TEMPLATES
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Create an HTML Email Signature to Showcase Your Blog
MyBlogLog has just added a very convenient feature that allows members to create rich text HTML signatures for use in email programs like Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.
If your web presence is spread across lot of sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Del.icio.us and more, you can put links to all those social profiles in the email signature as in the sample below.
Visit your Personal Profile page on MyBlogLog and click the Edit Signature link to generate your custom email signature.
You also place this signature in Gmail and Yahoo! Mail using the simple drag-n-drop method described in a previous article - Add HTML Signatures with Images In Gmail.
Create MyBlogLog Signature (requires MyBlogLog account)
FeedBlitz Introduces AdSense for Email Newsletters
FeedBlitz, a popular RSS to Email service, today launched an easy-to-use FeedBlitz Ad Network that will allow bloggers to monetize email newsletters dispatched through FeedBlitz service.
To participate in the FeedBlitz program, you first have to pick the different categories that fit the theme of your blog. Then you decide the ad format (like leaderboard, skyscraper, rectangle, etc) and the number of ads that should appear in the email newsletter.
Unlike FeedBurner Ad Network where the ads appear only at the end of each article, FeedBlitz also lets you choose the location where you want to place the ads in the email message - it could be at the top, the bottom or any of the sidebars.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
Installing a read more option on your blog
Most of the "fancy" blogs have this function and mostly they wont tell you how they did it. Otherwise, scrolling through most Blogger main pages becomes a lesson in great patience. One nice little link opens up the article. One nice little link closes it. Ah.
Download the installation instructions here
Be careful always backup your template first before making any modifications !!
Bookmark and Share widget
As you may have seen on most Wordpress blogs, there is a Share link, which once clicked gives a drop down menu with links to the most popular Social bookmarking Websites. For us Bloggers at blogger.com, addthis has come up with a similar but faster tool. If you still don’t what I’m speaking about, see the live demo on this blog (click on the share link to see).
The installation is very simple all you have to do is paste a few lines of code inside your template. You can find the instructions in detail on addthis.com
Create Web Forms Online; Embed Them in Your Blog
FormLogix is an online HTML forms designer that will help you create web forms fast and easy inside a WYSIWYG environment.
Whether you want to build email contact forms, feedback forms, or online surveys - you will find FormLogix useful. It will also host the HTML forms for you.
FormLogix has an intuitive design interface where you simply drag-n-drop the form elements (like textbox, radio buttons, etc) on the canvas without having to write any HTML - the forms still look stylish and beautiful.
They have a neat template gallery with forms for people who are too lazy to design a form from scratch. Once your form is ready for use, you can embed it inside your blog or website using simple Javascript code or as an IFRAME.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Integrating Feedburner with your blog
Would you like to integrate feedburner with your blog and don`t know how, well here is a video tutorial from youtube that might help you.
Add a "Save as PDF" Button to your Blog
Want site visitors to print or download your blog posts as PDF documents ?
PDF Online, the free PDF conversion service that helps you create PDF files of your Microsoft Office documents, has released a new online tool for converting HTML web pages to PDFs.
Here's how the new service works - bloggers add a small Javascript snippet in the blog templates, visitors can click the "Save Page as PDF" button and the current web page will be rendered as a PDF document.
Real Example - Print Google.com as PDF
When the SavePageAsPDF service goes live officially, you will be able to track all the PDF conversion activities on your website helping you visualize the most popular content on your blog.
More on the service at pdfonline.com/ and pdfonline.blogspot.com/.
This will be in direct competition with HP Print Widget that also allow printing blog posts and RSS feeds as PDF documents.
Related: CSS for Printer Friendly Web Pages
Update: You can directly embed the URLs in your blog posts without using any javascript. Use the following values for cURL instead of encodeURIComponent(document.location.href)
Classic Blogger - <$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>Blogger XML Template - data:post.url
Create A Tag Cloud Based On The Content of Your Blog
Tag Clouds, you have seen them on delicious, Technorati or Flickr, are an easy way to get people explore your site deeper. Here's a sample tag cloud that uses Google AJAX Search.
Tag Clouds (provided they are not cluttered and display just the relevant words) help visitors quickly visualize what your website is all about since the topics you frequently cover are mentioned in bold or relatively bigger fonts.
WordPress community already offers some excellent plugins for generating tag clouds (like the Ultimate Warrior) plus the upcoming release, WP 2.3, has inbuilt support for tagging.
digital inspiration tag cloudHowever, if you are on Blogger or have a non-blog website, there's no reason that you should miss Tag Clouds.
