| Archive Page | Post Preview |
|---|---|
| 2006/07 |
More good stuff at Hackosphere (subscribed, btw). This time Archive
Browser, a tool that parses a year's worth of selected archive pages,
and reformats the content onto a single page for quick browsing, as
well as quick & broad "find-in-page" searches. Want to find that
post that you wrote about Britney Spears last time she was pregnant?
Want to search for the stuff you wrote about Wimbledon in 2004? Format
your archives for browsing! There are two options for implementing this
hack: 1. For frequent use, you can add a widget to your sidebar which
will allow you to select a year. 2. As a cure for occasional lapses of
memory, you can head over to the Archive Browser page & input your
blog's URL. Permalink |
| 2006/07 |
David Nicholson has devised another great way to add categories to your
Blogger blog. There are two template edits required. One new code
string goes in each post that you want to categorise. You make a minor
edit each time to make the code contain the category that you want. Use
Blogger's Post Template to keep the code handy, then all you need to do
is add the category. David offers two versions of this post-tagging
script. The first tags the posts without showing the tags, by
displaying a transparent single-pixel image. The second has some
display customisation options, and will show the selected category on
the post. Permalink |
| 2006/07 |
Another great Greasemonkey-powered mod for Blogger. Thom has written a
proxy to convert comment pages to RSS, & whipped up a script that
provides an individual comment feed for each post. This way, your
readers can just sub to the conversations that they want to track, or
to the comment threads that they contributed to. If you're not a
Greasemonkey user, & you're not ready to dip your toe in there yet,
you can also hard-code the links per the instructions on Thom's page. Permalink |
| 2006/07 |
While we're on the subject of the wiki... we've also had our first
independent hack request added to the requests page. i need to create a
page in blogger which had had link but not a post. i saw this in one
blogger blogs. pl help me how to do this .This points up the need for
the request page to collect standard & detailed information in the
same way as the submit page does. Watch for the upgrade. In the
meantime, if you're making heads, tails or purple kittens out of the
above request, head on over to the wiki and respond. Permalink |
| 2006/07 |
The Blogger Hacks Wiki ensnares it's first victim... er, I mean, gets
the first fresh hack added directly by a user and not one of the
content import crew. There should be a prize, but there isn't, and so
the link-love from Freshblog (such as it is) will be the reward!
Hackosphere have an admin console icon that you can use when you're
logged in to Blogger to send e-mails to your commenters notifying them
that you've written a comment in response to their comment... Pretty
neat. There's an explanatory post, and a page of code chunks, at
Hackosphere. Permalink |
| 2006/07 |
Amit at Digital Inspiration finds that 4.5 Million Blogger blogs still
have the default sidebar "edit-me" goodies attached. In super linkbait
mode, Amit suggests that this is laziness, and Nathan goes a step
further and calls these folks idiots.... OK, I'll bite... Admittedly,
leaving these things in your template isn't the route to stratospheric
blogebrity, & some might even argue that a default blogger template
is equally mundane. Freshblog recently highlighted the relationship
between time spent blogging & increased geekiness / tech skills,
suggesting that as time passes, at least some of these sidebars will
see some love & get some links. Permalink |
| 2006/07 |
Jack at Blog4Bloggers has published a great how-to describing the
method for adding YouTube clips to your Blogger blog. Screencaps of all
the steps are included. Permalink |
| 2006/07 |
Waldwicht leaves a comment wondering whether it is possible to place
tags in the footer of a post rather than in the body of the post. None
of the tools that I'm familiar with allow this, & it doesn't seem
to be the most straightforward thing to do, given that the post body
updates / changes w/ each post but the footer remains the same. That
said, I figure if anyone knows how, you're out there. Permalink |
| 2006/07 |
Backlinks reveal the Museum of Modern Betas, a blog and digital
screencap exhibit (?) dedicated to tracking innovation on the web and
exploring the explosion of new services that are available. There's a
bunch of different ways to browse the museum. Pay a visit! Filed in:
blogtech webtech MoMB Posted at 4:37 PM by John. Permalink |
| 2006/07 |
Efendi at Zlythern has created a great next & previous post link
hack that he whipped up with moo.fx. Check it out, especially the
great-looking scrolling between posts. Only crawls down the main page
at the moment. Permalink |
| 2006/07 |
Another specific application for tags: Freedbacking. Chris Pirillo has
created this tag specifically to encourage (and enable the discovery
of) free and constructive feedback. Become a freedbacker - say
something! Tell them they’re not doing something right - tell them how
they could make their product even better - tell them what you want!
Users own the word: Freedbacking, labeling the art of offering free
(constructive) feedback.Wired.com explain further, and Bloglines are
already actively looking for the Freedback. Interesting way to
encourage companies to monitor tagged content. Permalink |
| Archive Page | Post Preview |
| 2006/01 |
Two more sites added. You can now see Freshtags in action on Simple
Code, where there's a very cool "multi-list" in the sidebar, and on
Stephen's XOXO blog. That's 10 blogs that I know of operating the
system now. If you're running Freshtags & we haven't blogrolled you
yet, let me know and I'll add you to the blogroll. Conversely, if
you're running Freshtags and haven't added the blogroll yet, I'd be
more than happy to send you the code!! What am I talking about? Well... Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Ed Kohler advocates third-party pinging, (at least when the party in
question has linked to you and T'rati hasn't picked up the link...)
Imagine stumbling across a site that has linked to you, and noticing
the site does not appear in your Technorati ranking report. Should your
Technorati ranking suffer because of this oversight? Of course not. The
solution: Ping their site for them... You should get credit for your
hard-earned link in short order.via BlogHerald, where Liz Strauss
comments that this will only work if the anchor text is specific /
relevant. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Rhys has upgraded his Technorati Tag generator so that it can generate
tags that point to custom URL's. Now I feel guilty for wrecking his
weekend!! Behold Technorati Tag Generator v1.5. No huge changes, but
it's now compatible with a multitude of aggregators. For ease,
Technorati, Del.icio.us, Blinklist and Flickr are listed as shortcuts.
So, should you be inclined to reward Rhys for his labors, you can
download the new version of the Tag Generator, and make a Paypal
donation there too.... Thanks for the upgrade, Rhys. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
In another post-footer makeover, I have added Simpy, Blinklist, Digg
and (rather optimistically, I thought) Slashdot to your list of
bookmarking options, which still includes Del.icio.us and Furl. Now you
can bookmark Freshblog posts on any of those services with the minimum
effort. Thanks to Otis at Simpy for code that will work there (it just
needed blogger template tags), and to E-Lamb for the Digg &
Slashdot code. There's a nifty table at E-Lamb of the variable template
tags for a number of blogging platforms, so if you're on MT & want
to add this, you can. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Greg Yardley's made the switch from Del.icio.us, in support of the
principle of sharing revenue with users. Simpy [will] let you add your
own AdSense links to your bookmarks page, allowing you to make 100% of
the revenue, that got my attention enough to dust off the Simpy
account. I love revshare with end users - it strikes back at the whole
‘Web 2.0-colonialism ride the long tail of user-generated content to
riches’ theme by treating people as publishers, which is exactly right.
So I’ve switched over to Simpy. Greg also has some great ideas about
how Simpy might leverage their user's importation of adsense to corner
the market. Interesting... Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Jason Shellen, aside from posting a great Top Gear clip, highlights a
new feature of Google Video:on the side of most ... clips there is a
'Put on site' link that will allow you to grab a snippet of code to put
on your blog. Very slick.Add the clip straight in to the post. Awesome. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
In the course of exploring what's new in the world of tags tagging, I
ran across Rhys Wynne's newly-created Technorati Tag Generator. It's
quite a simple program that allows you to generate HTML code for tags
from a list of words. It also allows the creation of prefixes and
suffixes (which can be saved) which are added to the code at the
beginning or the end (this allows different styles to be made). Once
the code is generated, it can be exported to any HTML editor, by
copying it to the clipboard. Pretty cool. I imagine that a bookmarklet
or greasemonkey is probably still a little quicker, but this is a great
solution to the problem. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Another service leaps beyond the function for which it was originally
designed.... Now you can add the features of Feedburner's Feedflare to
your blog post footers as well as to your feed. The newly enhanced
FeedFlare service is live now and accessible through the "Optimize"
tab. Our thoughtful designers have even created step-by-step
Quickstarts for adding FeedFlare to your Blogger, Wordpress, Movable
Type, or Typepad blog. But if you run into any snags or your flare just
won't spark, drop into our Support Forums for help, assistance, alms,
and more. You can also get the basics from our short FAQ. If you've got
a pretty basic template, or haven't messed with your post footer too
much, this is a great way to add some features all at once. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Hyperwords is a new Firefox Plug-In that includes blogthis! options
amongst many other choices of what to do with selected text (search,
shop, copy, e-mail, translate etc...) Tom Raftery has written it up:
What does it do? Well, the default behaviour is that, when you select
text in your browser, a drop-down menu appears, giving you instantly
available options of what to do with the text. This is quite cool and
allows quick and easy access to functionality you might otherwise have
to go to other pages to get. The Preferences settings for the plug-in
allows you to select whether the data you select opens in a new tab, or
a new page, in the foreground or background. Also, all the menu options
are available from the keyboard. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Phydeaux3 has supplemented his category method with a sidebar tag cloud
which rounds off the hack very neatly and professionally...This is only
useful if you've implemented the category method outlined in the
Blogger Categories with Delicious series. I initially was creating the
"cloud" by formatting the normal del.icio.us supplied cloud then
rewriting the links with another script. I ran into some weird problems
with Internet Explorer and encoded characters doing that, so rather
than drive myself crazy trying to figure out if I or IE was wrong I bit
the bullet and dissected the tag cloud code for use.... Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Performancing 1.1 is out, and there's great stuff there for blogger
users. The big fat holy grail of integrated trackback finally makes an
appearance. You can put trackback URL's right into your compose form,
and trackback as you publish. Yeah!! You can also bookmark on
del.icio.us with the same tags as you select for t'rati. The one thing
I don't see is the ability to customise the tag URL... but the
Del.icio.us settings page is down right now (along with the rest of
Del.icio.us...Ho-hum) & the URL change might be an option there?
