33 How to hide the Blogger Nav-Bar July 28, 2007 /

At the top of most Blogger blogs you'll see a navigation bar, which enables you to flick from one blog to the next (plus additional options when you are signed in). Many bloggers have used CSS techniques to hide the nav-bar. At first, I thought it may be against Blogger's terms and conditions to do this, but after reading this post by Kawaljit, I now think it may be okay:

The Blogger's TOS page makes no reference to navbar while Google representatives in the Blogger support group (nickname: Blogger Employee) have always ignored discussion threads seeking an official stand on hiding navbar. 

There's some hope now. Google recently organized a road show in select Indian cities to promote their Blogger platform. Ankit attended the event and requested clarity on the navbar policy from the Googlers present at the roadshow. They immediately called up their team based in Google's Bangalore office and confirmed to Ankit that it's legal to hide the navbar.

If you want to hide the nav-bar in your blogger blog, here's what you should do (these instructions refer to the "new" Blogger layouts templates):

• Go to Template>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard and first back-up your template to ensure you can restore it if you make unwanted mistakes!
• Next, find this line in the template: </b:skin>
• Just before this line, insert the following lines of code:

#navbar-iframe {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none
}

 

You can preview your template to see the effect in action, and then save your template to save the changes for good. (Thanks to Testing Blogger Beta for this hack!).

I don't include this hack in my blog since I actually find the navbar rather useful (especially when editing my blog) but I can understand why others would want to implement it. As yet, I haven't been able to find clear clarification about hiding the nav-bar from Google/Blogger, so if you do use this hack, please be aware of possible implications!