Here's how to add a good looking tag cloud to your Blogger blog:
1. Type your Blogger feed address in RainMaker
http://www.blogger.com/feeds/xyz/posts/default?max-results=999
Remember to replace xyz with your Blog ID. This URL will retrieve your latest 999 posts and supply that for analysis to RainMaker.
2. For the word link, type the following (where xxx is your blog name, e.g. labnol)
http://xxx.blogspot.com/search?q=%%enc_word%%
3. You can change the default font size, tag cloud dimension background image and colors to fit your site theme.
4. Now the tricky part. Once you have generated the tag cloud using RainMaker, right click over your tag cloud and click "View HTML source" - that the code you need to copy paste in your site.
Tip for Tag Clouds - If you really want visitors to spend more time on your site via Tag Clouds, always keep the number of words in Tag Cloud to an absolute minimum and that there is sufficient space around each word.
Add Ratings To Your Blog Posts!
Blogs that are on Blogger, WordPress or TypePad can now add the wonderful outbrain star ratings widget to their blog posts.
This ratings widget has been under a closed beta for some time but they finally made a public release today.
It's light, requires no registration and very intuitive - visitors can hover the mouse over the five stars and click any of them to rate your current blog post.
Even if you have a regular website that's not a blog, this ratings widget can be installed on your site as well.
You need such a rating widget to get feedback from all those reader who are subscribed to your blog aren't contributing to the discussion because they are probably too lazy to write a comment.
Give them a system like this ratings widget that requires no effort and they'll be happy to say if enjoyed or disliked reading your blog post.
Get Ratings Widget here. Developer Blog is here. If you are using Windows Live Writer to insert ratings in your blog posts, make sure you remove the link breaks from javascript else this may not work.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Monday, October 15, 2007
Crazy Pigeons Hunter Widget
This little shooter will keep you playing for hours! Shoot the pigeons within a set amount of time to win the game. The time and amount of pigeons will randomize, so evey game will be different!
Download Here
More game Widgets can be found here
MyBlogLog Recent Visitors
Build a community of readers around your blog with MyBlogLog. Premium service includes a stats package. Display a widget on your site to show recent visits by MyBlogLog community members.
Flickr Profile Widget
Shows a selection of ten of your photos and some statistics about your Flickr usage on your website.
Download Here
Good Widgets - Custom Photo Widget
Embeddable Flash based widget for your photos. Import photos from your favorite service (flickr, photobucket, 23hq, set some colors, sizes and blammo! - another widget to add to the pile.
Download Here
ClockLink - Flash Clock Widget
ClockLink provides embeddable Flash clocks.
Digital, analog, themed, you name it.
It’s nice to be able to give my brain a rest and work with a good old fashion widget. No email required, no account to create and a simple config.
Download Here
3jam Text Me Widget
3jam released a new widget which lets your web visitors send you a mobile text message without revealing your phone number. You can also reply to the original text message and the conversation continues as long as you want.
The widget is receiving lots of interest from MySpace and other social network users.
Download Here
LineBuzz - Inline comments for bloggers
Once installed on you blog, LineBuzz provides the ability for users to highlight text in a blog entry and post an inline comment.
LineBuzz recently went Beta.
No plugins, browser extensions or bookmarklets are required.
A working sample is available on their blog at http://blog.linebuzz.com/
Download Here
WhoLinked - Incoming links widget
Video Tutorial : Adding Google adSense
Here is a nice video explaining how to add google adSense to your blog :
How to change the navigation ?
Most templates are deliver with some sort predefined navigation on top or on side. You need to edit the xml file under -> Templates -> Edit HTML and put your own links inside. You should look for the following part of code :
One thing you should now..
about blogger templates is that all the images and style files inside the xml template file are linked from free web hosting services. Sometimes it happens that those services are off line or overloaded and their servers respond slow, this can lead to incomplete opening of your blog. If you have your own web hosting it`s the best to download all the images of your template placed inside the xml file and upload them to your own hosting. This way you don`t have to worry that next time when you open your blog it will be broken.
ps. This only affects templates uploaded by you not native blogger templates.
First post
Everything has a start and this is my first post on this very new blog dedicated to the world of blogger a small one indeed :) . I`m about 24 hours a day on the internet and so i decided to give a little bit back to the community by posting the things I discovered deep under every search engine. Here you will find all the nice stuff for blogger in one place.
If you wish to contact me you can by mailing me here
Posted by Timethy Jones at 1:12 PM 0 comments
Labels: tips and tricks