[update] Ya know, a week after all this work, I learned that you could add more than one text widget.  Sigh.

Creating pages automatically puts navigation links overtop of the header image.

I don’t like the automatic page links.

Because I’m hosted on wordpress.com, I’m a bit limited as to what I can do.

1) Create blog entries as pages ∞

1. Create some regular blog entries.

2. After you’re done, edit them again and change the date (top-right).  Make the date old, to get them out of the way.

2) Learn more about your style ∞

I installed the Firefox Firebug add-on so that I could easily inspect my page.  I wanted to do this so I could understand how my theme made the nice titles on the right-hand side.

You don’t have to use Firebug, you could use any other tool to gain this knowledge.  Heck, you could even track down the theme author and ask.

1. Install Firebug.
2. Restart Firefox.
3. Visit a regular blog page.
4. Click the Firebug icon in the bottom-left part of Firefox.
5. A new window slides up.  Click “Inspect.”
6. Click one of  your existing titles on the right side of your blog.

7. The proper code should be highlighted. In my case, I had to use a little more than just the one line that was highlighted.

3) Set up the “Text” widget ∞

The Text widget allows you to write arbitrary text and HTML code into the right column.

Your widgets can be found at YOURNAME.wordpress.com/wp-admin/widgets.php

What you need to do is get the URLs to your blog posts and paste them into regular <a href= URL tags.  Build a little list.

My style automatically styled bullet points, but I needed to properly identify my title.  For my theme, it looked like this: <div class="title"><h2>Tags</h2></div>.  It may look different for you, which is why I gave you Firebug instructions.

In my case, I only kept the trailing part of the URL without the domain name.  This is so that I won’t have broken links if I ever move to another domain name.

My text looked like this:

<ul>
<li><a href="example.com">Contact</a></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="title"><h2>Tags</h2></div>
<ul>
Wanted:  wordpress.com to give users a simple tag list widget.
</ul>

Note: The reason I used <ul> for my text, and not something like <p style="margin-right:2%;margin-left:10%;"> was that the <p> added an additional space underneath the text when the final page gets rendered.

4) Delete your pages ∞

Either delete your actual pages, or revert them to drafts and the header image’s navigation links will be removed automatically.

YOURNAME.wordpress.com/wp-admin/edit-pages.php

Thoughts ∞

One annoyance is that I wanted to have a “Contact” page.

If it were an actual page, then it would have a comments section.

However, because it’s now a blog posting, it’s comments are subject to an automatic comments closure if one is set up for blog posts.