how to get rid of the navbar in your blogspot blog, yo

First things first: All thanks and love to Schmutzie, who showed me how to do this fix. If you want to thank someone for this, thank her. I'm the messenger.

Hey friends (you are my friends, right? You're not going to do that thing where you walk up all friendly and then stick me in the back of the neck for the mob money, are you? Because mob justice - that's not okay. Not in my book. Not between friends.). Do you walk around hating the navbar at the top of a blogspot blog? Does it make you grind your teeth and strangle wildlife? Maybe something like that? All I know is, I get to thinking about the navbar and suddenly all the geese and deer in the park are dead.

I'm not sure if this constitutes a gross violation of Blogger's terms of use - I am way too lazy to go look - but here's a handy way to remove the navigation bar from your site. This particular method works for the beta blogs only, but there's an easy fix for old blogspot blogs.

1. In order to do this, you need to start poking around in the HTML. Get some gloves first. Okay, got the gloves, that's good. Click on the Template tab and choose 'Edit HTML'. If you're the nervous kind, with the sweats and shivers and the rolling rheumy eyes, you may want to download your template just in case.

2. In the template, find the body, near the top of the page. Here's what mine looks like:

body {
background:$bgcolor;
margin:0;
color:$textcolor;
font:x-small Georgia Serif;
font-size/* */:/**/small;
font-size: /**/small;
text-align: center;
}
a:link {
color:$linkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:visited {
color:$visitedlinkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:hover {
color:$titlecolor;
text-decoration:underline;
}
a img {
border-width:0;
}

3. After the image attributes, insert the following code:

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

That should do the trick. For old skool blogspot blogs, the navbar is not an iframe element (as far as I know), so you should be able to get away with inserting the same code but removing the "-iframe" bit.

Now you are free of all your navbar troubles. No more hitting the 'next' button and finding yourself at some crazed right-wing blog, or a fourteen year old Filipino girl writing about her kooky friends, or a spamlog offering stock tips or herbal Vuhz@gra. You're one step closer to never having to experience anything ever again unexpected or in any way discomfiting.

Speaking of which, go read PWOT's article on the subject.