stuff on that page, but you don’t need it right now, so just go to your right and click Add Link.  Now your category and link should appear on the front side.   To quickly view it, hover over the new category and click View and it takes you to the front side.  Part of the headache you just avoided was not realizing you needed to link your new category (e. g. Example Blogs) to an URL before anything would appear on the front side/side bar.

And now that you have created your own category, you could create more.  And now that you know how to delete parts of a given Widget, like Blogroll, you can delete parts of other widgets automatically constructed by the theme template.  Or you could delete any or all of the automatic widgets and activate or build others.