TEMPLATES
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Animated Blog Headlines Box
First, you need to find the address for your blog feed. In most blogging platforms, this is usually displayed as a link somewhere in your blog's template (in Blogger templates for example, you'll find this at the bottom of your page). Alternatively you may be able to find the blog feed address in your settings or control panel. Right click the link and copy the shortcut if necessary. Next, head over to the RSS Scroller page at Widgetbox.com. There are other RSS widgets available, but I've found this particular one to be the best free one available. You need to enter the site feed address (XML or RSS) in the box and will be presented with a preview of your ticker on the right. You can also change the colour of the ticker to suit your blog using hex values. I left the example above in the default colours, but you can change the colours to whatever you want. Finally hit the "get widget" button to get the code needed for your blog platform. Many blog platforms are already supported and Widgetbox can insert the code into your page automatically (eg: Blogger, Typepad, Facebook). Alternatively, you can choose to simply "Get Widget Code" which will present you with two options: the flash embed or javascript formats. Simply copy and paste the code which works best for you. You can paste it into your blog's sidebar, or in a post (as seen above). If the Javascript code doesn't work well for your blog, try using the embed option instead. Save your template/post and take a look at your blog's headlines, attractively presented in a free ticker: a great way to keep readers looking through your blog posts at what you've recently written! Source : BloggerBuster
Would you like to create an animated headlines box for your blog headlines like the one below? It's easy and free to do this using a great tool I found at widgetbox.com. In this mini tutorial, I'll show you how to create one and include it in the sidebar of your blog.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Cheats' Guide to Customizing Blogger templates
Amanda from Blogger Buster has released an free ebook on template customization which you can use to make your blog stand out from the crowd. I think this is a great resource and should be fetched by everybody trying to modify the template look. For download and features head over to blogger buster.
Are you planing to modify your template or have you done it all ready ? What problems did you encounter or do you have any tips for fellow bloggers ?
Tags:
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Blogger Template : Vistered Multi Style
Vistered is our first multi style template for blogger. You and your visitors can choose between 11 styles while browsing the blog. I hope you like it as much as I did working on it.
Preview the template here
Download the template here
For setup open read more..
This one is easy to setup. Find inside html view Vistered Demo and change to your blog name. Thats all folks :)
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Blogger Template : Digg
Another 3 column template this time inspired by the Digg website. All credits goes to the original creator, blogger port is made of course by me.
Download the template here
Preview the template here
For template setup open read more
To change the top navigation once you have installed the template inside html view find the Home and About Links :
and change the to whatever you like.
To change the blog title, find "Digg Template" the same way and change to your blog title
blogger templates
Hack for better Google rankings
Google loves pages that have a good title stuffed with keywords. And some believe that Google even looks at the words contained in the filename of the webpage to measure it's relevance or importance.
Despite this fact, Google's Blogger users have absolutely no control on the filename of their blog posts. Blogger automatically derives the name from the title of the post - it just concatenates the first six words of the title separating each word with a hypen and also removes the common words like A or The.
For instance, if I create a new post titled "Yahoo! Desktop Search getting closer to X1", Blogger will store the file as yahoo-desktop-search-getting-closer-to.html. Notice that it even removed the exclaimation mark in the permalink.
Basic SEO understanding suggest that in the above case, the file name should contain keywords like "Yahoo", "Desktop Search", "X1" since the post is all about "Desktop Search" provided by Yahoo! and X1.
Since Blogger doesn't allow custom file names, here is a simple blogger hack:
1. Compose your Blogger article with a title containing all the keywords (6 is the limit) and in the right order (e.g. X1 Yahoo Desktop Search)
2. Publish your post on Blogger.
3. Now open the post in w.bloggar, an offline blog editing tool and change the page title to something more meaningful (e.g. Yahoo! Desktop Search getting closer to X1)
4. Click "Post & Publish". Congratulations! Your permalink filename is what you want it to be and no longer defined by Blogger.
There's another scenario - Say if you wrote a post on Monkeys an year ago and that article became very popular with lot of people linking to it. One day, you decide to add about Bananas in that same article so a page title "Monkeys and Bananas" makes more sense. But if you change the page title, Blogger will change your page URL or permalink - That would not be a good thing as people who have previously linked to that Monkeys page would no longer find it and there's little guarantee that search engines will index the new page. The above hack may save you here as well.
Source : Digital Inspiration
Monday, April 14, 2008
Simple way to hide Navigation Bar
/* CSS to hid navigation bar */ #navbar { height:0px; visibility:hidden; display:none } Follow these easy steps to paste the above code This is how your template HTML code should look after pasting the hack code snippet Source : TechDreams
This one has been discussed a lot. For my personal opinion I like the navigation bar right there where it is but if you want to hide it this is the way to do..
Open your template in html mode and paste this code somwhere in the css part of the template :
Headlines Ticker Widget
Scrolling Headlines widget shows recent post titles of your blog like scrolling news headlines as seen in new web sites and TV news channels. Adding the widget to your blogger beta is very easy. In the following form..
Get the widget for free : TechDreams
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Tagboard for Blogger
Did you ever wanted to display a tagboard (shoutbox) on your blog but did not know which one to choose in the flood of websites offering such services ? If so here is one you can rely on. Cbox is free and all you have to do to get started is to sign up, choose colors and copy and paste the code as a new html widget and thats it. Of course there are advanced customization options as well, like size, custom colors, custom smilies ... and so on.
Get Cbox for free here the demo is on the same page
Saturday, April 12, 2008
A tool every webmaster should call his own
Ever since I discovered nattyware pixie few years ago I fell in love with that tool. It was something I missed but did not know of it`s existence till the day I bought some of my monthly web design lecture and it was on the included cd. Long story short pixie is an easy to use, fast and tiny utility designed especially to fit the needs of Webmasters and Designers. Its a color picker that includes a mouse tracker. Run it, simply point to a color and it will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color. You can then use these values to reproduce the selected color in your favorite programs. Pixie will also show the current x y position of your mouse pointer. Its the only tool you'll need for working with colors.
Imagine how simple it is with this tool to find the correct color code inside the style.css file or the html code. Just point with your mouse over the website part you want to change, find the code inside the style.css and change it (this of course does not work with images as background).
Get Pixie for free here
Further Info here
Friday, April 11, 2008
Blogger Template : Black Tech
Black Tech is another nice Wordpress template converted by me for Blogger. It is a 3 column template which are very rare for blogger. I hope you like it :)
Download the template here
Preview the template here
For setup open read more
The template is ready to be used from the start all you have to do is setup your blog title and description. Open the template in html mode and find "Black Tech", replace this with your own title. Do the same with "Free your mind" few lines under.
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Yes I`m Back
It has been a crazy few last months for me. From being sick till crazy busy with work and school I did not had much time to follow my passion and go on with blogging. Things should now change as I have more time to breathe now :) I have some new templates for you guys in the kitchen cooking so hold on just a few more days and we are back on track
Posted by Timethy Jones at 11:53 PM 4 comments
Labels: Widgets