Add a Google Blogger Gadget to Your Mom Blog

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

Blogger gadgets work like WordPress widgets. In fact, gadgets are also sometimes called widgets on Blogger. You can add gadgets in your header, sidebar, and footer. Gadgets can appear in many different places on your Blogger template, not just your sidebar.

Blogger offers quite a few kinds of gadgets, including

Standard blogging features: These include such niceties as a search box, list of popular posts, list of followers, and pictures and links to your feeds.
Advertising options: AdSense ads and Amazon affiliate ads (you will need to apply to their programs first).
Social networking features: Share your Flickr photos, Twitter tweets, and Facebook account.
Custom: Just like with WordPress, you can add your own text or HTML to a custom gadget and add it to any place you would put a gadget.

Most gadgets are very easy to set up, and can be dragged and dropped to rearrange as necessary. The following steps show you how to set up the Search Box gadget:

On your Blogger Dashboard, click the Design link.
Click the Add a Gadget link in the position you want the gadget to appear.

A pop-up window appears with a list of gadgets to select from.
Scroll until you see the gadget you want, and click the plus sign to the right of it.
Configure your gadget as desired; click the Save button when you’re done.

For the Search Box gadget, the default title says Search this Blog in the provided text field. You can leave it blank, but it’s best to make it clear that this is a way that readers can search your blog.

The Search Box gadget provides the option to allow your readers to search just your blog, the pages that you’ve linked to in the past, your blog list, your link list, or the entire web. My personal preference is to keep the search box just for blog content. If your readers want to search the web, they can use their favorite search engines to do that.

You can test out how the search box works by typing in a word under the Preview heading and clicking the Search button. This only works if you have blog posts already written that you can search.