Friday, February 11, 2005

I made some hacks to the template of my humble lil' blog here... found some really cool stuff out there in the world.

I really think there needs to be a book devoted to creating and hacking Blogger/Blogspot templates. The help files are really good on Blogger.com, but you really won't find the good stuff unless you know what you're looking for. If anyone knows of such a book, let me know. Otherwise, I may just have to write one myself.

Some features I added:

1. Expandable posts - Some of the posts here get really long, and it would definitely unclutter the front page to be able to hide half of the post behind a "Read More" link. So, that's what I did! I've only got it on one post right now - the one from last weekend's "Collusion at Shellmuth's" post. From now on, when I make huge posts, I'll use the summary and "Read More" link.

This hack was described in the blogger.com help, but I didn't like how it was implemented. I didn't want the "Read More" link to display on EVERY post - just the ones that actually had more to be read! My solution wasn't the most graceful, but it'll do the trick.

2. Collapsing Comments (aka Peek-a-boo comments). Awesome. No more having to load a new page to view and post comments.

3. Fixed the display problem that was happening with Internet Explorer (ie. all posts began way down the page, after the sidebar). This was caused by a renegade tag in one of my previous posts. Thanks to April for pointing out the glitch! I use Mozilla Firefox, which was showing the pages properly, so I hadn't noticed a problem.

If you encounter any problems, please let me know! Thanks :)

4 Comments:

  1. Human Head said...
    I also wish there was a book on blogspot hacks. Perhaps you SHOULD think about making a go at writing your own book about it, you being a web developer by day and all.....
    Shelly said...
    Thanks for the encouragement - I'm gonna do it :) I sent a book proposal over to O'Reilly & Associates today, and if they don't like it, I've decided I'll write the book anyway and self-publish it. Thanks for the vote of confidence :)
    StudioGlyphic said...
    Good job on the hacks. I like 'em.
    Shelly said...
    If someone reads half of a post and isn't interested enough to read the rest of it, I doubt they'd read the entire thing posted on the front page. :) In the same vein - a lot of the longer posts are my home game writeups, and I know not everybody wants to read them in their entirety. So I'm sparing those who don't care to read about my friends from enduring a four-page-scroll-fest!

    I'd like to think I'm interesting enough for the occasional click on a "read more" link... I could be wrong!

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