And the winner is: PageList

michael b / flicker

The PageList sidebar widget, and the older LinkList widget, each creates a list of links.

PageList, which Blogger calls "Pages" on its list of widgets, has one clear advantage.

LinkList won't automatically reformat as a horizontal list in the Responsive blog themes. PageList will.

A tabbed navigational widget is generally a very good thing to provide for your readers.

Some find PageList challenging to set up. The user interface is poor, so I've written a PageList guide.

For a long time, I recommended LinkList over PageList. Originally, PageList only showed the static pages, which were introduced as a feature in 2010.

Changes over time

Also in 2010 Google introduced the customizable Designer blog themes, still widely in use today. They format any list as "tabs" in a widget in the area above the blog posts and below the title.

Remember tabs?

LinkList could always link to any web page, including the static pages.

So really, LinkList had the edge.

Sometime after that, PageList became more customizable, and it was possible to link from it to any page on the web (just like LinkList).

But people reported that it was buggy. Meanwhile LinkList was rock solid. I continued to recommend LinkList.

At some point, and with no fanfare, Google fixed the bugs. But some people still got lost in the user interface you use to add links to it.

It works, but you have to know how.

LinkList seemed easier.

The big difference

In the newest themes, you can't use LinkList to make that navigational bar across the top of the posts.

Source: Blogger configuration screen. But note there is no "Design" page of the dashboard: this refers to the Layout page.

If you try, the widget will continue to format as a stacked list, not a horizontal set of links.

To my mind, that makes PageList the widget of choice, at leasts for that purpose. It is no longer buggy, just (sometimes) difficult to set up.

Even if you are not using the newest blog themes, using PageList will make it easier to change themes in the future.

LinkList still works

The older LinkList widget is still great for stacked lists of links in any theme. It still formats as tabs in the Designer themes. If all that is working for you, there is no urgent reason to change.

But PageList works too, and while it might be a little tricker to set up, today it is just as stable as LinkList and makes a good navigation widget in all themes.

The user interface for PageList is not that bad. Here's how to hack it.