1. Blogger in Draft

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    …because "in Draft" sounds cooler than BETA.

    Yes, Blogger is at it again. Releasing new and (sometimes) exciting features. I took a bit of a spin with it today to see what is up.

    The major additions are in regards to some of the rougher bits of Blogger 3.0 - the template WYSIWYG template editor.  Some sorts of widgets have been sorely lacking for some time.  Subscription links (for feeds) are new trivial to add to one's Blogger sidebar.  Better for hackers, Google Gadgets can now be directly added.  The fact that this comes so close on the heels of OpenSocial is doubtfully a coincidence.  This opens Blogger up to a large number of new functionalities instantly.  Other new widgets include a search box, polls, and a sideshow widget for photos.

    Videos are now just as trivial to add to posts as images.  A loss useful feature, but cool none the less.

    Now for my favourite and most exciting feature - OpenID!  Yes, you read it correctly, the new Blogger (which could doubtless be dubbed Blogger 4.0) has support for leaving comments using OpenID!

    This is exciting for a number of reasons, but largest of all is that this will soon expose THOUSANDS of people to OpenID.  This could easily take it from a geek tech to mainstream knowledge.

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    Creative Commons Licence © 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.
    Stephen Weber at 2007-11-30 15:59 | 1 Comment / Trackback

  2. Content in Footer for Single-Author Blogger Blogs

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    Awhile ago I received this message from an unidentified user:

    Title: photo for authors
    Can you use javascript to show an author's photo in the footer of a post? I've looked everywhere and only find it in the old blogger Any help would be awesome!

    While a script based on my new comment author photos could be built to inject the image for the post author (multi-author blogs), I thought it might first be useful to provide basic information about hard-coding this.

    1. Go to the Template tab on your blog's dashboard
    2. Select Edit HTML
    3. Check the Expand Widget Templates box
    4. Find the code block starting with <div class='post-footer'> or after <data:post.body/>
    5. Insert the content you want there
    6. Save!
    Tags:
    Creative Commons Licence © 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.
    Stephen Weber at 2007-09-12 10:53 | No Comments / Trackbacks

  3. FreshTags' Static Widgets

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    This enhancement to FreshTags in response to Amit, who has been persistently requesting the feature in comments and a ticket. FreshTags now has the ability to generate widgets (from any source) which are locked on to a particular tag(s). For example:

    <!-- FreshTags0.5-Singpolyma2 -->
    <script type="text/javascript">
    if(typeof(WidgetData) != 'object') WidgetData = {};
    if(typeof(WidgetData['freshtags']) != 'object') WidgetData['freshtags'] = {};
    WidgetData['freshtags']['freshtags_static'] = {
    "type":"posts",
    "source":"source",
    "format":"drop",
    "defs":"tags",
    "force_defs":true,
    "username":"del.icio.us username",
    "url":"blog url",
    "join_char":"/",
    "tag_url":"/search/label/%tags%",
    "sort":"alpha",
    "rows":100
    };
    </script>
    <script src="http://jscripts.ning.com/get.php?xn_auth=no&id=818185" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <div id="freshtags_static"></div>
    <a href="http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/freshtags/" title="Categories by FreshTags"><img alt="FreshTags" src=" http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/freshtags/freshtags-btn.png"/></a>
    <!– /FreshTags0.5-Singpolyma2 –>

    The above code must (for new Blogger users) be inserted into a new HTML/JavaScript sidebar widget. Source (in red) must be either del.icio.us, blogger, or mediawiki (use blogger for labels on posts in the new Blogger). Defs (in red) should be a +-separated list of tags to load into the widget (or just one tag). Username (in blue) must be replaced with your del.icio.us username (if source is del.icio.us) or the whole line must be removed. URL (in blue) must be replaced with the full URL to your Blogger blog (ie, http://you.blogspot.com/) if source is blogger or the whole line must be removed. Join_char (in blue) must be / if source is blogger and + otherwise.

    The ID (in purple) is fine to leave if you are only going to insert this widget once. For the second, third, etc widgets you must change it to something like freshtags_static2. The higher reference (also in purple) to freshtags_static must also be changed. Second, third, etc widgets do not need the <script> tag that is in purple near the end.

    If you have any questions, just ask!

    Tags:
    Creative Commons Licence © 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.
    Stephen Weber at 2007-05-14 14:17 | 19 Comments / Trackbacks

  4. The State of Distributed Social Networking

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    Also known as Portable Social Networking, this is the concept of decentralising the social networking functionality of sites like Facebook so that one does not have to use every service to connect with everyone (previously covered here).

    Videntity is a wonderful service for this movement, and one that I have been using as the hub of much of my efforts. Explode seems promising, but they're down for upgrade.

    So let's talk about my list from last time:

    1. hCards and Pingerati : For Blogger I have a wizard. Pingerati pings still manual.  For WordPress there is a widget.  Pings still manual.  For even more professional information (such as my resume) there is an hResume WordPress Plugin.  For other websites/services there is always the hCard Creator.  Of course, Videntity.org supports hCard by default.
    2. XFN Friends lists : For Blogger I have a wizard.  This wizard will actually work on any web page or on any service where you can post (X)HTML (including MySpace or Xanga!)  For WordPress there is a nice plugin, although a widget version would be a bonus.  Videntity supports this by default.

