Fixing the Popular Posts Widget

For a while the Popular Posts widget (i.e. the one Blogger developed and available via the Add a Gadget menu) in the right hand sidebar has been displaying incorrectly and today it's irritated me enough to do something about it!

The picture was truncated and the left hand side of the accompanying post title merged into the picture OR for posts that were text only, the first 2-3 letters of the post title were missing. I tried altering the settings in the Popular Posts widget itself, but there's very little there to play with. Removing the thumbnail option only made things worse: all post titles were displayed with the first 2-3 characters missing. Having upgraded to IE9 recently and its attendant problems, I also had a look at the blog via a a couple of different browsers, only to find the problem hadn't gone away. Grrrr!

For once searching Blogger Help for the answer was successful - see reply #3 (NB my search was for Popular Posts widget truncated). Removal of the following line from the blog template's HTML is needed:

text-indent:-15px;

If you have the same problem with this widget and don't mind fiddling around with HTML, then this will probably work for you too. Save a copy of your current template first (just to be on the safe side), then look for the part of the template which starts:

.sidebar li {

The offending line should be a couple or so lines further down - I can't say exactly where as my template looked slightly different to that shown in the Blogger Help reply. Anyway, locate and remove the offending line then save your revised template. Refresh your blog and have a look - a nice square picture icon (if you ticked the show thumbnail option when setting up the widget) and clear text should now be looking back at you :)

If that pesky line isn't there (and if I was a betting girl, I'd lay a shilling that it is), then restore your saved template copy and seek help via Blogger - I don't have the answer I'm afraid :(

Good luck!