Otherwise, there's a request for 1.2. Check out a whole host of new
features, and the promised integration with Del.icio.us.... Visit
Performancing. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Upgrades in hardware have (hopefully temporarily) disabled tagrolls,
linkrolls, and multiple-tag queries at del.icio.us. The same upgrades
have also thrown a wrench into the operation of Freshtags in generic
mode, as explained by Greg in comments on Freshblog and the del.icio.us
blog. Hopefully there's a swift fix in the works Filed in: tagroll,
del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Doraemon at Paolo Sebastio reports on how to use CSS to clean up post
titles if you're using the Search Method for Blogger Categories. Pretty
cool.... Now your post titles don't have to say, er... "Blogger
Categories," for instance....For other hacks this will work with, see
my list of blogsearch method hacks.For a wider range of Blogger Hacks,
including a number of category methods, see Blogger Hacks, The Series. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
In a bizarre time-paradox that will confuse me for days, it turns out
that Improbulus had this all solved before I wrote my "here's the
problem" post... either that, or she read my post and then went back in
time to pre-invent the solution... (theme from "twilight zone" plays
quietly....) If your blogging platform (e.g. Blogger) won't let you
write a post but then delay or postpone publishing it until a later
date or time, you can still do that with a newish free service called
Emailschedule. It was designed to schedule the sending of emails e.g. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Stephen at Singpolyma has some thoughts about using feedreaders for
comment aggregation: I am proposing a simple piece of standard markup.
Most blogs that have comments feeds for every post have a link to that
feed somewhere on the post page. If we made it standard protocol to set
rel="alternate comments" (obviously, just like with relTag, you can
have other things in the rel-list as well, but require both of these)
for these links, the aggregators could pull them out of the page and
get the appropriate URL.The idea is that if you subscribe to a blog,
your reader could be made to see new comments as well as new posts, and
could show you the whole conversation. An interesting & provocative
thought, and one that automates comment aggregation. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Phydeaux3 has written an extensive 3-part how-to for a version of the
del.icio.us category method that creates a single, hidden post in the
archives of your blog, and uses javascript to build a dynamic category
list within that single post when you link there from the special
sidebar menu. Very cool.Part 1 covers the creation of the special
dynamic post, and of a sidebar menu that will link to that post.Part 2
deals with customising the link field for the addition of tags, as well
as the construction of a one-click post-to-del.icious link that can
remember your tags. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Pete at Grogmaster is considering a hack that I'm sure we'd all find
useful... a realistic post preview that is clued-in to the layout of
your template in blogger and can accurately reflect the way that the
thing is going to look, images, colors, margins & all.... That way
if your pictures overlapped or went off the edge of the page, you'd
know before you hit publish... Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Taher at Websites, Mashups and More is creating an experiment to
compare the Google Blogsearch and Del.icio.us category methods. It'll
be interesting to see how the study stacks up & what the outcome
is, but the pro's & cons of each are pretty clear, I think. The
Del.icio.us method is involved. Posts must be tagged & bookmarked
to del.icio.us, but there are benefits: Posts are listed on a public
forumPosts contain tags that can be picked up by other search
enginesPosts are categorised as soon as you bookmark themDel.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Another great essay from Rashmi Sinha, this one focusing on the social
aspects of tagging. Tagging enables social coordination that is
simultaneously more direct and abstract than collaborative filtering.
More abstract since we are exchanging conceptual information. More
direct, since there is no algorithm mediating our connection. When we
navigate by tags, we are directly connecting with others. Flickr and
del.icio.us both show that tagging helps in the spread of ideas, memes,
trends and fashions. A related question - what role does it play in
concept development, in social consensus building? ....What role do
tagging systems play in ebb and flow of concepts. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Webosphere reports the addition of a del.icio.us module on Netvibes.
Looks like you can tag, bookmark and edit posts, as well as viewing
tags and a custom-length list of your posts, all from the Netvibes
interface. Filed in: netvibes, portals, blogtech, webtech, del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Yes, I have discovered time-travel and am writing this post from the
year 9000..... But seriously, as you know, Blogger does not allow the
automatic publishing of pre-written posts at a specified time in the
future. 7cMarketing explores the alternatives, including the
possibility of using e-mail to auto-deliver your messages at the
desired time. If you can find a free autoresponder service, you could
set messages up for so many days ahead, if not for specific dates.
Autoresponder services, along with many email providers, do insist on
adding signature dross or unsubscribe links to the bottom of emails, so
you would need "to make sure this cruft doesn't get posted to your
blog, put #end at the end of your post. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Taher at Websites, Mashups and More has come up with a variation on the
Google Blogsearch Category Method developed by Orangewise, Skeptic Rant
and Netcf2.0. The blogger.com provides a search engine for blogs. All I
needed to do is use the search engine and pass it the query that I am
interested in. I started by looking at the advanced search options for
the search.blogger.com. I found out that you could perform a search for
a specific phrase in the posting's title. You can also limit the search
to a specific blog. That’s basically all I needed. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Improbulus explores and develops the principles involved in using
Technorati's tag search for categories on your blog. This new method,
which I've been trying out since I discovered that Technorati have
introduced much more powerful tag searching, should involve much less
work going forward (always a good thing in my book), and it can even
pick up your old tagged posts, but it still takes some time and thought
to set up. If you're curious, you can see the new system in action on
this test blog (opens in a new window). Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Hey everyone, get over there and ask for tag-clouds... (or whatever
else would float your boat!) Technorati is planning lots of exiting new
features for 2006 and we would like to know more about you, your
reading and blogging habits, and the features you would most like to
see implemented by Technorati this year. Our team has put together a
33-question Technorati survey to help us quantify your preferences and
needs.This is an interesting process, & I wonder what it is all
about. I see questions about vanity searches and the frequency with
which you tag (guilty!) as well as some about investigating businesses,
checking out what people are saying about clients, and seeing what's
being said about your own business. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Freshblog is pleased once again to serve as host and moderator for the
development of a system authored by Greg Hill that uses the Del.icio.us
API to build interactive and context sensitive tag / category menus for
the sidebar of your blog. We are pleased to announce v0.5 of the
system, now called FreshTags. There are several changes and new
features with this version. The most significant is an expansion of the
services that Freshtags can interface with, and the introduction of
"listening" and "fixed tags" modes, making it possible for you to
implement Freshtags even if you don't have a del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Want to cycle a series of images through the header of your blog, with
a different one popping up every time the page loads? William Bontrager
has written a how-to that will help you. The hack is in use
successfully at Once Upon a Dreamer. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
More on pulling Technorati tags to your sidebar, from Library clips :I
wonder if Technorati will provide code for a tag cloud for each
profile…anyone hacked this yet? …I noticed Alex Barnett from the CWH
network, dropped his user tag cloud from Technorati into a post, I
wonder if this same code can be placed in the sidebar, and for it to
update as you update your user space at Technorati. Otherwise the
option is to hard code each URL into your sidebar which could takes a
long time, and isn’t as fancy as a tag cloud…although if you only use
5-10 tags for your blog (more like categories), then this is a viable
option…So hey, Technorati... Any chance of a sidebar tag cloud? We'd
use it, and we'd like it..... Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
In a contribution that furthers the technorati for categories hack that
is explored and explained in Freshblog's recent archives, Nathan at The
Church at the Gate has hard-coded the search URL's into his sidebar.
He's calling it "Technorategories..." In a stroke of brilliance, I
began inserting url addresses for all of my tags. Thus,
"Technorategories" were birthed. I'm no HTML genius, but I don't know
if anyone else has thought of this yet, but until I know otherwise, I
am claiming the coining of the term "Technorategories". (I even did a
google search to see if the word even existed. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Pappmaskin's category method has been explored and explained by
Gretchen at Young Ladies Christian Fellowship:This method of categories
uses Blogger Search to search your blog for whatever word you put after
"tag=" in each category link, so your categories are variable and
endless! (It's not limitless, however, for only the 100 most recent
posts will show up in each category.)Check out the how-to. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Robert Scoble proposes an aggregation engine for posts that are heavily
commented on. Great way to see the busy posts of the day and to quickly
locate the focus of current discussions in the blogosphere. What would
be required here to detect posts with high comment volume across
multiple blogging platforms? Memeorandum shows you blogs that have
gotten linked to (the more links, the higher up on the page it goes).
But no one is showing you posts that have received a ton of comments.
