I'm a bit of a control freak. I don't much care for the "new blogger" or widgets - they get the basic job done, but I found it hard to get the result I was after. So I reverted my blog and spewed out some html and css. Having achieved that, I started searching for "widget" functionality for classic blogs. The most obvious failing was the labels widget. There are no tags for classic blogs to grab all the labels. A bit of digging on the net and I soon found a javascript solution.
Now, I'm not hugely fond of javascript. In fact, I consider it the bane of my web programming experience. That being said, sometimes it's just too bloody useful to avoid. So I threw in the labels javascript to my sidebar.
While browsing the blogs and webpages that informed me about the wonderful solutions to customizing blogs (most of which turned out to be "new blogger"), I made mental notes of what features I liked and what made blogs navigatable. I discovered I really wanted users to be able to sort the archives (and maybe labels) in whichever way suited them best - date, alphebetical, reversed. Although classic blog templates have a tag for archives, the only way to do it was by date (or, with a little hacking, reversed) and each result was a link to the archive page. One extra step means harder to browse. Another nice javascript addition in the widget is the expandable links. I was disappointed and frustrated by the limitations.
I studied the labels solution I had found. There I found a hint - the url used as the source. Poking around a bit more, I discovered the magic of blog feeds. Here, at last, was the solution for the control I sought! Sadly, it requires the use of javascript, but I can live with that. It's certainly been a bit tricky, and I'm only through the beginning of the learning curve, but I'm feeling pretty good about it.
I expect post more details later. Look forward to it!
Labels: blog, classic blogger, feeds, javascript, series 2, template
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