Post Summary And Read More

My old friends here are very well aware of the Peek-A-Boo-Posts hack that Ramani and I came up with several years ago. It required quite some template hacking and javascript too.

In this tutorial you will learn how to tweak your blog without any javascript to get a similar effect. On our homepage, all posts will show a short summary, followed by a "Read More" link. Clicking the "Read More"-link will bring up the post page with the full post text.

Step 1: Back up your template
Open the Layout|Edit HTML-tab on your Dashboard, and download the template as an XML-file to your harddisk. If anything goes wrong, upload it again and there will be no problem at all.

Step 2: Modify the template code
Scroll down and look for the following piece of code:

This is the piece of template code that displays the post-body on the screen. We have to add a few lines of code here:

  
    
  
  
  
    Read more...
  
    
      Read more...
    
  
  
 

Now save your template.

Step 3: Modify your post template
In your Blog Settings you can modify the post template. Change it to:

Type summary here
Type rest of post here

And save your settings.
This will take care of all new posts. Type the summary text in between the summary-div-tags. Type the rest of the post between the other div-tags, and publish!

Step 4: Modify old posts
If you want older posts to have summaries as well, change every post and add a summary-div and restofpost-div.

And furthermore...
The summary-div is not really necessary, as the code only hides the restofpost-div if we are on the homepage. If you want some other styling for the summary, add CSS-tags to the skin-part of your blog.

More If Then Ideas

Now that my train of thought has started on how to use the - constructions to enhance the Bloggger experience, I got some new ideas that really need some investigation.

Idea 1: Table of Contents
We can tweak the Blogpost Widget, so that it displays only posttitles when we are on the Blog Homepage, and full posts when we are on an Item Page. In the Blog Settings we can set that our Blog should display 365 days on 1 page, allowing for a maximum of 500 posts to be displayed.

Idea 2: Post Summaries on front page
By default, we have 1 Blogpost Widget on our Blog. But we can easily add a second Blogpost Widget to our Blog. We can modify Blogpost Widget #1 to be displayed only on the Homepage, and #2 to be displayed on Itempages.
In our posts we could use 2 span-tags, one for a summary and one for a full post text. In Blogpost Widget #1 we only display the summary-span, in Blogpost Widget #2 we only display the full text span. It can be done with javascript. The challenge is to see if it can be done without!

Idea 3: Featured Posts on front page
If we can have 2 Blogpost Widgets, we can have 3 as well.
Widget #1 shows on item pages, just as we are used to. Widget #2 and #3 are shown only on the Homepage, where #2 filters for 'Tutorial' and #3 filters for 'Template'. And #2 and #3 are side by side.

Well, I have to do some experimenting to get this to work. Please feel free to create your own solutions, and throw in your own ideas as well!

Admin Widget

In my last post I taught you how to remove the ugly Blogger navbar from the screen. One minor setback is that now you don't have access to your dashboard, settings, layout and posts, because the navbar is gone.

In this post you will learn how to add an Admin Widget to your sidebar.

Step 1: Backup your template
Although this is not a very risky modification, it is always good practice to backup your template before modifying it.
Go to the Layout|Edit HTML-tab, and download your template as an XML-file and save it to your harddisk.

Step 2: Create an new Link Widget in your sidebar
From the Layout|Page Elements tab Add a Widget to your sidebar. Select the link-widget from th list. Set the title for example to Admin, and add 4 links to the list.

Dashboard       : http://www.blogger.com/home
Change Settings : http://www.blogger.com/blog-options-basic.g?blogID=####
Change Layout   : http://www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=####
Edit Posts      : http://www.blogger.com/post.g?blogID=####
New Post        : http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=####

In this links you have to change the ####### to the ID of your Blog. The easiest way to do this is to go to your dashboard, and view the list of your blogs. Hover your mouse over the links (Layout, Settings, etc) and watch the status-bar of your browser. You will see the link there. The easiest way is to right-click each link, copy the hyperlink, and paste it into the link widget.

Step 3: Save
Save the Widget and display your Blog. If you are viewing your Blog, clicking one of the Admin links will bring you to the appropriate screen. Visitors of your Blog will not be able to modify it, because they are not logged in to your blog. If you are not logged in, clicking an admin-link will bring up the Blogger login screen.

Removing the Blogger Navbar

It is an oldie, but worth mentioning.
You can remove the blue Blogger navigation bar that is at the top of each page by adding a single line of CSS to the skin of your blog.
From your dashboard go to the Layout | Edit HTML screen and scroll down to the skin part of the blog.
Feel free to save your current template first by downloading it, but it is not really necessary as this is not a very risky modification.

 ...
 ...
#navbar {display:none;}
 ...
 ...
]]>

Save and display, and finally you will be rid of the navigation bar.

Selective display of widgets

Here is a small tutorial on how to display your blog's widgets selectively on your pages.

Let's suppose you only want to show your Profile Widget on your blog's Homepage, but not on the other pages. This is how it is done.