That’d be useful. Particularly for something like photos. I’ve noticed
that about 5% (or less) of my Flickr photos get commented on and the
ones that do get comments are usually my more interesting photos. This
would be useful beyond flickr too. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
1000 Tags is selling inclusion in their tag-cloud. For more, see Zoli's
Blog: It may not be that original, but certainly is “cool”. At $25–$100
for shared tags and a lot more for exclusive ones, it could very well
reach $1M. I sense a new “land-grab” rush develop here: it’s easy to
boost your traffic by buying a generic tag that describes your
blog/site/product and be the only one listed in that category ( at
least for a while). There seem to be two competing imperatives here...
one is the urge / instinct to monetize everything, sell space, and make
capitalism work on the web, and the second is the "spirit of the tag,"
a free label that enables the exchange, expression and location of
ideas.I wonder if this is a mashup that will stick... Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Blog SEO brings a tool that will take your Technorati Cosmos and "rank"
you, ttlb style, based on the results. viz: I'm a Proud Citizen of
Technorati Cosmos How about you? Pretty cool additional feature for
T'rati data. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Blog Herald reports that a number of sites that post "supporting
materials" for users of MySpace (templates, layouts, tricks, hacks,
that sort of thing) have been cordially invited to stop,
immediately:The now Newscorp owned Myspace has sent out Cease &
Desist To MySpace Domain Sites that actually support the Myspace
service. According to Search Engine Journal, the sites offer tools and
downloads to a very loyal MySpace community including layouts, graphics
and image hosting. Hmmm. Let's imagine, for a moment, a site that
collects material that enables users to customise their blogging
service and to adapt it to their needs (shouldn't be too hard... Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Larry Magid & Anne Collier are running BlogSafety.com:where teens,
parents, teachers and adult bloggers can learn about the benefits of
safe blogging. Looks like solid information, usefully organised. Well
worth a look if your kids blog, & you'd like to know more... Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
In response to a comment re: blogger archives and the reversing
thereof, here's a couple of existing hacks that will get the job done.
To reverse the archives in a drop-down menu, use the Roveberg hack. To
reverse your archive display without a drop-down, try Witfits, about
halfway down the page. There's also a reverse archives hack offered on
the Blogger Hacks page. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Zoli's not that impressed with the new cosmos info in the T'rati search
results, and I agree... Until recently Technorati had...the actual
link-count listed in the search results. If they insist on switching
from meaningful numbers to cute graphics, could they at least be more
granular, and have a color-coded scheme for major brackets, like 50,
100, 500 ..etc links? Not a fan of mystery meat, or hover-over. Cut the
info, I guess, if it is out of date or no good, but if it is useful,
then just serve it up, plain-text style... Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
The consensus seems to be that it isn't about what you get right now,
it's about what you might be able to get in 3 or 6 months, or a year,
and that the big transformation here isn't what you get (at least right
now) but rather how you get it....., via a pauseable updater that could
deliver additional software to your machine in the months to come.
Here's Improbulus: Who knows what deals they could do with other
companies eager to take advantage of Google Updater to get basic
versions of their software onto consumers' PCs - reminiscent to me of
Microsoft's arrangements with AOL etc to put their icons onto Windows
desktops. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Why, it's the delicious aroma of, er, del.icio.us. To see stats from
the service and to observe trends that will leave you wondering "why?",
check out deli.ckoma. from LibraryStuff Filed in: library-stuff,
del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Stephane Hamel has set up a new blogger hacks blog at Scriptlet.
There's a couple of goodies over there right now, and more to come, I'm
sure.... I have subscribed look forward to seeing the good new stuff!!
Filed in: scriptlet, blogger-hacks Posted at 8:45 AM by John. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Allow readers to tag your blog, & reflect their tags in the sidebar, using Wanabo. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Jasper at Browservulsel has upgraded his custom backlinks script to
make it run a little faster. If, like me, you're using the script, head
on over there and upgrade to the new, faster version. Pretty cool!
Thanks, Jasper. Filed in: browservulsel, blogtech, backlinks,
blogger-hacks Posted at 9:27 AM by John. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Performancing have flipped their format. Now, instead of posting to
their single & large-group blog, they're going to host a series of
inividual blogs about problogging & link to the best & most
focussed of those from the sidebar. With the advent of PFF, and after
some thought, and talks, we've decided to do away with the present
format of submitting stories for review by Performancing, and have
opened up blogs for all members. You can now register or login with the
form on the top right menu and post directly to your Performancing
blog!If you have something to say about getting paid to blog, they'll
host you while you do it. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Johan presents a very neat hack for backing up your blog by saving your
feed. For the code, and full instructions, see Ecmanaut:Go to
https://www.blogger.com/atom/ and type in your Blogger login
information. This will yield you a very brief and to the point chunk of
XML that at least Mozilla and Internet Explorer will render quite
readably for you.... Mark and copy the URL in either (they are the
same) href attribute of the blog you want to back up, and paste it into
your browser's address field. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Technorati have expanded their help section and co-opted some of the
blogosphere's hints & tips, blogger-hacks stylee. Check out their
new howtos and tools, and let's see how the collection grows. via A
Consuming Experience Filed in: technorati, blogtech, webtech Posted at
4:36 PM by John. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Great looking category hack from A Consuming Experience. You might have
seen the slick categories in the sidebar over there and wondered how to
get something similar for your blog... Well now you can. The code is
available in full with examples and detailed directions. On the upside,
it looks great. On the downside, this is a manual method that requires
a template edit to add a post.... but if you're an infrequent poster,
want to keep your categories for just your best stuff, or if you'd like
your sidebar to look very slick indeed, this is the way to go. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Here's my initial thoughts about the integration between Del.icio.us
and Performancing for Firefox:In terms of features and such, I'd like
to see: * The ability to customise tag URL's, so that users can point
the tags that they add to either their personal page on t'rati or to
their del.icio.us acct. * Features from the current dedicated
Del.icio.us extension, such as bookmark this / tag this / jump to my
del.icio.us acct etc added to the performancing window. That way a
number of additional significant features will be accessible from the
performancing console, & it will be useable as a bookmarking tool
as well as a blog posting tool. * Perhaps the ability to bookmark to
del.icio.us / ping could be added to the "posted successfully"
notification page? * If that's possible... (here we go!) could the
bookmark to del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Many thanks to Johan, who has revised his excellent Greasemonkey
Tagging Script to interface with the new Blogger Blogthis! It sounds
like it was abig deal because blogger shook things up in the back room
when they redid the tool. See ecmanaut:I want to add native trackback
support to Blogger, not make things that used to work fine keep working
fine -- and within weeks of the time I embraced and extended some
feature the first time too, at that. Anyway, the script is updated to
cater the changed BlogThis! page, and thanks to some other user
feedback earlier today, I also fixed a few old bugs of mine. It's quite
possible the script works with the ftp publication mode now, too, and
not only the Blogger hosted mode of publishing, as before. Do tell if
it does or not; I don't have any test setup myself. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
If the neat one-button multi-rss image employed here is a bit too
"mystery meat" for your taste (as I often think it might be) and you
want a full suite of custom chicklets, see TwisterMC's Chicklet Creator
2, which lets you create and format "easy subscribe" & "easy post"
buttons for many of the major readers and social bookmarking sites.
Pretty cool. via Paul Stamatiou. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Performancing reports that their custom extension is going to interface
more closely with del.icio.us when it is updated. They're looking for
suggestions for features, and I think that Freshblog readers who tag
for categories are well placed to help in that department.... Let's see
what features we can come up with & request them!! Filed in:
performancing firefox del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
Looks like Blogthis! got an upgrade? I almost fell off my chair tonight
when I was presented with a full range of rich-text editing options and
an interface that looks & feels very much like being logged into
your regular account. Pretty slick!! Out of interest, does the fact
that the form is a proper web form now mean that we could greasemonkey
it to add a tag entry field? Hey.... Permalink |
| 2006/01 |
News of a cool new service for the trading of open-source programming
skills comes our way from HorsePigCow. Check out Bounty County's list
of funded open-source programming projects, and leave a comment here if
you pick one out to work on!! What's a bounty project? well.... "More
often than not, a bounty project consists of fixing a known bug in a
platform or product for a fee ranging between $50 and $300. Permalink |
| Archive Page | Post Preview |
| 2006/02 |
Another neat blogger hack submitted by Mario, of Caso Pathologico. He's
authored a script to estimate the reading time of your posts, so that
your readers know whether they've got time to get through the whole
thing before the boss comes back!! The default reading speed is 25o
wpm, but the script is open & so you can set a slower or faster
reading speed depending on your opinion of your readers. There are 4
code inserts required to set this up... a script in the head, the code
to display the time estimate, a special div to make the blogitembody
stand out, and another script that sits just outside the closing
blogger tag. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Are we one step closer to the killer blog-support app that does all the
back-room reader / feeder / bookmarker / linktracker stuff
authoritatively & in one spot? Check the Technorati Weblog for an
intro to their latest feature, Favorites:We've made it as easy as
possible to add blogs to your Favorites. All over Technorati, just
click the star icon (*) to add that blog to your favorites. Looking for
good blogs on a certain topic? Check out Blog Finder and add blogs from
there! There's also a bookmarklet you can take with you, so you can add
to your favorites wherever you browse (get it on the Favorites Help
page). Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
What do you get the blog that has everything? How about a garish,
over-the-top and visually-unsettling font? Here's one that marshals the
creative flair of photography enthusiasts from across the world. The
result is a constantly-evolving typography with a capacity for surprise
and novelty that is second only to its ability nauseate and confound.
Read on for a demo, how-to and blow-by-blow account of my
implementation of FlickrFont. As you can probably guess, the idea is to
take arbitrary text and convert it on-the-fly into a set of image
"tiles", where each tile is a thumbnail image of a character lifted
from the photo-sharing site Flickr. Why do this? Because it's a very
geeky hack. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Have some family business this week. All good stuff, but (happily)
time-consuming. Normal service will be resumed next week at some point.
