Awesome TypePad Hack: Dropdown Menus for Archives

Okay, okay, I know, make up my damn mind eh? First I took the archive links away to save space. Then I saw my pageviews drop almost 50% because people actually use the archive links to find stuff. So I put a big, obvious link to them right under Elena's Spanking Gallery pic. Yup, immediate transition back to people reading the older posts.

But then, purely through blind luck (also known as pestering the TypePad techs to send you links to every hack they know) I found instructions to create drop down menu links for archives. YES! Not only does it save room and make finding stuff easier, but it solves a problem I had last year when one of my older blogs passed the ten month mark: the standard TypePad list for archives is limited to displaying only ten months. So now we have beautiful menus to make stuff easy to find.

If your blog is on TypePad and you want to do the same thing, I've posted the code to do it in the extended entry. It's the same as what you see in the link above except for a couple container tags that aren't mentioned in the original source.

To Make drop down archive menus follow these steps. You must have a TypePad Pro account and be using advanced templates in order to make tihs work.

1. Go to your design tab for the blog you want to change.
2. Click the template for your sidebar, probably named sidebar1 or sidebar2.
3. Copy your existing code and paste it into a text document in case you make a mistake and need to start from scratch.
4. find the typelist are in which you want to insert your archives. It will look something like this:
    <!--#include virtual="/lists/buy_badass_paddles/module.inc"-->
5. Insert the follwing code, verbatim:

        <div class="module-content">
            <ul class="module-list">
<form>
<select style="width:150px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 5px; font-family: verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;" onChange="document.location=options[selectedIndex].value;">
<option value="">archives by month</option>
<MTArchiveList archive_type="Monthly">
<option value="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveTitle$></option>
</MTArchiveList>
</select>

<select style="width:150px; margin: 0px 0px 10px 5px; font-family: verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;" onChange="document.location=options[selectedIndex].value;">
<option value="">archives by category</option>
<MTArchiveList archive_type="Category">
<option value="<$MTArchiveLink$>"><$MTArchiveTitle$> (<$MTArchiveCount$>)</option>
</MTArchiveList>
</select>
</form>
            </ul>
        </div>

6. click "save" then "publish."
7. Reload your blog. You should now have menus. Yay!

If this fails, or totally hoses your blog, please email TypePad's tech support dept for help, not me. They'll be able to view what you're doing from their end, where I would only be guessing.

Comments

[Colleen]

Glad you found the code for this :) I wrote that post long before I was in TypePad support so the instructions aren't very well written. It's on our to-do list for things to add to the Knowledge Base, so keep an eye on the KB for new articles :)

[BadAss]

Hi Colleen,

Wow, that's really cool that you stopped by to leave a comment. Quick, too!

Thanks for posting the code on your blog… it was a *really* useful hack for me. Saved a lot of room without sacrificing function.

And I learned some other cool stuff in the process of making a hash of applying it to one of my other blogs, so that was good too (actually).