display only selected blogger labels (tags)

For those of you who use blogger and use labels/tags, just a heads up, if you delete posts that you have labelled or try to remove labels, it may not work properly. If you need help deleting labels, check this post.

A few ways around displaying all labels (and it would seem that this would be a feature in blogger at some point):

Use a html links list. Create a html links list to just the labels that you want to display. This approach works well if you want to display just a few labels.

Use del.icio.us ! Tag the labels you want to display using del.icio.us (ah! del.icio.us -- my friend!)
http://del.icio.us/ and then use a del.icio.us link roll to a generate the script for you. Very easy.

1. Click on each of the labels you want to include in your list. Add the url for the label to your del.icio.us account. However, you'll want to do a couple of unique things for these links:

• Description: [blogger label name]
• Tags: [Give your blog labels a unique tag -- this should be the same for all of the blogger labels... I used blogger_labels in my experiment)
• Save.
• Do this for each blogger label that you want to display in your label list.

2. Go to the del.icio.us link roll creator http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls

• Make any choices you want but to only display the blogger labels:
  
• Under Display options, check => Use only these tags (choose your unique blogger tag, in my example, blogger_labels )

3. Copy and paste the script into your blogger template or using Add page element, click on text option. Give your labels a name and copy + paste the code in.
Voila!

Using method 1 or 2, you can choose labels based on any particular criteria: your favorite topics, etc.

Looking for a way to limit blogger labels in a tag cloud? Read this.