Thanks for your patience, & please don't go cancelling your
subscriptions, or anything!! Posted at 2:29 PM by John. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
After blogging about the service & getting some good buzz last
week, I have had the chance to implement Labelr on Freshblog. The
effects can't be fully explored today because the service is down for
enhancement. Full road-tests will commence when Amit's improvements are
complete. I'm not formatting the results page correctly at the moment,
but I'm working on it. (All support welcome!) Have tried to be smart
with my categories.... Blogger Hacks for specific posts dealing with
add-ons to your blogger template, Blogtech for more general / generic
blog technology material, and Webtech for non-blog related interweb
technology posts. I may add more labels, we'll see, but I vow to be
neater than I have been w/ my tags.... Plan to continue w/ Technorati
& Del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Want to give your site a color-coordinated makeover? Not sure which
shades go together? Check out Wellstyled's Color Scheme Generator 2.
You can: Pick a base color from the color wheelView color families with
mono, contrast, triad, tetrad and analogic relationshipsView hex codes
for selected and recommended alternate colorsChange one or all colors
to view recommended colors (using the arrows at the far right) Adjust
the triad, tetrad and analogic views to sample a range of complementary
colorsLimit to readily-rendered browser colorsView selected colors in
default, pastel, dark pastel, light pastel, contrast and pale views. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Aditya has written a hack to change the formatting of comments that you
leave on your own blog, so that they stand out. This requires wrapping
your comments in a distinctive formatting tag (a div, for example...)
and then pulling out any comments authored by your profile for fancy
formatting. You can see it in action in the comments on The Last Word.
Looks great!! Helps your own words stand out in the comments...
especially useful if you like to carry on discussions and add original
material there. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Another new blogger hacks resource: Athique from Me, Myself & This
Other Stuff has set up a Blogger group on Ma.gnolia, for all of your
blog-hacks bookmarks and resources. Good move, Athique! Thanks for the
Freshblog link there too!! Let's all go sign up w/ Ma.gnolia!! Filed
in: blogger-hacks, social-bookmarking, ma. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
You can never have too much social bookmarking. Going one step beyond
my recent collection of 6 social bookmarking services for your post
footer, 3spots lays out the code for 30 (yup, thirty!) different places
for your readers to bookmark your posts. Now that's service!!
Incidentally, I see Blinklist being used over there for categories.
Interesting.... (v. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Two new blogs in the blogger hacks field.... Two new subscriptions and blogroll entries for John. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Another limitation of blogger cracked and hacked. By default you can
erase a comment, and then "delete it forever" to remove the comment
footer and such. You can't change the content to correct for a typo, or
dodgy HTML, or whatever. Well, nothing stays in default mode for long,
and as the following hacks demonstrate, comment editing for blogger
users is go!! Three options here. First, you could head over to
Browservulsel and take advantage of Jasper's Greasemonkey script. This
will add a new link to the edit posts menu in your blogger account,
that will access the comments on a post. When you view the comments
you'll see a pencil icon to edit the comments. This has been updated to
be 0.6.4 compatible, and so if you're greasemonkeyed up, this is the
way to go. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, there was a lil' lo-tech
greasemonkey script that output tags that were valid in Technorati and
Del.icio.us. Then Firefox and Greasemonkey got makeovers, the script
broke, and that might well have been the end of it (esp. since Johan's
spiffy script does the same thing with a number of additional features)
but hey, Kevin McMahon has updated the script to work w/ 1.5 and 0.6.4.
The old how-to is new again, and all is right with the world......
Updated Basic Greasemonkey Script. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
I'm not the only person to notice that T'rati is having some digestive
difficulties. It still seems to be picking up and showing new links,
but the rankings haven't updated in three weeks. Technorati Rank: 3,306
(843 links from 329 sites) and ever-more shall be so, by the look of
it, unless there's an un-gumming of the works in progress. Here's my
thought... Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Leveraging existing assets to provide support to users, Blogger now has
a dedicated Google Group. It's a new community on Google Groups that
will let you talk to other Blogger users, ask questions, and share your
blogging expertise. In the group, you'll be able to get all kinds of
help with your blog - from template customization and HTML to
publishing tips and troubleshooting advice. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Have taken a leaf out of Pete's book... Saw that he monitors a special
tag on del.icio.us so that Grogmaster readers can send fun stuff his
way. Well... both to extend my use of del.icio.us, and to make myself a
little more accessible, I'll be monitoring For:jrfj44 on del.icio.us
going forward. If you see good Freshbloggidy stuff that you think I
should see too, slap it on del.icio.us for me!! Update: Stephen points
out that the for: ID has to be a username and not a site name. Duh! All
fixed. Thanks for the heads-up. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Amit e-mailed to tip me off about Labelr, his solution to the absence
of categories in blogger. Labelr is in private beta, has a google
discussion group, and can be seen in action on Amit's blog, Nerdier
than Thou. Looks pretty cool. Labelr has a pre-set list of categories
in the sidebar, and a custom-built list of posts within your template
when you select a tag, apparently without loading in a pre-dated
blogger post. Looks good. I'd be interested to know, Amit, how you add
your tags to your posts, and how easy it is to add an additional
category? Interesting stuff..... Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Webosphere has a very interesting "compare and contrast" intro to
Mag.nolia, complete w/ screenshots. As you can see, it’s more riche
[sic], and pretty. Bookmarks tab shows you Your Most Recent Bookmarks,
Most Recent Bookmarks from your Contacts, and Most Recent Bookmarks
from your groups. RSS feeds are available for each three categories in
full and lite versions ! Clicking (View all) link, allows you to show
all bookmarks from the selected category....Ever since Yahoo I have
wondered whether / when Del.icio.us will become more cosmetically
appealing, and if that will be required to have a broader crossover
(non-geek) appeal? Looks like some of the advantages are structural
rather than cosmetic, though, w/ contacts, groups, and the ability to
"send" bookmarks to those places. So much to test, so little time.... Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Psychologists say that shame is the most powerful human emotion. Well,
I wouldn't be too quick to write off spite. During last month's
del.icio.us upgrade, a valuable means of tapping into the hivemind of
taggers was inexplicably turned off. I vowed revenge and today has seen
the generic JSON feed return, with all the elegance, robustness and
civic-mindedness of a dodgy third world electricity hookup. First, the
backstory. Perhaps the most important part of "social bookmarking" is
the "social" bit. This means you can access the whole community's
bookmarks, for example: http://del.icio.us/tag/blogger Note that no
particular account is specified - here I'm asking for all pages tagged
"blogger" by anyone. (Hence the term "generic". Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
BenBishop has posted a great article on making the most of
del.icio.us......which in its simplest guise is an online bookmark or
favourite’s manager that allows you to access the bookmarks of sites
you like from anywhere with an internet connection. At its most
compelling level though, Delicious is an eclectic social mix of peoples
browsing habits that could be considered the finest internet directory
on the planet.Part 1 is an elegant intro to basic functions. Part 2
promises a discussion of feeds, the inbox, refined tagging (see Greg's
excellent post on retro-fitting tags) and the API. I'll keep an eye out
for that one... Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Have turned off the pop-up comments (even though I vastly prefer the
way they look) so that Freshblog is CoComment friendly. I know that the
Greasemonkey Script works, because one of my comments on the previous
post was successfully harvested and reposted, w/ no input from me.
Filed in: coComment Freshblog Posted at 6:02 PM by John. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
So you've been convinced of the benefits of tagging your blog posts and
have your eye on increased visibility, navigation and integration. But
now you've got to backfill dozens or even hundreds of posts with
meaningful, traffic-driving tags. How do you craft a set of sensible
tags that afford stability and growth? How do you stay sane while
spending long hours weaving these tags into your posts? Read on for
tips and tricks for retro-fitting tags to your blog. Getting the right
tags for your blog is important. For starters, it will affect how your
blog appears to search engines and other services. Next, it will impact
upon the way your readers navigate your blog to find other posts. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Thanks to Nick & Stephen for pointers to Brian Benzinger's
Greasemonkey Script that will automate CoComment's functions and cut
out the potentially clunky bookmarklet. I’ve got it working for
WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, MSN Spaces, and Xanga. Let me know if you
run into any problems and I’ll try to fix it. But, as I browse to
various blogs, it seems to be working. As pointed out in the comments
on the previous post, this has the added benefit of integrating the
system with blogger blogs (such as this one) that have comments appear
in a pop-up window. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Another comment tracking service, this one, coComment is still in
private beta. Looks strong: When you comment on a blog, coComment keeps
a copy of your message on a special page - called "your conversations"
- that allows you to quickly see your commennt and where it was posted,
with a link to the original site. Display all the comments you make
accross the blogosphere on your own blog. In one easy step you can show
your readers where you've been commenting recently. Don't lose the
value you create on other's blogs, benefit from it! Whether you've
commented on a blog or you're just following a blog-based conversation
of interest to you, coComment can let you know what's been added to a
particular discussion in real time.Hey, coComment folks... Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Stowe Boyd and Steve Rubel are discussing the problems of changing
hosts / sitename etc. The discussion as it stands is a bit of an
exercise in Technorati bashing: The focus of Technorati and other
services on the physical dimension -- files, links, trackbacks, etc. --
leaves them blind to the underlying social reality. Those posts are
written by people, they don't just appear. Technorati should explicitly
create "technokarma" which is tied to individuals, not the physical
location of blogs. So, when you start a new blog, or participate in a
group blog, you do not start from zero.This is a wider issue, though,
and not just about T'rati. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Inbound links reveal this little gem at General Disarray: I just
skimmed Freshblog’s complicated three-part series on adding categories
to Blogger blogs using a combination of del.icio.us and javascript. I’d
like to add my own tutorial on adding categories to your Blogger blog:
Switch to WordPress That pretty much covers it. My one-step process
will solve all of your problems. Unfortunately, the comments are off
over there so I can't leave a note of appreciation!!Update 2/3:
Alright... Clearly my attempt at dry & ironic didn't translate into
prose, so a debate has developed and clarification is required. To be
clear: This is a categories solution, but not one that I advocate. Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
Another very interesting and extensive essay on the structure and
function of tags & tagging, this one from Ideant. I was especially
drawn to this section dealing with tags as markers for readers'
attention: Tags are very efficient ways of allocating attention in the
face of informational overabundance. It takes very little time to
bookmark and tag a resource. Because users are the first ones to
benefit from classifying the resources that interest them, there is a
very high motivation to tag. Thus, what people are doing in reviewing
tags is capitalizing on attention allocated by others, specially on
aggregated attention (what happens when large groups of people allocate
attention to the same tag or resource, as seen in the 'Most Popular'
tag or resource feeds in a DCS). Permalink |
| 2006/02 |
There's a new beta tester forum at Performancing, so that members can
download and road-test the newest (beta) version of PFF. The
Performancing team are going to post "issues" in the forum, and invite
their community of users to test the new version. I'll be interested to
see which issues are selected for testing and development. Permalink |
| Archive Page | Post Preview |
| 2006/03 |
Six Apart (TypePad / Moveable Type) are offering a suite of easily
installed additional sidebar content tools for your blog. Pretty cool.
