It seemed like a good idea at the time.
A while back, I activated backlinks at Blogger, which are automatically created links to posts that link to yours. Trouble is, there are lots of spamblogs out there, which aggregate posts from real blogs and then add spam posts, so my "links to this post" section was just filling up with links to a bunch of spamblogs.
So I've de-activated the backlinks. You probably won't miss them.
Showing posts with label New Blogger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Blogger. Show all posts
April 08, 2007
De-activating backlinks
March 28, 2007
Pillage favicon
A favicon is that little image you see at the left of the address bar and often next to the site name when bookmarked. It turns out you can create your own.
Following the method described at Peter Chen's Blogger Tips and Tricks, I used the MyFavatar site to create my little Attila favicon.
You'll find it up at the top of this page and, if you have a tabbed browser, on the tab. If you're using IE6, you won't be able to see it. Sometimes -- but only sometimes -- it will appear in IE6 if you drag and release the IE favicon to the right.
February 11, 2007
An explanation for RSS feed weirdness
Those of you who subscribe to my feed may have noticed something strange this morning. A few of my posts from previous weeks have suddenly materialized without any obvious updates.
Late last night, I experimented with modifying a couple of labels on posts written under New Blogger and adding a label to the last post I wrote under Old Blogger. Although Pillagemail picked up the difference and sent out only my one new post, the RSS feed shows these modified posts as new.
There must be a workaround, and I'll have to search for one or else abandon the effort to give labels to Old Blogger posts. If you have a workaround, please email me (pillageidiot -at- hotmail -dot- com) or leave a note in the comments.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: I called on Aditya Mukherjee again, who advised me to create a "pipe" through Yahoo Pipes that organized the feed by publication date and substitute the feed so that my subscribers will get the new feed. I think it works, but if you're getting the feed with older posts at or near the top, please let me know.
February 06, 2007
More on new template
I've spent a few hours over the past several days fiddling with my new template. After I was forced to switch to New Blogger, I decided to switch to a New-Blogger-compatible template, which happens to look a lot like my old one.
Much as I disliked the way I was forced to switch to New Blogger, I think it's an improvement -- at least in the sense that the template is easier to fool around with. There are still issues with certain types of modifications. For example, you may have noticed that my permalinked pages have a list of "Newest Posts at Pillage Idiot" at the bottom, just as they had in my old template. This is done with FeedDigest, but the implementation in New Blogger was tricky. Not only did I have to figure out where to place the code to put the feed in the right place but I had to add some "if/else" code to make sure it didn't show up at the bottom of my main page. It shows up on archive pages, too, but I haven't figured out yet how to stop that.
I did some research and discovered that you can put the Newer Post/Older Post links at the top of permalinked pages, not just at the bottom, and that you can also change the text. You'll notice my text says "Next Idiotic Post/Previous Idiotic Post." No one has explained to me -- and as far as I can tell, no one has even questioned -- why the "Newer Post" link is on the left and the "Older Post" link is on the right. It seems obvious that older should be on the left and newer on the right. What are we? Israelis? We read from left to right, and older to newer should track that. But, for New Blogger, it doesn't.
So far, my favorite hack, which is still a work in progress, comes from The Last Word. This young Indian blogger named Aditya Mukherjee has a nice hack in which clicking on the labels in a list in your sidebar brings down the titles of the relevant posts, and you can click on them to read the posts. In New Blogger, clicking on a label brings up the complete posts on a new page. The hack I got from The Last Word is far better. There really are some creative people out there.
UPDATE (2/8): Aditya's post suggests using CSS to adjust the layout of the post titles in the hack described above. I know nothing about CSS, except what it is, but I did some guessing here. I remember that I'd removed some CSS code about lists, because the way my template was set up, list items had an orange arrow bullet point and were separated by dotted lines. Fortunately, I'd saved the code in a TXT document, and I guessed about how to apply it to my drop-down list of post titles. It seems to work in Firefox, but not in IE6 or IE7. Go figure. It's the opposite for my extended posts code. The basic code works in both Firefox and IE, but I was able to get the font of the "Click here to read more" text to appear larger and in blue in IE, but not in Firefox, where it's the standard size and link color. I've heard that different browsers render code differently, but maybe this is just something I don't know how to do.
February 03, 2007
Announcement
If you check in at Pillage Idiot in the next couple of days and it looks strange, it's because I'm in the process of switching to a nearly identical template that works with New Blogger. What it means is that I'm going to have to re-create the changes I made to my old template, and I hope most or all will actually work with it. I suspect it'll take a little time to get my upgrades back in order.
UPDATE: Wow! This is much more complicated than I realized. I get XML errors when I try to modify the new template, and I don't do XML. Installing the Haloscan comments is a more involved process, and the result needs adjustment, but the code is so complicated that I don't know where to start. In short, for now, I'm sticking with the old template. Maybe some other time...
UPDATE: I took another stab at it, and I'm on the way. I had to guess a lot about placement of the HTML code. I had to learn some really rudimentary XML (like the fact that all codes have to have end codes and have to be in order). But I'm making progress, and only a few bugs remain.
February 01, 2007
Another Blogger outage
I went to try to find out why I stopped getting site visitors this morning around 9 a.m. EST, and I got this error message: bX-vjhbsj. At the Google Help groups, everyone and his mother was complaining about the same message. No one had a good solution. But at least I understood the error. It's Google-speak for "YOU ARE bX-vjhbsjED!"
The thing I don't understand is why all of you, having seen this error, weren't inundating me with emails begging me to get it fixed, or even alerting me to it. Hmmm?
Finally, from Google: "We have identified the source of this error and will push the fix to the site shortly."
January 26, 2007
Bastards!
I've been avoiding the switchover to New Blogger, because, as my mammy used to say, If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Or maybe that was someone else's mammy. I don't know.
So I went to sign in today and discovered that Blogger wanted to "migrate" me (is migrate a transitive verb?) to New Blogger. There was no way around it. A search of other blogs revealed that you could skip the migration once (which I had done last night) and then you were SOL.
Fortunately, I just finished a major project at work yesterday, and though I've asked for new assignments, I've got next to nothing to do today.
The migration seemed to go fine at first. Pillage Idiot looked just the same as before, apart from a new font in the navbar at the top. But when I checked out the post editor, there was no toolbar and I could write only in HTML. The lack of toolbar meant no photo upload, either. Hmmmmm.
So I checked out one other theory. I closed IE and opened Blogger in Netscape. The editor suddenly was WYSIWYG. Aha! Must have something to do with the fact that my employer has locked down ActiveX controls on IE.
Normally, I don't post at work. But as I said, there's not much happening today, and I need to check out how this post stuff works in New Blogger.
P.S. What's that pink bar that appears occasionally for a fraction of a section at the bottom of the screen while I type this? Is Blogger saving a backup of the post?
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