Want to remove the Blogger navbar from your blog?

If you're blogging through Google's Blogger service (and let's face it: it's free, so a lot of people are) you have probably noticed the ubiquitous navbar at the top of the page that includes some nice navigation and search tools, but which also includes the distracting and sometimes disturbing NEXT BLOG button.

"Next Blog" takes you to some random blog on the site and sometimes you don't want to be the launch point for your students or parents to be sent to silly topics and/or discussions.

So -- and this is a great pedagogical discussion for another arena -- as a teacher, do you want the navbar? If you are teaching your students to be self-reliant responsible digital citizens, then you welcome this link to randomness. But if your aren't focussed on that, then here's all you have to do to remove it:

1. Go to blogger.com and on the dashboard for the blog you want to change, select the DESIGN tab.
2. Select EDIT HTML.
3. Find the line that reads </b:skin>. Just before this line, paste-in this chunk of css code:
   #navbar-iframe {
   height:0px;
   visibility:hidden;
   display:none
   }
4. Select SAVE TEMPLATE.

That should be it. I have never experienced a problem with this solution, but the potential is there that it may conflict with the template you have chosen for your blog.

From what I've read, this does not explicitly violate your blogger terms of service and it may save you from the embarrassment of explaining to a colleague, a parent, a student, or a potential employer about why they jumped from your classroom blog or online resume to the "LOL Catz got Mohawks" blog.

Cheers!