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Thanks to the new upgrade, blogger finally gets Category option to its bloggers in its both newer and classic versions. I know there are a lot of new features, including this Category one, in the newer blogger, but I still like the classic version because of my FTP setup. So how to create a sidebar with Categories Links is a task of my own instead of waiting for blogger to upgrade its classic version again.

First of all, I really do not want to spend too much digging into the code to put dynamic category sidebar like the new version of blogger. Fortunately I do not have many changing categories for my blog. So a very dumb, simple but effective sidebar was created with the following steps.

1), Log onto your blogger account, and select Template from the dashboard.

2), In the Edit HTML tab, locate where you want to put your Category sidebar. Usually it will between <!-- Begin #sidebar --> <div id="sidebar"> and <!-- Begin #sidebar --> <div id="sidebar"> tags depends on your blog template and your favorite.

3), Add your side bar code here like the following

<!-- Begin #categories-container -->

<div id="categories-container">
<h2 class=”sidebar-title”>Category</h2>
<ul class=”profile-datablock”>
<li class=”categories-link”><a href=”/labels/5Y2a5a6i6L2v5Lu2.html”>Web Design</a></li>
<!-- other category labels here -->
</ul>
</div>

<!-- End #categories -->

Here the label link above (in red color) should reflect your own link. How to find out such link? Simple, just open your own blog, and copy the link location for your each label/category which is in the end of your each post.

4) , To make your category sidebar more attractive, just edit your CSS or in-line style for your categories-container class.

5), Save and Publish, then you are done.

Last but not least, if you add new label in your blog, just repeat what you have done above, and re-publish you will be fine.

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