This "official" inclusion of third-party services is a great addition
to the service, and perhaps a pointer for possibilities w/ Blogger 2.0?
See Blogspotting, Message, Blog Herald and others.... Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Well.... actually the first rip-off, long anticipated and now arrived.
As we've seen, there's multiple versions of the Absolutely Del.icio.us
Complete Tool Collection on the Interweb. Well, guess what? Now there
are multiple versions of Blogger Hacks: The Series. Free Blogspot
Templates (nofollow with bells on) has lifted the text wholesale, and
although they link back to me, I'm feeling somewhat proprietary about
my content, and have asked that the post is taken down. The blog
doesn't allow comments, the template looks like a possible blogger
trademark violation, and the content appears sploggy in the extreme.
The site appears to be connected with Xkhanh. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
It is Mashup City over at Instabloke, where Bloke suggests a strategy
for adding the rel=tag attribute to Google Blogsearch operators in your
post footer. They're crawled as though they're tags, but when you click
'em, they niftily search for other examples of themselves across your
blog, and the search results serve as categories. Since the search URL
doesn't end the right way to be crawled by T'rati (so why are we adding
the rel=tag to it again?), you have to deploy a second stage of
nested-link hackery to fool the crawler... ...alright... so now I don't
get it..... SkepticRant's method seems a little smoother.... Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Great tip from Tarun, asking for an evaluation of the PsycHo template
building tool. Well, as you can see, I took the assignment pretty
seriously! Consider the tool evaluated. As with any template builder,
this would be great for a new site. If your blog is established,
customised, and loaded with goodies, you may have to cut and paste a
bit, but this is still a cool tool. It has built a great-looking (at
least IMHO) template for Freshblog. I am still recovering from the
sting of an inbound that said something like "bad layout, good
content," and when I set out to fix the CSS in the template header it
became a bit tricky.... Hopefully now the standard of the layout
approaches the standard of the content. There may be (will be?) bugs.
Please leave me a comment. I'll be grateful for the heads-up. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Tom Raftery muses about maximising the potential of Del.icio.us, and
holds up the inbox as an example of an under-utilised tool. Agreed. I'd
also suggest the for:username tag as a tool that stays in the box of
most account holders. Leave a comment on his post to suggest other
uber-user tricks. Filed in: del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
The Official Google Blog reports that the oft-rumored "seen in the
code" ability of reader to share content has gone live: You can send a
link to your starred items in Reader, and you can even put a clip on
your blog with recent items from your reading list. For instance, I
mark all of the interesting posts that I find as "linkblog."Looks like
it is all label based... (can we please start calling the damn things
"tags"?) and so requires a certain level of commitment to reader, and
the frequent labeling of content viewed therein. Here's the
screenshots, anyway, to help you along with this new feature. It isn't
difficult, I just really like screenshots! (These can be made larger by
clicking on them) 1. So what's this all about? The general intro / help
screen explains the send & sidebar functions. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Forgive the self-indulgence. Normal service will be resumed asap.
Freshblog isn't really 3... I mean, Freshblog will be 1 in April,
really, on the anniversary of the publication of my first del.icio.us
for categories hack. This birthday post is sneaking out today because
I've been blogging for three years... What a difference a year makes.
Freshblog turned two with minimal fanfare and no attention. The site
turns 3 ranked just the wrong side of 3000 (out of 30 million) on
T'rati, with 400 + subscribers, two additional contributors, and
100,000+ total page views.... Now, I realise this is an hour in the
life of the Instapundit, and that my blogstats are not so much to brag
about. Let's just say that I'm enjoying this a lot more now that
there's a community of readers and contributors here, and now that the
content is original, & useful to readers. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Use Haloscan comments? Sisyphean Musings lays out the Haloscan Recent
Comments Hack for your template-modifying pleasure. There are 4
commented-out clauses in the code that tell you how to edit it to suit
your purpose. Great addition to your sidebar if you're a Haloscan
comments user. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Steve Rubel wants to see an impartial third party collect auditing and
marketing data from the big blog networks... Auditing keeps publishers
humble. With social media networks, however, the game is more than just
about numbers. It's about reaching influencers. This means that
marketers need auditing that goes beyond reach and explores influence
metrics. So far, Nielsen BuzzMetrics is best positioned to develop the
kind of syndicated research marketers crave...So when does the new
media become more like the old media? My concern here is that this
reinforces the a-list and their claim to be "proper" bloggers, (because
they're listed / tracked / rated) and would make it harder for a
breakout blog from the long tail to be recognised as influential...
(Not tracked by X? Must not be consequential.... Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Google Blogoscoped points to Bloginfluence, an interesting service that
can aggregate many of the existing measurements of your blog's reach
and interactivity into a single (abstract and isolated) number. I rate
a 3734.4, whatever that means, (although Technorati didn't seem to
poll, and so there may be more digits to be had at another time....) My
influence [3734.4] Anyway. Brings up an interesting opportunity to ask
for your thoughts. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
No in depth review just yet, but I have signed up, added the code, and
look forward to seeing what the new service has to offer... Have also
(in response to a helpful comment from David) moved my sitemeter stamp
so that it is on every page again. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
ProBlogger points out that there's something new at SiteMeter, which
has been Freshblog's stats tracker of choice since day 1.... (or
whatever day it was that I decided I would like a stats tracker....)
:That the free website statistics package has added tracking of
outbound links to it’s offering. The free version of their service will
now track the last 100 URLs that your readers leave your blog to visit
if you have the javascript version of their tracker installed on your
blog.As Darren points out, they're pre-empting Performancing, & may
not win the war even with this new feature, but hey, more tracking is
never a bad thing.... even if it does show most folks leaving Freshblog
from the main page... Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Googlist present a considered and provocative list of 18 things that
would make Blogger a much more potent and respected blog host. I
particularly like number 1 - Categories with Tags... Imagine that?) and
numbers 11 & 12 - navigable file storage for images and other
blog-post enclosures, as well as (maybe?) some room for template
images. Just the thing to get a discussion rolling. I have a suspicion
that a lot of this stuff is coming, whenever Blogger gets its next
makeover.... We'll see. Check out the list & let me know what you
think... Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Have finally added the new hacks from January & February to Blogger
Hacks: The Series. The post is getting a bit unwieldy now, & I'm
wondering about other ways to organise the list.... Anyway. Current
good stuff now available, incl. Labelr, Freshtags for Wordpress,
Comment Editing,... Just when you thought it was safe to stop editing
your template..... Posted at 2:25 PM by John. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
A new tool for the definition of and participation in a "microsphere"
of blogs that are topically related to your own. Similicio.us is a
mashup of del.icio.us and easyutil.com. It's an experiment...to see
whether I can quickly find relevant web sites based on people's
tags/bookmarks on del.icio.us, using the engine from easyutil.com. It
answers the question "people who tagged this site also tagged what
other sitesLooks pretty cool. It will show you what else was tagged on
del.icio.us by the folks who tagged your site, and will therefore give
you a look at related readings, as well as a sense of the "genre" that
your readers think your blog is in. The creator, Ying Xie, is just
pulling popular information from Del. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Good news for WordPress users! The FreshTags blog navigation system now
comes in a WordPress flavour, thanks to the tireless work of
Singpolyma. Since WordPress has native support for blog categories,
this plug-in allows familiar FreshTags features like "tag grabbing"
(extracting tags out of inbound search queries) and "tag passing"
(passing reader-selected tags to the next blog). Singpolyma has also
advanced the state-of-the-art for blogrolling. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
I have a strong interest in the sometimes shady world of Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). SEO and SEM is
the use of techniques to improve the ranking of a web page in search
engine results. If, for example, you have a website selling blue
widgets, you want people who Google for "blue widgets" to easily find
your page. One way to enhance your search engine placement is to buy
links from other websites. Google frowns on this practice and will
penalize your site if they catch you doing it, but some highly ranked
websites make decent money by selling links to your page. Bloggers are
also known to accept money to make favorable mention and provide a link
to a website. Your hypothetical seller of blue widgets may visit a site
where link selling occurs and offer $20 to any blogger who will write a
post about his site. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Moshare have developed a very cool php-based category method that works
w/ blogger blogs that are published to host servers via FTP. If you're
on blogspot, this won't work for you, but if you have a server, bring
on the heavily integrated categories. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
We're in good company w/ the whole del.icio.us tagging malarkey... I
wonder if this means that we'll find all sorts of well, er... news on
the del.icio.us frontpage instead of the usual geekery?
