Remove the ‘0 comments’ label on Blogger

With the recent revamp of the commenting system and a rumored Google+-based solution for sites, there are still some minor tweaks that can make Blogger comments work better on your blog or site. One thing that nagged me was the fact that below each article there is a rather big section dedicated to the number of comments – which is well and nice if there are comments, but completely useless on posts with none (I have a fair amount of those, as most casual bloggers do). So if you want to remove that part of the page, follow the instructions in this article. This involves changes to the HTML template, so be sure to back it up first, just in case.

In the new dashboard go to ‘Template’ ► ‘Edit HTML’, click ‘Proceed’ and check ‘Expand Widget Templates’. Here search for the following block of code:

<h4>
<b:if cond='data:post.numComments == 1'>
1 <data:commentLabel/>:
<b:else/>
<data:post.numComments/> <data:commentLabelPlural/>:
</b:if>
</h4>

This piece of code is responsible for generating the section underneath the blog post displaying the number of comments, including when there are none. It should show up twice in the template. You need to wrap this entire code section inside a conditional tag, so that it will only be visible if there is at least one comment. The final code in the template should look like this, with the code you need to add in bold:

<b:if cond='data:post.numComments != 0'>
<h4>
<b:if cond='data:post.numComments == 1'>
1 <data:commentLabel/>:
<b:else/>
<data:post.numComments/> <data:commentLabelPlural/>:
</b:if>
</h4>
</b:if>

While we’re on this subject, you might want to have another text displayed on your main blog page if there are no comments, instead of the standard ‘0 comments’, something like ‘No comments’ or even ‘Post a comment’. This can also be easily achieved with another change to the template. Search for this code block:

<a class='comment-link' expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'> <b:if cond='data:post.numComments == 1'>1 <data:top.commentLabel/> <b:else/> <data:post.numComments/> <data:top.commentLabelPlural/> </b:if> </a>

Replace every occurrence (there should be two or three) with the code below. As before, the bold section is new code to be inserted, while the italic text can be chosen freely. This will become the anchor text for the hyperlinks to the comment form on articles with no comments.

<a class='comment-link' expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'> <b:if cond='data:post.numComments == 0'>No comments<b:else/> <b:if cond='data:post.numComments == 1'>1 <data:top.commentLabel/> <b:else/> <data:post.numComments/> <data:top.commentLabelPlural/></b:if></b:if></a>

Another small inconsistency I noticed on Blogger is that when there is only one comment to an article, the label still uses the plural ‘comments’. It’s a bit odd, because the Blogger template actually has two different variables for the singular (<data:commentLabel/>) and plural forms (<data:commentLabelPlural/>), but in the user interface we can only set one of the two. If you want to correct this, you can simply replace every occurrence of <data:commentLabel/> with normal text: ‘comment’. Using an example above, you would use this code:

<a class='comment-link' expr:href='data:post.addCommentUrl' expr:onclick='data:post.addCommentOnclick'> <b:if cond='data:post.numComments == 0'>No comments<b:else/> <b:if cond='data:post.numComments == 1'>1 comment<b:else/> <data:post.numComments/> <data:top.commentLabelPlural/></b:if></b:if></a>