Blogger Suicide



I almost committed blogger hari kari today. No I didn't try and 'top myself', but I completely screwed up my blog template so none of the posts were readable. The rest of this post will probably sound like gobbledygook gibberish unless you have a blog (and probably if you do too!) but here goes anyway.

What I wanted to do , should have been a fairly simple tweak to the blogger layout template and add a few new blogger widgets. I do make backups periodically but haven't done so in a while and I'm sort of a techie geek that should know better. *slaps himself on wrist*

There's a new blogger in-line comment feature which you can enable in draft blogger that finally puts a comment box below the post instead of having to click and launch a separate window or pop-up window.

I like it BUT......


a.) You have to do another code tweak to make it work if you previously tweaked the classic blogger template. This proved frustratingly difficult as the code refused to work "blogger incomprehendable error... blah blah blah!"

Twenty google searches later and tweak, tweak, tweak, like a budgie with bad pronunciation, it finally worked but not before a 30 minute slot where the only thing the hordes of people saw as they dropped by my blog was a small feedburner banner and no matter what they clicked on it just looped back to the same page. To those two unfortunate individuals, I offer my sincere apologies and please do come visit again!

b.) You can't sign up for follow-up comments on the new comment form which kind of sucks if you want to keep tabs on if/when your comment has been responded to (I love/hate this feature in all blog platforms.) I like being notified of a response to a comment I've made, but I hate being notified of 250 other responses i.e. 250 email messages, so I use that feature sparingly! Thankfully Gmail wraps the blog response emails in a cloak of the same conversation so its easier to manage. Hotmail has a lot to learn from the new kid on the block!

I found another hack that lets you add a link to the old comment form so your visitors can comment on either the 'new' or 'classic' version of the form. This worked fairly well except I kept messing up, since I had both the real blogger dashboard and the draft blogger dashboard open at the same time as I modified stuff and one would overwrite the others changes - argh!.

Finally it's working - well sort of - I still have some alignment issues!
... but you can now comment the old way with email follow up (if you have a gmail id) or use the box below the post. Now I understand why people move to Wordpress , MoveType etc!

OK almost the end of techie gibberish post. I've also tweaked the comments for I DO FOLLOW (remove 'No Follow') so you get a little link love from your comments when the Google Spiders come crawling here!



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14 comments:

Unknown July 04, 2008 9:28 pm  

yes you can make the alignment of the comment form to the right.right by using div styling.. you may use the left-margin attribute to specify how much margin you need on the left of the comment box..

to dp that just replace
<div class='comment-form'>
with <div class='comment-form' style="margin-left : 50px;">

You may use any width there instead of the 50px i have mentioned..

Queen Goob July 04, 2008 9:43 pm  

Holy Crap! Can someone make this easy for blondes please?????

Paddy in BA (Quickroute) July 05, 2008 12:40 pm  

Aneesh: Thanks - You the MAN!

Queen Goob: It's as easy as 1 2 3 (multiplied by 3.14159265358979323846 x Ο€)

Megan July 05, 2008 3:18 pm  

I like the picture...

Baino July 05, 2008 5:08 pm  

I'm with Queenie, what language were you speaking? Can you tell me how to backup my blog? I'd be devastated if I lost it?

Anonymous,  July 05, 2008 5:42 pm  

Hi ! Nice Blog and valuable posts !
Also , thanks for visiting my blog and commenting there !

My reply for your nice comment :

I hope that most of us do this . I too use "Filter & Forward" for my other e-mail accounts and read them all at my primary a/c .
But , still there are some other services ( and not just e-mail a/c ) where I think that above trick is quite useful !

Paddy in BA (Quickroute) July 05, 2008 6:44 pm  

@ Baino: I know - bit goobledygookish but make sure you make a backup your blog - Instructions below

Log into Draft blogger

http://draft.blogger.com/

click on Settings then Basic
then Export your blog

See more here

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=97416

@Arpitnext: Thanks - I've added your site to my RSS reader - very interesting stuff!

maiylah July 05, 2008 7:32 pm  

cool blog tweaking! i could never do serious blog tweaking; makes my head ache. lol. :D

thanks for the visit!

Nomadic Matt July 06, 2008 8:49 am  

You have to move to wordpress.....its way better than blogger. I was a blogger guy for ages but after moving to wordpress i could never go back....the backend is cleaner, the formatting cleaner, more plugin options, more design options...

just do it!

Martin July 06, 2008 10:02 am  

I started with this comment box too last week, it's much better.

I need to sort out the back up options too. I'd top myself if I lot it now.

Because I am a fidgeting idiot, I messed my template to the point where it's looks and works fine, but I can not make any change to the code now without it going apeshit.

Paddy in BA (Quickroute) July 06, 2008 1:03 pm  

@ Maiylah: You're probably better off not tweaking - it definitely headache material.


@ Nomadic Matt: I'm seriously tempted to make the switch but I'm an awful procrastinator!


@ Xbox: I know how you feel. It seems the slightest tweak to blogger can leave in in deep Sh!t !

Megan July 06, 2008 3:15 pm  

I am trying to get up the courage to attempt this. So far the courage is lacking!

Paddy in BA (Quickroute) July 06, 2008 5:12 pm  

@ Megan: I know I'm almost sorry I started the tweaks - It gets addictive after a while!

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