Washingtonpost.com last week announced the launch of a partnership with
De.licio.us. The deal allows us to offer tagging capabilities on all
articles on the site. The service launched on February 23. By taking
advantage of this partnership, washingtonpost.com readers will now be
able to save articles into del.icio.us's central database, which allows
for easy retrieval for reading at a later date or for you to share your
favorite articles with other readers. Prety cool. Permalink |
| 2006/03 |
Internet Marketing Blog challenges the blogosphere to forgo the
self-reinforcing blogs of the T'rati 100, and to loudly declare an
interest in lesser-heard voices and the quieter corners of the web: I
challenge every blogger to post links to new blogs, unknown blogs and
blogs not in the Technorati’s Top 100. And I’ll pay out a total of
$10,000 to those who participate. All I ask is that you announce on
your own blog your intentions to blog about newer, less known blogs,
and post your blog URL here in the comments. ( A link would be
appreciated but is not required. Permalink |
| Archive Page | Post Preview |
| 2006/04 |
Spinning off the user subscription feature from the inbox (and
clarifying it to no end in the process) Del.icio.us have added a new
feature called the "Network." This allows you to monitor all the
bookmarks of users whom you are stalking...er, I mean, users who share
your interests and whose bookmarking activities you'd like to follow.
So, to be clear about what's going on over there: The Inbox is where
you read your tag subscriptionsYour Network is where del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
I may be six months late with this hack, since icon buttons at the
bottom of your posts are officially no longer cool. But in case they
see a revival, you can be ready with the Markit buttons. These work
like the traditional buttons, except they help your readers populate
the "notes" or extended free-text fields of their bookmarks. By
default, the button will dump the first 255 characters (truncated to
the last whole word) into the notes field. Unless they've selected some
text on your page, in which case that text will be used as the notes.
The idea is that most of the time, the best summary or notes will be in
the first paragraph. But, sometimes, it'll be another snippet
elsewhere. Most bookmarklets support this capture, so the footer icon's
should too. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Great-looking implementation of Freshtags at Dumb Little Man. Choose
your topic from the scrolling text box, and see the posts pop up in the
column to the right. Freshtags in 2 columns. Cool! There's plenty of
customisation going on out there. Let us know how you're making
Freshtags work for you.... Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
As promised, a little more on Feedburner's Feedflare. Marshall
Kirkpatrick points to a new Feedburner feature that will let you
customise your post footer in your feed. Not only can you add
pre-selected modules, but the service has been opened up so that you
can write your own. Feedburner maintains a list of all the currently
developed units in their Feedflare Catalog. They also make it
ridiculously easy for you to implement a custom unit: To use 3rd Party
Flare, just copy the Flare's address (found in the “Use this link”
entries below) and paste it into the Personal Flare field on the
FeedFlare service setup form for your feed. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
In response to yesterday's exploration of microspheres within the
blogosphere, Tor has leveraged the Del.icio.us category method to
provide multiple topical feeds for those readers who are interested in
part of his content, but perhaps not all of it. In the case of his
multi-topic blog, we're talking Buddhism, Libertarianism, and the State
of Maine. The feeds are run through Feedburner to provide maximum
stats, feedback, and the Feedflare footer (of which more later...) If
you've implemented categories on your blog using Del.icio.us, you can
do the same! Del.icio.us offers feeds for each of your tags, so using
Feedburner is polish rather than necessity. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Responding to a survey that evaluates the behavior of folks who read
different kinds of blogs, Steve Rubel points out that the problem with
surveys like this one is that the blogosphere has a lot of gray areas.
There are some blogs that are about cats. There are others that are
about world affairs. And there are even more that are about cats and
world affairs on the same page. How do you classify which is which?
Regular readers can predict very easily how I responded to this, and
are probably bored to tears with the whole thing, since there have been
6 posts since last October throwing around the concept of the
Microsphere. Time, I think, to be a little more articulate and
definitive on the subject. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
The other navigation drawback of Blogger (apart from the lack of
categories) is the absence of next/prev post buttons. Freshblog has
seen an ingenious earlier solution via ecmanaut, though it apparently
requires daily archiving plus a complete re-publish each time. I've
gone for the Pareto 80/20 rule: 80% as good, for 20% of the effort.
This hack requires the publisher to link to a small (3K) JavaScript
file and put a whole lot of code into their template. If you've got a
standard blog, it takes about 5 minutes. Once done, you get next/prev
links (or buttons) next to each item (posts and comments) on your main,
archive and post pages. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Three new userscripts for blogger, courtesy of Kuribo. Now you can add
emoticons to Blogger, add an append link for CoComment, and (this is
the one that I'm really excited about) generate a sitemap for Blogger.
These are hosted on Userscripts.org too, but there's something going on
over there and I can't access those versions. So. Sitemaps in review,
since that's the one that's really got me interested. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Long Zheng reports that he's created a new Technorati tag generator for
use with Blogger and other services. You can read about Tagalong on his
blog, and of course you can take it for a road-test yourself. Pretty
cool. This is a web-based application that you'd keep open in another
window as you blogged. Not the most integrated solution, then, but a
couple of neat features make up for that... Custom prefixCustom
seperatorThe option to enable DIV tags and CSS, and Easy integration
with your Technorati username, for "Technorati Personal" tags like
these. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Internet Explorer users are now no longer safe from the peril of
FlickrFont, the distributed social font discussed on Freshblog. Thanks
to the Flickr Developers' Yahoo! Group, the outstanding issue with how
Flickr presents JSON feeds has been resolved. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
3 new Freshtags powered blogs over the weekend. Welcome to: The Noiz
BeginsSatisficedTapping IntoVery cool!! Filed in: freshtags, blogtech,
webtech, categories, blogger-hacks, del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Hack requests, like buses, seem to come along in groups... The
difference is that I'm not out in the snow waiting for them (at least
not most of the time...) So, 3 e-mails this weekend exploring the
possibilities displaying recent posts in blogger. 2 requests to add
posts to the menu / make it longer, and a request for sticky posts. It
seems that the menu itself is pretty hack-proof, and that the 10 titles
that immediately precede the page that you're on is the best we can
get. An alternative, for posts that are sort of sticky, in a "jam in
the margin of your sidebar" sort of way, (mmmm, thumbprinty!) is the
use of Freshtags for a categories menu that will pull relevant &
clickable post titles into your sidebar when your readers select the
topic that they're interested in. Make your blog truly dynamic, &
"replace" the 10 recent posts menu, with Freshtags. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
A decidedly-mercurial thought occurred to me about the confluence of
tags, blogs and advertising made possible by FreshAds ... the
possibility of using different advertising account IDs based on tag. Ie
you could use this system to display an Amazon or AdSense banner ad,
but with different account IDs (and hence revenue destination)
depending on the tag. How could this change blogging business models?
Most obviously, you could tag posts by user on multi-user blogs, so
each blogger would get ad revenue in proportion to his or her post
popularity. (Note to John: I'm not suggesting this for Freshblog!)
Another possibility would be for a blog publisher to "sell" a post (or
at least, ad revenue arising from the post) by using FreshAds to insert
the buyer's Amazon Associate (or AdSense) ID on the banner ads. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Over at The Last Word, Aditya has put Freshtags to work to set himself
up with an automatically updating list of sticky posts. He's tagged all
his sticky stuff "Highlights," and then set Freshtags to show those
posts as the default. Very nice, and mighty dynamic in a Freshtags way,
of course! No hard-code updates of any sidebar elements required when a
new sticky post is produced. Ah, Freshtags... everyone should have one!
So... Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Another new method for categories from Rangga. This one a manual
method, but clean and easy nonetheless. If you post occasionally, and
aren't too bothered about additional exposure from tags, this would
work out great for you. Have a regular blog full of uncategorised
posts.Set up a second blog to serve as your category manager.On your
second blog, have one post per category.Edit each single-category post
to include a link to the relevant posts on your main blog.Add a link to
each of these category posts to the sidebar on your main blog.Pretty
cool! A bit labor intensive if you're a ten-posts-a-day person, but
good for the low-volume blogger. All done w/ HTML too, so no CSS or
scripty knowledge required. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Baher @ Technoogle points out that both Vista and IE7 are going to use
a customiseable rss portal as their default start page, opening up the
custom power of the portal to anyone with a PC, and perhaps giving
feeds the push that will make them mainstream? Filed in: webtech
microsoft Posted at 5:14 PM by John. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
There's an abundance of goodies out there for the blogger who wants to
get a bit of show / hide action going on their blog. Expandable posts
are useful if you write long posts and want to tease your readers with
a little something but keeep your template looking stylish. There are a
number of strategies available to get this done.... by the end of this
post I'll probably wish I was using one of them! Blogger themselves
offer a couple of different strategies for this. The expandable post
summaries hack uses conditional tags, wraps the part of your post that
you want to hide in a special span tag (which you can add to the post
template so that it is always there waiting for you), and only shows it
on the post page. The "read more" link is really a link to the post
page. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
A reader mails to ask what I know about setting up a "print view" in
blogger, so that posts can print without a sidebar or header (or
blogger nav-bar?). The answer, of course, is notalot, but hey, let's
flip some pancakes and see if any of them stick to the ceiling. CSS?