Step 1: Back up your template
Go to your blog's Layout Page, and enter HTML-edit mode. Download your template as an XML-file and store it in a safe place. In case template-hacking takes a wrong turn somewhere, you can upload your template-file again and you are back to normal.

Step 2: Find the Profile Widget
Expand the widget-code by checking the checkbox on the HTML-edit page. Now scroll down and look for the Profile Widget, that looks like this:

  
    
      

    
    

    ...
    ...
    
  

Step 3: Modify the widget code
Now we only want to display this widget if the page that we are looking at is our blog's Homepage. We will use a -statement to check for this situation.
Insert the following (red) lines of code into the widget code:

  
   
    
      

    
    

    ...
    ...
    
  
  

The datafield data:blog.homepageUrl contains the url of your blog's homepage. The datafield data:blog.url holds the url of the current page. If they are the same (==) we are on the homepage and the widget should be displayed. If they are not the same, the widgetcode is skipped.

Step 4: Save your template
Save your template and display your blog.

Breadcrumbs for Blogger

With my new Blog Skin I also introduced a "Breadcrumb Trail" to my Blog. If this doesn't ring a bell, don't worry. Remember the Hansl & Gretchen fairy-tale?

Hansl and Gretchen were 2 kids from a very poor family. The parents were so poor that they had nothing to feed their children, and between them decided to take the kids into the forest and leave them to the wild animals. Hansl and Gretchen discovered these terrible plans, and decided to take pre-emtive measures. They took with them a piece of bread, and dropped breadcrumbs along the trail in order to find their way home. As might be expected, they didn't find home and they were captured by an evil witch (the breadcrumbs were eaten by birds, I guess). But the general idea got a strong foothold in the internet world, and nowadays you can find a breadcrumb trail on many a website to find your way back to the Home Page.



On the main page of my Blog there is no breadcrumb, because that is .... Home!

But as soon as you click on a specific post title, or on a label, or on an archive entry, you will see how the breadcrumb magically appears on top of the page:

Browse » Home » Tutorials » Breadcrumbs for Blogger

Now, here is an easy piece of code to put into your template, and breadcrumbs will be yours!

Step 1: Save your template
Go to the Layout tab, and click Edit HTML.
Download your template as an XML-file and save it onto your harddisk. If anything goes wrong, upload it again and not much harm will be done.

Step 2: Expand the widget code
Now check the checkbox to display your template's XML-code. Ready to hack? Here we go!

Step 3: Add a new Includable
We are going to modify the code of the Blog-widget. The default-widget uses a so-called "includable" (a chunk of code) to display a status-message above your posts when you have selected all posts with a certain label. We will turn off this default status message, and replace it with our breadcrumbs.

Scroll down through your expanded widget code and look for the following piece of code:

Now we will switch off the default status-message, by putting comments-brackets around it. (You can also delete the line, but I think leaving it there and commenting it out is more elegant in case you want to track back and debug).

Now add the following line, that will call our breadcrumb includable:

Immediately above this 'main' includable, insert our new breadcrumb includable:

You can also download the xml-code for the includable here:
Breadcrumb includable
Right-click the link, and select "Save as..." to save the XML-file on your harddisk. You can open it with Notepad, and copy-paste the code into your template.

Step 4: Add some CSS to the skin
The basic code of your breadcrumb is now in place. You can change its looks by adding a CSS-class .breadcrumbs to the skin of your Blog.
This is just an example:

....

.breadcrumbs {
  float: left;
  width: 590px;
  font-size: 11px;
  margin: 5px 10px 20px 10px;
  padding: 0px 0px 3px 0px;
  border-bottom: double #EAEAEA;
}

....

]]>

Step 5: Save your template
Save your template and view the results. Enjoy!

Troubleshooting
The code above was copy-pasted directly from my template into this post, so it should be error-free if your copy-paste it into your template.

Be sure to have the latest widget-versions in your template. As you maybe know (or then again, maybe not) the widgets code (such as your Blog Posts) is updated regularly by Blogger, providing you with new functionalities. But if you have hacked into the code of the widget, Blogger will NOT update to the newest version of the code.
If you want to be sure that the most recent version of a widget is present on your blog, you can click the "Return to default widgets"-link in the Layout-HTML editor.

If you do not feel comfortible about modifying the code of your blog, create a new testblog for testing purposes. Add some Lorem ipsum posts (filled with nonsense text and fake labels), and see if the breadcrumbs work. If everything works fine, port it to your real blog.

A New Skin

I finally got completely BORED with the old look-and-feel of Beautiful Beta. It was so totally not 2009.

And besides that, pageloading had slowed down tremendously because of all the javascript-widgets and other stuff that was hanging in my sidebars.

Furthermore, now that everybody has a 3-column template, it seemed time to turn back to an old-fashioned, well-designed, crisp and clear two column design. With lots of space for the post content, and a minimum of sidebar widgets.

The coming weeks I will clean up the posts, so Beautiful Beta will be up-to-date again.