JSON (and particularly JSONP) is one of the most useful data formats for hackers. For quite some time we have had to do all sorts of hackish things to transform the data available from Google services to JSON(P). No longer.

Blogger, Google Calendar, and Google Base now all support JSONP. This was announced on Blogger Buzz and is perhaps one of the greatest advances in hackability in (at least recent) Google history.

On top of this, SearchMash (a Google susiduary) now offers JSON feeds of Google’s Web, Images, Blog, and Video searches. For JSONP a proxy service is required, but this still allows for getting Google’s data out where we can hack with it.

One thing that this will mean very soon is an upgrade to peek-a-boo for BETA that makes use of this and will definately be faster.

As promised, here is the revised version of my Feed Links Widget. Just click the button and follow the wizard!

Some Notes
Due to circumstances beyond my control, if Blogger changes the URL format for feeds this hack will break (and I will, of course, speed to fix it 😉 ).

If you want to make it easier for others to add this hack, clicking the button below will add the button above to your sidebar.

Bloggeratto and phydeaux3 (and likely others) have blogged about a new one-click widget adding system for Blogger. This system would allow us to create widgets and then just put a button in our blog post that, when clicked, places all the correct code into the user’s template. This is a huge step for ease-of-use, and could also be for prorogation (have users add a widget-adding widget to advertise instead of just linking back, etc.) I’ve taken my look and the system is brilliant. There is, however, one snag.

You cannot define your widget to be of any type, it is simply in the global namespace. This means that, for example, it cannot be done with my Feeds Widget. Why? Some genius in Blogger decided to put that data in the post namespace, and thus make it inaccessible to this new system.

We won’t let a little thing like that spoil our fun now though will we? Brace yourselves for a hack of the mod system! Coming very soon – one click feeds widget (with comments feed link too!)

If there is one hack I get requests for more than any other it is this. My inline comments form on Blogger BETA. It was my first ever hack (before I had even fully moved to Blogger), and probably still my favourite as the most useful. I recently blogged somewhat optimistically about my progress, which only increased the demands. I regret to inform you that I have hit a wall. Perhaps not unsurmountable, but a huge one.

The security token scraping did not work.

I’m not entirely surprised. After all, Blogger added the security token code to prevent people from doing just what I am attempting. I cannot say that I fully understand how the whole technology works, or why my attempts to circumvent it have failed, I only know that they have. It may take help from Blogger themselves (bah!) to get this working.

For the community : to those who wish to put their heads with mine on this problem. The code for this hack on BETA, such as it is for as far as I’ve got, can be found at the following URLs:

http://jscripts.ning.com/get.php?xn_auth=no&id=1338954
http://singpolymaplay.ning.com/blogger/blogger_beta_comment_form.txt
http://www.ning.com/view-source.html?view=app&op=viewFile&appUrl=singpolymaplay&fileName=commentFormData.php¤tDir=%2fblogger

As a side note : installing this hack as is actually does sort of work. But it errors every time and requires that the user push the button on the inline form, and then on the other form. (Similar to what is happening here since I was forced by mega-spammers to turn on word verification…)