Phillip at You've Been Haacked has a pretty cool "print" link on each
post page of his blog that would seem to do the trick, by creating a
new page & only pulling certain elements from the original. This
works by opening a print dialog box, & having the box refer to a
print preview page stylesheet. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Some buzz about the impossibility of reading Blogger's captcha images
this week, esp. from Phydeaux3, who has taken out his captcha
frustration on a spiffy new template. Zenyenta has the answer. Kitten
Authentication. This is a 3 x 3 tiled image of various zoological
organisms, only 3 of which are of the kitty variety. The system
requires that you click all 3 kitties to verify that you are a human.
No more warpy words, just cute and cuddly kitties. Sort of reminds me
of the BlogExplosion "click on the right number" imagemap link, but
with hairballs! On a related issue (this is one of the tiles in the
system, honest!)... Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Taking up John's call for innovative new FreshTags applications, I
present the FreshAds extension to the FreshTags blog navigation system.
The idea is straightforward: when your readers select a set of tags of
interest, your advertising messages should be tailored to those tags.
Everyone's happy: it boosts the chances that your readers see something
of interest, that sponsors will get a click and you (the publisher)
will get your few cents. This article explains how FreshAds works,
demos a working example and gives you step-by-step instructions on
getting it set up on your own pages. Under The Hood FreshAds is a part
of the FreshTags family of navigation tools. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Phil at Hysterical and Useless belies his own blog's name with a very
innovative and interesting application for Freshtags. He's set up his
tag cloud on a stand-alone page, is showing a huge number of tags, and
is putting Freshtags to work to call post titles in at the end of the
page. Very cool. Are you doing something cool with Freshtags? Let us
know. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
There's a backlash against the social bookmarking one-click icon in
your post-footer. Michael at Binary Bonsai calls it Digg-whoring. He
cites WG, who note the overall ugliness of the buttons, and their
similarity to the "add to your reader" buttons that can get messy (and
were recently retired from Freshblog.) I would add that I used to have
search links for individual post inbounds too, but they went the way of
all things a while back, in the interests of streamlining the template.
I guess they're right. Del.icio.us users are going to bookmark your
stuff if they like it, whether or not you have an icon... and I'm no
more likely to get slashdotted with the icon than I was without it....
don't make me beg.... er... Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Lioness points out that the Del.icio.us extension for Firefox makes it
much easier to tag old posts.... Simply right-click a link to the post
that you want to bookmark (from your archive page, for example). You'll
have to re-enter post titles, but it cuts out the step of reloading all
your post pages. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Question. Is there a smart way to run multiple scripts on the page, to
decrease load time & make everything smooth? This template is much
faster than my last one because I have (temporarily?) dropped Labelr,
and because it uses off the peg backlinks rather than the custom ones.
Quoting NukeMods, a reader asks if there's a way to smarten up a
template with multiple scripts.... Update: Link revised, so now it
actually works! Posted at 4:55 PM by John. Permalink |
| 2006/04 |
Koranteng, in an exploration of folksonomy that is also a work of comic
genius (in which he confesses to an "affair" with a fellow user of
del.icio.us, whose tags enable him to better comprehend his own stuff)
puts Freshblog squarely in the "glue layer." New to me but applicable,
I guess, since we're making the code "sticky" so that it can be used
more widely? Posted at 4:45 PM by John. Permalink |
| Archive Page | Post Preview |
| 2006/05 |
The Retrospector has taken the 80 submissions to Darren's Habits of
Highly Effective Bloggers series, and run the numbers to see what
advice is most common and which of the habits are the most widespread.
V. interesting.... What is your percentage of effectiveness? Filed in:
blogging Posted at 7:55 PM by John. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Another great new way to add inline comments to your blog comes our way
from Azer Koculu. The download is a *.rar file, which is not the most
accessible format in the universe (witness my inability to open it....
I'll have to go download winrar!) but there's all sorts of goodies
wrapped up in the zip file, including a script. Sound familiar? More
work for Stephen's jscripts.ning.com, methinks! Judging by the
application on Azer's blog, the comment entry form is neat, & it
looks to work great. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Looks like the latest cool formatting tool to arrive on the scene is
the offset text box, which lets you pull out a choice quote, format it
for maximum impact, and offset it within your post to catch your
readers' eye. I noticed this first a few weeks back with a how-to at
Mandarin Design, You can see the hack or one just like it in action on
Annie's Blogger University. Well, Al points out a similar hack, by the
ARC90 lab, this one designed to put footnotes in the text boxes instead
of choice selections of prose. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Philipp Lenssen points out the changes on the Del.icio.us frontpage.
Any thoughts? While clearly designed to make things appear more dynamic
over there, with a short list of 3 "hot links every hour" appearing at
the top of the page, I'm not sure that I like it as much as the long
list of random frontpage goodies that you could browse to see what's
going on across the whole site. I liked the color coded "how many
people have bookmarked what" list, and the longer list of random
goodies. Phillipp also makes a great point that is suggestive of the
future of social bookmarking. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Here is the latest in my "Just because you can, doesn't mean you
should" series of bloghacks. In this one, I build on Adi's excellent
Native Blog Search hack (incorporating Singpolyma's rss2json service).
The idea is to replicate more-or-less Blogger's Backlink feature, but
with a twist. For starters, it's dynamic, so it will always get the
freshest links out of Google's blogsearch. You also get the first
paragraph in the tool-tip when you move your mouse over the link. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Not content with blogging my comments from other folks' blogs, I'm
blogging my comments from my own blog. Ron has added Freshtags to his
blog, & has asked for a bit more info about the option for an
archive menu with post count. Here's the (hopefully comprehensive)
scoop: This hack uses a bookmarklet and menu combo that allows you to
bookmark your archive pages on del.icio.us with a special tag, and a
post count. That way you can pull these pages out of del.icio.us and
into a sidebar menu that includes a post count & gives your readers
a sense of how much stuff you're writing & what's happening on your
blog. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
As Tags become widespread and well-used, is it time for a dedicated and
feature rich tag-site designed especially for bloggers? John T thinks
so, and is chasing up the possibilities. He's shooting for
auto-detection like Technorati, with an exportable tag cloud like
Del.icio.us, and a slick appearance, perhaps customiseable so that it
would match your template. So what would this service look like, and
what would we need it to do? Perhaps it could have The ability to
generate tags w/ custom URL's that were visible in all other tag search
services. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Great post by Denise that comes via Full Circle. Discussion of the
blogroll as a feature of the blog, and 5 questions about the role of
your 'roll. Here's my 10 cents: 1) why do you have a blogroll? I had a
blogroll because most of the blogs that I read when I started to blog,
and most of the blogs that I read now, do. I had a blogroll before I
knew what RSS was, or had an account with a reader, and so I used to
find stuff to write about by hitting up my favorite reads in turn, and
cutting & pasting where necessary into a new compose window. In my
case, RSS killed the Blogroll show, and I don't even click out of my
own blog that way any more. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
This is the question posed by Marshall Kirkpatrick. Marshall wonders
whether the features added by the buttons are worth their aesthetic
downside. The great stuff is in the comments, where he goes on to
wonder whether all of these “easy connection” tools are just little
levers that only some people will use as part of a blog’s larger
connection to the world? Hmmm…My response is in a comment over there...
but a lil' repost never killed anyone. Part of my hack-addiction (and
part of what is so great about blogs in general) is that they make
information as interactive, adaptable and accessible as possible....
moving beyond the book, if you like. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
3Spots keeps on top of the bookmark buttons issue, presenting a great
new tool for generating your button code which will also keep that code
in a bookmarklet for you, so that you can retrieve it & paste
easily. There's also a link to a show/hide hack for the buttons. Now
that keeps your template tidy! Excellent. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
If you change your URL, or move to WP even, DON'T DELETE YOUR OLD BLOG!
Leave it there for the links, and the goodness, and the memories of the
old times, and so that your subscribers don't have to put up with
sploggers poaching your URL and delivering their spam-infested
crapulousness to your feedreader. There were some good blogger hacks
over there... I guess they're gone now, replaced w/ advertisements for
assorted herbal remedies and quackery. At least now we know where to go
for Viagra... Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Anyone else notice a change in Feedburner stats over the weekend? Both
my comment feed and post feed are up by 100 subs since Friday, which is
v. interesting. Post feed only, & I would have thought I'd had a
bump from a big inbound or something... Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Visit The Last Word and Bloggeratto to check out Aditya's excellent
output options for the del.icio.us "tags as categories" blogger hack.
It's all asynchronous, & so loads up after your page, & isn't a
drag on the whole blog. Very nice indeed, especially the way that it is
set up there, w/ a pop-up sidebar and a table of post titles that
appears at the top of the main frame. This is a great use of space on
the page, & allows for a post preview to be included in the
category search results. Excellent. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
More good stuff at Library Clips, this time some thoughts about
courtesy, notification and what John is calling "homepage trackback..."
the ability to "push" a post to a reader whom you know will be
interested in the content. If you've talked about an issue of interest
to a blogger, but you don't have a post to ping, what should you do?
Blogger has an "e-mail this post" feature, which will let you e-mail
this post (duh!) to anyone who's interested. This requires that you've
got the address of the person, some sense that you'll get past their
spam filter, and that you can find the e-mail icon on your blog....
It's there somewhere.... John explores other ways of doing this...
