Links to your blog: backlinks & other template hacks

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My template's been long overdue for an overhaul. I'd added Blogger's Backlinks feature previously (which was mentioned on Blogger's own blog, Buzz). But now I've tweaked my Blogger template so that:

• Blogger's "Create a Link" text under the backlinks list now reads the more accurate "Create link here by posting on Blogger"
• the backlinks from Google's Blogsearch now display together with similar links from other blogosphere search engines such as Technorati's Cosmos, Icerocket's Link Tracker, and simple searches of Bloglines and Blogpulse. (I could have added Feedster too but one has to draw the line somewhere, plus its coverage is minimal compared with the others). Correspondingly I have removed the old Cosmos links at the top of each post as they're no longer needed there.
• my email subscription form now points to Feedblitz (though I'm still keeping Bloglet going for the benefit of my previous subscribers)
• my sidebar categories for my previous posts (laboriously produced manually - Blogger are you listening??) now take up much less space by using the show/hide trick explained on Blogger's help page (thanks to Truckspy for the suggestion and the help!).
  

I did want to change my Recent Posts lists to a dropdown list based on the handy script by John of Blogfresh, but my post titles are sometimes quite long, so the box extended into the right margin of the page - very ugly. So I didn't make that change. (Same reason why I didn't put my categories into a dropdown, which I would have preferred).

I will post a howto on the backlinks code for customised Blogger templates plus the (platform independent) code for the other backlink-style services, separately. [Edited 18 October:] Now done, for the howto see this post.

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