      As far as finding/adding friends goes I have a bookmarklet for Videntity that allows one to add hCards, Facebook results, or Wink.com people results as friends/contacts.  Bookmarklets for other services would not be hard.  For Blogger we would need an actual blogroll-producing service beyond just a wizard to make this work.

    3. Public/private profiles : Again, Videntity has this built right in (as long as you have the URL that the contact uses for OpenID on the friend list, it does not follow rel=me).  I am working on a solution for WordPress.  Would people be interested in a solution for Blogger/other websites?
    4. Messaging : not sure where I stand on this.  Lots of nice contact options, and creating a 'wall'-like interface on WordPress would be easy.  The question is : what is the goal of this?  If it is just the address book features then a way to integrate social networking contact lists with email clients / Gmail might be better.  If it is being able to communicate without revealing your email address a protocol/system for that might be easy enough.

      My brother (and avid Facebooker) says that it is about visibility.  The benefit of Facebook messaging, for him, is the unified notifications area that he KNOWS his friends all check.  He KNOWS that they will see his message.  He is not sure they check their email.

    I still promote the idea of supporting rel=tag on hCards.  We need a better hCard search engine, one that takes Pingerati pings, crawls regularly (some of my pings from months ago were never indexed by the Technorati Kitchen hCard search), outputs results as hCards (to facilitate things like my bookmarklet), and recognizes rel=tag.

    Perhaps a tagspace could do a rev=tag for members.  If an hCard URL has rel=tag to a page that has rev=tag to it that would give credibility to the category.

    Notifications (think Facebook mini-feed) need to fit into this idea somehow.  Events are hCalendar.  Notes/posts/shares are hAtom/xFolk.  Status is something I've blogged about recently too.  Services like Twitter are heading in the right direction.

    Tags:
    Creative Commons Licence © 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.
    Stephen Weber at 2007-05-09 19:30 | No Comments / Trackbacks

  5. New Comment Photo Hack (Blogger)

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    By demand, I have added a maxheight option to this hack as well, it works the same way as maxwidth :)

    Some people have really liked my comment photos and highlighting hack. Many have hated it. Especially since the move to the new Blogger, the hack is just unstable and difficult to implement or understand. Even my own implementation (before the move) was doing odd things.

    So I decided that a complete rewrite was in order. The old scripts are still intact, but this new hack uses none of the old code. This hack does only comment author photos (highlighting is better handled other ways in the new Blogger).

    This hack is 100% compatible with the newest version of my asynchronous peek-a-boo comments.

    Without further ado, the instructions:

    1. Go to 'Edit HTML' under Template and check the 'Expand Widget Templates' box.
    2. Find the following code:

      <dl id='comments-block'>
      <b:loop values='data:post.comments' var='comment'>

      and insert the following code directly after it:

      <div style="clear:both">
      <dt style="float:left;margin-right:5px;clear:both;" expr:id='"commentphoto" + data:comment.id'></dt>
      <script type="text/javascript">if(typeof(commentPhotoIds) == 'undefined') var commentPhotoIds = []; commentPhotoIds.push({'id':'commentphoto<data:comment.id/>', 'url':'<data:comment.authorUrl/>'});</script>
    3. If you go down a very small ways from where you were in the previous step you will see a </dl>. Directly before it insert the code: </div>
    4. Directly before the </body> code in your template add this code:

      <script type='text/javascript'>
      //<![CDATA[
      function commentPhotoDo() {
      var tag;
      for(var i in commentPhotoIds) {
      tag = document.createElement('script');
      tag.type = 'text/javascript';
      tag.src = 'http://scrape.singpolyma.net/avatar.php?maxwidth=70&url='+encodeURIComponent(commentPhotoIds[i].url)+'&id='+encodeURIComponent(commentPhotoIds[i].id)+'&defaultimage='+encodeURIComponent('http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/1011/defaultavatarad7.png');
      document.body.appendChild(tag);
      }//end for var i in commentPhotoIds
      }//end function commentPhotoDo
      commentPhotoDo();
      //]]>
      </script>
    5. Save your template

    My fellow hackers will not like the way I did the second-to-last step. I should be using window.onload. I am not simply because in the tests I did on a certain much-hacked template, this worked and the other didn't. I am not prepared to say why the other didn't, only that it didn't and that disturbed me. So for this hack I'm doing it like this. It works.

    This hack causes direct hits to my singpolyma.net hosting server every time a page loads. If your blog gets a significant amount of viewers (>300 subscribers or thereabouts) I would ask that you contact me before installing this hack so that we can work out whether it will be a bandwidth issue or not. Thank you for understanding.

    Tags:
    Creative Commons Licence © 2006-2008 Stephen Paul Weber. Some Rights Reserved.
    Stephen Weber at 2007-05-02 16:21 | 22 Comments / Trackbacks