Interesting to think of the blogosphere as "pull" vs. "push," and to
address new ways of "pushing" content. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Darren @ Problogger has set up a "group writing project" on the habits
of effective bloggers. You let him know you've written a post, &
he'll link to it this week. An interesting way to collect the wisdom of
the blogosphere & to share the love / influence. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
John T @ Library Clips revisits the Del.icio.us network page to see
that if you go to "your network", you will see a section on the sidebar
called "your fans". These are people who have you in their network (you
can set your network to private, so no-one can see which users you
subscribe to). Great use of the network feature! People who are
interested in your stuff will be interested in other, similar stuff
that is bookmarked by other people, & so will lead you to new
resources. To see the network of a del.icio.us user, simply log in,
view the user's bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/username then select
"view network" from the greyed-out bar at the top of the page. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
A reader e-mails to ask how to hack the blogger comments code to make
the post count grammatically correct... Comments (0), Comment (1),
Comments (2), that sort of deal. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Another way to track the status & traffic of your blog comes our
way from Wholinked.com. This is a neat little sidebar widget that
queries search engines for your most recent inbound links and outputs
them in a list. The service is currently free, although the "what's
this?" link at the bottom of the box flashes an ad when you select it.
For a review of the service, (and an interesting "marketing" challenge
w/ a cash prize attached) see Technology Evangelist. Two ways to look
at this, of course.... it tells you who linked to you, and tells your
readers how authoritative you are based on how authoritative your
inbounds are, but it also serves as an automatic backlink on your site
for anyone who links in, including those ever creative "marketers"... Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Over at The Last Word, Aditya has come up with a great blog-search hack
that displays the search results in your template. As regular readers
know, one of the things that adds value to a hack & makes it worth
implementing is the nature of the output. Are you taken offsite / to a
3rd party to see search results, category lists &c, or can you pull
those goodies back into your sidebar (or a fake post) for maximum
integration and slick-looking professionalism? So... This hack takes
Google Blog Search results, converts them to a JSON feed and lets you
format them any way that you please on your blog. Cool. The code is
alll available at The Last Word. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Hot on the heels of Singpolyma's Tagging Thesaurus project comes new
taggy goodness in the form of a webservice from knallgrau, boldly
dubbed tagthe.net. (These guys are seriously ambi.tio.us) This is a
simple webservice that helps you in tagging textual content on and off
the web. There are two ways of using it: 1. by simply pasting a URL or
a text in the fields below or uploading a file 2. by using the REST API
tagthe.net then returns a set of tags based on the textual content you
specified. The algorithms is far from perfect, but it's exciting enough
to warrant attention from bloghackers and tagerati everywhere. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
In a move that pushes last week's discussion of tag-passing to the next
level, Stephen has come up with Tagging, a great new Ning application
to enable the consolidation of similar tags. Tagging has an API that
will enable applications to poll for "virtually synonymous" tags, and
then output a broader range of results based on the accessed pool of
synonyms and not just the individually searched tag. Stephen explains:
Virtually synonymous means that two tags mean the same thing in
practise. Variant spellings (web2.0 and web20, or colour and color) and
plurals (hack and hacks) are usually virtually synonymous. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Leveraging the information that passes through their hands in an
interesting new way (which came to my attention via Micropersuasion)
Technorati have started representing the info about your blog on an
index card. (Kinja plaques, anyone?) Interesting compound view of
relevant info, w/ the innovation that you can see how many people have
"favorited" your blog. Another metric to start losing weight / sleep /
hair over! Great to have all the goodies on one page! Consolidation is
surely the future of the blog-tracker market, & the one-stop stats
page seems to be the latest frontier in the battle.... Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Emphasising mobility, Stowe Boyd blogs on the death of the browser, and
has good stuff to say: The browser will explode into a thousand
fragments, will spawn a thousand specialized offspring. They will share
common DNA, and many of the components will remain common, but I
predict a huge surge in this form of innovation, especially as we move
toward mobile, ubiquitous, handheld, always on computing. Like the
dinosaurs, the browser will apparently become extinct, but in fact will
live on, as in the form of modern day birds, a thousand times lighter,
faster, and smaller than their lumbering ancestors.... Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Have found the time (despite having many other things that ought to
have been done) to throw out my old "Sticky Posts" sidebar box, and
come back with the rockin' dynamic Freshtags "Highlights" post-title
list. The sidebar now lists what I consider to be the 15 most critical
Freshblog posts by default. Cool! More to come too, I think... Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Singpolyma mashes up two of the coolest comment hacks available to
allow you to add profile photos for your commenters, and to enable you
to highlight your own comments. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
After experimenting with bookmarking buttons and seeing 3-spot's
impressive array, it occurred to me that there's a helluva lot more
ways of getting tags in to your social bookmarker than getting them out
again. Hence, TagOverlay was born. It's a pretty straightforward idea:
you click a magic button on your browser (bookmarklet) that will suck
down an arbitrary user's tags, trawl through the current page's text
looking for matches, and throws some highlights around them. For
additional fun, you can also toggle a pop-up box full of links via a
mouseover. OK, let's see this working. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Improbulus highlights Craffter's new venture, a blog-hacks and add-ons
blog called Blogeratto. He's started strong w/ a very cool hover-over
show/hide navbar hack. Now you can have your Navbar and hide it too!
Looks like there's plenty more good stuff to come over there. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
The latest at 3 Spots is a how-to for the category method which is in
use there. A 3-part how-to for a 3-part hack. You'll need a collapsible
sidebar, bookmarked posts in the social-bookmarking service of your
choice, and the ability to pull linkrolls or content feeds from the
service that you select in order to build the collapsible sidebar. All
explained very clearly and in a way that encourages customisation /
application to your favorite social bookmarker... Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
So Phydeaux3's revised category method, promoted prematurely on this
blog last week, is now live and ready for use. The system has a new
name and a new website on Google Pages! D2B! Very cool! Filed in:
blogtech, webtech, categories, blogger-hacks, del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
I just noticed that Blogger.com finally features audio word
verification for sight-impaired users. Click the accessibility icon and
you'll hear some digits that you need to type into the form to verify
that you're human. Posted at 1:44 PM by Fritz. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Hmmm. Interesting, debateable and provocative category hack at Stupid
Stuff. Ionut categorises his blog posts by changing their publication
dates once they fall off the front page so that they appear in the
archive for a day/month of his choosing. He has hard-coded links to
those archives in the sidebar, and they're labeled as categories. "Hall
of Shame" posts, for example (including a classic series of photographs
in which two recovery cranes follow a white car into a harbor) are all
made to seem as if they were written on January 1st, 2001. Upside: This
is all happening within his blog, and is very possible w/ existing
blogger features. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Three Spots' list of social bookmarking icons, that contained the code
for 30 services when I blogged about it in February, now contains add
code for 87 services and counting. Wow! Great service. Makes me wonder
how soon it will be before there are ratings for these services to make
it easier for new users to decide which one to use. Makes me wonder how
many more of these services the web can reasonably support..... Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
3-Spots rolls out some very fine looking categories. Not only is there
a very nifty pop-out sidebar, but a "Freshtags" style menu that calls
the post titles for each tag into a list under the tag, and all done
with Netvouz instead of Del.icio.us. Very cool! Now there's a hack
that's in need of a how-to... If you write it, Yuri, I'll link to it
for sure! Filed in: freshtags, blogtech, webtech, categories,
blogger-hacks, del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Chorus Line points out a new feature that will enable blogspotters to
verify their sites on sitemaps. As an alternate to the frustratingly
impossible file upload method, you can use a special meta-tag for the
purpose. Pretty cool. For more, see Google's "claiming your site" help
page. Claiming was a snap. Log in to sitemaps with a Gmail or Google
account, enter your URL to add the site, and then select verify as an
option. Open your blogger template in another window, because you'll
paste in the new tag while you're on the verify page, and republish. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
It's your blog, after all... If you'd like your comments to stand out
on your blog, Aditya at The Last Word has a hack that will get the job
done for you. This is a level 2 (or 3) hack, and requires that you
first format your blog to have inline comments. These pop out from
under your post on the main page, and don't require your reader to
visit the bizarre nether-world of the tan n' orange blogger comments
page, or your post page, before they see the comments on your blog.
Spiffy, but only the beginning! Inline comments enabled? Groovy! Now
wrap the whole comment code, including the comment author info, in its
own special tag that doesn't see much action elsewhere on your page. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Mario from Caso Pathologico sends word of two new hacks for Blogger.
The first reverses the order of the posts listed on your main and
archive pages, so that the early stuff is at the top of the pile and
the new stuff is at the end... This also allows for a very slick
"change the post order" link at the top of Mario's main page. Mario's
second hack uses Del.icio.us to add "Random Post" links to your blog.
This requires that you bookmark all of your posts there... so I know a
couple of hundred bloggers who have a leg-up! There are translation
links in the post footers, but if you read English, you may be better
placed if you click the [English] links that follow each paragraph on
Mario's blog. Del.icio. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Tarun e-mails to point me to Mandarin Design. Pretty cool. I think I've
been there once before & haven't made much of it, but there's
plenty of good stuff there to see, including some mighty-fine layout
tricks for your template, not the least of which are magazine style
pullquotes. Permalink |
| 2006/05 |
Phydeaux3 has reworked his category script to boost the features and
functions. Check it out: New features are the ability to use one
del.icio.us account for multiple blog categorization, or just to use
the same account to categorize your blog and still use it normally for
other bookmarks. Also added the option to include a link to the RSS
feed for each "category", figure since del.icio.us offers it why not
use it. The major benefit of this method (the kick-ass sidebar
tagcloud) seems to have made the transition between versions too. Permalink |
| Archive Page | Post Preview |
| 2006/06 |
Randy points out a detailed how-to at Hakuna Matata for those of us who
want to use Google Sitemaps with Blogger, can't upload the verification
file, and need to validate by inserting a meta tag. There are
screencaps and a detailed 6-step how-to. Cool. See what happened when I
validated this way, & check out a couple of tools that let you ping
Google to declare your updates, in the Freshblog Archive. |