My Blogger Trackback Userscript has been getting more and more broken the longer I stay away from Blogger. It was inevitable, I suppose, that some of my code would rot when I wasn’t using the service. Enough people have asked me to fix this one, however, that I finally logged in again today and fixed the code. Install the new version and it should work again 🙂

Older readers will remember my Blogger Recent Comments service that was hosted on Ning.  It has be obsolete for some time now (since Blogger now has provided their own comment feeds since v3) and has long since been shut down by Ning for being a horrible bandwidth hog.  I have thus decided to delete the app (since it’s just taking up space on my Ning account) and release the code under an MIT-style license on my devjavu repository.  Maybe someone will find it useful.

Now to go see if I can use Ning for my next project… Google App Engine not having a decent cron/fakecron is not at all useful… and my Python sucks.

…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.

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!

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!