Saturday, July 28, 2007

Labels Drop-down Menu for New Blogger

I am testing Hackosphere hack for Drop-down labels - First blogger beta template hack! with Best Gardening Articles. It works. You can see the drop-down menu for the labels in the right sidebar.

Some tips for using this hack. First, backup your current template. See Backing and changing New Blogger template. Remember also to edit the Page Elements one-by-one, copy them into Notepad files, give them a suitable name like "blog name hit counter footer no 1" and save them in the same folder where you save the backup template.

Now it is best that you are using a browser like FireFox with tabbed browsing so you can be in Hackosphere page in one tab and in the Blogger page in another tab, all in the same window. Sign into Blogger, and in the Dashboard, click LAYOUT, then click the TEMPLATE tab followed by the EDIT HTML sub-tab. This will open your template editor window. Tick "Expand widgets template" and wait for the template to fully expand. You will then have to look for the block of codes as explained in Hackosphere page. To make your life simpler, press ctrl+F and you will see a "Find" search box at the bottom of the page. I would suggest you type or copy-paste all or part of

<b:widget id='Label1' locked='false' title='Labels' type='Label'>

into the search box and click "Find Next". This will automatically locate your search term and highligh it. Then somewhere below, you will see <ul>. Highlight all the codes between this tag and </ul> and delete it. Then paste what Hackosphere instruct you to replace all the highlighted (and deleted) codes with their replacement. Preview, and if satisfied, click "Save template".

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Embedding music with Imeen



Trying out embedding music using www.imeen.com to Blogger.

However, I got the following messages:


www.imeem.com is requesting access to your Blogger account so that it can post entries on your behalf. You can revoke access at any time under 'My Account'. www.imeem.com will not have access to your password or any personal information. Learn more

This website has not registered with Google to establish a secure connection for authorization requests. We recommend that you continue the process only if you trust the following destination:

http://www.imeem.com/edit/bloggerpost.aspx?id=-IutYgTin6



I am going ahead anyway, and then for security purpose, probably will change my password. I am going to click "Create Post" and see what happens


Update: By clicking on a song to select it, then click "play" Imeen play music button button, the music started playing. Test is successful.

Update 2: When I tried publishing the post after adding the Update above, got error message "<embed> not closed" althought I did not do anything to the script for embedding the Imeen music list. I edited the script (added a </embed> closing tag) and tested the post in another test blog, and it published successfully. So just to make sure I don't lose the original post, I created a new post with the edited script, and if everything publish OK, I will delete the original post.

I paste below the original script and and the edited script in scroll boxes below. Them embed tags highlighed in red:

Original script

<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><object height='290' width='300'><param value='http://media.imeem.com/pl/-IutYgTin6/aus=false/' name='movie'/><param value='transparent' name='wmode'/><embed wmode='transparent' height='290' width='300' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://media.imeem.com/pl/-IutYgTin6/aus=false/'/></object>


Edited script

<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'><object height='290' width='300'><param value='http://media.imeem.com/pl/-IutYgTin6/aus=false/' name='movie'/><param value='transparent' name='wmode'/><embed wmode='transparent' height='290' width='300' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' src='http://media.imeem.com/pl/-IutYgTin6/aus=false/'/></embed></object>


Update 3: I deleted the original post, click EDIT POST and saw another post related to Imeen: Embedding Imeen playlist using embed script (click BACK button to get back to this post). I saw that there was a </embed> tag in the script I pasted in the scroll box in that post.

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Testing Another way of hiding the navbar

Update: Refer to Simple adjustable way to hide Blogger Navbar for the latest.

I have previously published a post Hiding the navbar. As had been mentioned in the post, the navbar can be useful in that it enables a visitor to search the content of the blog, it enables you to easily get to the LAYOUT by clicking on "customize", and to make a new post by clicking on "New Post" when you are signed into Blogger. However, many educators who uses Blogger for their blogs for the students will like to see the navbar gone because of the presence of "Next Blog". One never knowns what kind of blog you will get to when you click that tab. The chances of getting to a blog containing sexually explicit content is not negligible. Blogger has made it mandatory for blogspot blogs to have the navbar, but many blogspot blogs have hidden the navbar and so far no action has been taken. So I think it is justified and OK for educators to hide the navbar.

I do remember reading something about the navbar being compulsory using Blogger to host their blogs, but not compulsory for those who host the blog on their own (web host). However, accoring to Kawaljit of Maybe it is OK to remove Blogger navbar, Google did a series of road show in some Indian cities to promote their Blogger platform. Ankit attended the event and asked for clarification on the navbar policy from the Google representatives at the roadshow. They called up their office in Bangalore office and confirmed that it's legal to hide the navbar.

I have tested the method described in the post linked above before I published, but a blogger complained it no longer worked. I tested it and found it to be true. Fortunately Rat has posted a similar but different way of hiding the blog at Hide navbar where it advocate putting the code

#navbar-iframe {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none
}

just before the closing style tag ]]</b:skin>

So what you need to do is to sign into Dashboard, clcik LAYOUT for the relevant blog, click the template tab and look for the clossing style tag

]]></b:skin>

If you have problem finding ]]></b:skin>, press ctrl+F and you shoud see Find end CSS in New Blogger template. Type or copy-paste part or all of ]]></b:skin> into the "Find" box and click find. That part of the code in the template editor window will then be found and highlighted

Paste

#navbar-iframe {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none
}

just above that so that it become

#navbar-iframe {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none
}
]]>≶/b:skin>

Preview, and if satisfied, click "Save template"

I have tested it at this blog Blogging Ideas and have found it to work.

Important note: Before you make any changes to your template, always backup you template. Refer to Backing and changing template. It will also help to edit each Page Element one one one and save the content into a Notepad file so that you can put it back if you need to revert to your backup template (with the New Blogger, many Page Elements (widgets) will be deleted when you change template). However, if you use the Link List to make you "blogroll" you will not be able to save that Page Element this way. It will only be possible if you use the HTML/Javascript Page Elemtent to create the "blogroll". Also, if you want a template that don't have the navbar without you having to tinker with the template, use templates from New Blogger templates by Final Sense

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Post content removed because of problems with linked website

The content of this post had been deleted because of the presense of dead links. Search engines don't like dead links and such dead links can affect one's search engine ranking.