bloggertech

January 31, 2002

Oh, you put the comments in, and you take the comments out
Guardian on Blogger Pro:

Still to come are much-requested features such as built-in commenting - through which readers can leave their comments

Well, I was delighted to see that comments were not on the list of "coming soon" features on the Pro page. Not only do I not want to see my friends in the comment provider business be put out to pasture, but there's just no point in running comments through Blogger. What possible value could Blogger add to comments, other than to put them in the templates by default? Even that's not a killer feature, since anyone who wanted to do an auto-install could do it through the API (Hossein: want to try it? Finding where to put the <head> script would be easy: just go right before </head>. The other piece would be a bit harder to place correctly, though). The only thing I've ever come up with that would be close to a feature would be the ability to do inline comments and put them in the actual html of the page (by republishing the blog every time a comment was posted), which would make the comments available without Javascript. Which would make them available to search engine crawlers. Which would make them worth spamming. Which would make them worth-less.
posted by Phil Ringnalda at 11:39 PM | 8 comments

January 29, 2002

While right-click BlogThis is still a bit of a sore spot for me, a question in the BlogThis Howto forum (for which the questioner owes me $10) made me realize that there is one advantage to hosting the script locally: you can have as many different custom BlogThis context menus as you like. I use BlogThis in two ways: sometimes I just want to link to the site, and so all I want is the default link with the page title as text, but when I want to blog some text from the page, I want

<a href="http://www.example.com">example</a> :
<blockquote><i>The text that I am quoting from the page</i></blockquote>

but I'm far too lazy to stick the blockquotes in every time. However, if you aren't afraid of registry editing (which you should be), it's not hard to create your own custom BlogThis:

Backup your registry, or it's your own damn fault when you break your computer.
Make a copy of your local blogthis.pyra file and name it blogquote.pyra
Open blogquote.pyra in a text editor, and change the line that starts "sel=... to:
sel = "<blockquote><i>" + escape(doc.selection.createRange().text) + "</i></blockquote>";
Start regedit, and search for blogthis
Select MenuExt (the "folder" that contains the BlogThis key) and create a new key named BlogQuote!
Double click BlogQuote!'s (Default) value, and change the value data to the location of blogquote.pyra (e.g. c:\blogthis\blogquote.pyra)
Add a new Binary value to BlogQuote!, name it contexts, then double click it to change the value data to 31
Close any open IE windows, and then restart IE, select some text, and try out your BlogQuote!

Now if only the popup would leave out the link if you didn't pass it a url, so we could have the long begged for BlogNothing!
posted by Phil Ringnalda at 11:18 PM | 2 comments

January 28, 2002

Once again I have to disagree with Ben Sullivan: Zaxer is not competing head-to-head with Movable Knife, HiFi Slicemup, Sliver, and Slash in a zero-sum game. They meet different needs for different people, or even for the same people: I've seen zarphs that use Zaxer for some content, and slice other things with Movable Knife (no "e"). It's a big interwebnet, with lots of room to get along: if everyone uses the same Zaxing system, then it will either not do everything that everyone wants, or it will be so complex that nobody will really know what it's doing. Can't we all just get along?
posted by Phil Ringnalda at 2:41 PM | 2 comments

January 27, 2002

In case you missed the code for the Blogger Pro buttons on the "thanks for upgrading" page, here they are:

<a href="http://pro.blogger.com"><img src="http://buttons.blogger.com/powered_by_blogger_pro2.gif" width="88" height="31" border="0" alt="Powered by Blogger Pro&#153;"></a>

gets you

and

<a href="http://pro.blogger.com"><img src="http://buttons.blogger.com/powered_by_blogger_pro.gif" width="88" height="31" border="0" alt="Powered by Blogger Pro&#153;"></a>

gets you

Note: I added in the border="0" cause I'm sure Ev. didn't mean for you to have that big ugly visited-link color border, just so people could see that the button is a link ;-)
posted by Phil Ringnalda at 9:40 PM | 0 comments

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