Filtering Blogger by Label

How do you show only posts with a particular label on your blogger homepage? Read on. What if you want to write a blog with a primarily technical audience, but also want to be able to write complete cruft and not have to bother readers with it? I searched for how to show only posts with a particular label on the home page but the closest thing I found was this post asking how to remove content from the homepage with a particular label. Of course, that post had no responses. So I wrote my own solution, which turned out to be easier than I expected. This could easily work to support inclusive or exclusive filtering. I haven't been able to find much documentation on the markup for Blogger (if you know where it is, please let me know) but I was able to find some documentation in a few blogs such as the excellent Hoctro's Place. That post gave me enough information to put this hack together. The only thing you really need to know is that you can create a 'function' with includable and you can call it with include. From your blog dashboard, click on "Layout" then click on "Edit HTML". Once you have done that, click the "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox. Now you're ready to edit. As always, I recommend making a backup before you get started. First, search for the line that starts with <b:includable id='main' var='top'>. You are going to remove everything in that function between <b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'> and the closing tag with the following:

 <b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
   <b:if cond='data:post.labels'>
     <b:loop values='data:post.labels' var='label'>
       <b:if cond='data:label.name == "main"'>
         <b:include data='post' name='printPosts'/>
       </b:if>
     </b:loop>
   </b:if>
 <b:else/>
   <b:include data='post' name='printPosts'/>
 </b:if>

The above change essentially says the following: if you are on the homepage, and a post has labels, and the post has the "main" label, then call printPosts. Or, if you are not on the homepage, call printPosts. Now search for the close tag of the main function (it looks like </b:includable>) and after it paste the following code:

<b:includable id='printPosts' var='post'>
<b:if cond='data:post.dateHeader'>
<h2 class='date-header'><data:post.dateHeader/></h2>
</b:if>

<b:include data='post' name='post'/>

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:include data='post' name='comments'/>
</b:if>
</b:includable>

The above code is your printPosts function/method. It is identical to what you had before, it was just turned into a function to reduce code duplication. That's it. Now only posts with a "main" label will show up on the front page. For Peter Sachs, who was wanting to filter out content, just change the (== "main") markup to something like (!= "nsfw"). Enjoy.