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Contest Suggestion: 31 Days of the Dragon
2008-05-14 21:01:00
'lo. After a long time I am posting some thing here for you guys. I hope until now you have enjoyed the existing set of Blogger mods that I had published. While this is not related to blogger mods, I am sure those of you who were unaware, will definitely love it. The other day I came across a big contest while browsing some of sites I read regularly, and simply could not resist sharing it with you.HP (in association with Buzz Corps)is promoting its latest 20.1" notebook i.e. The HP HDX Entertainment Notebook using a contest called "The 31 Days of Dragon ". Before I proceed further note that this contest is open to everyone from any part of the world.Contest Info: There are 31 participating web sites, with the sponsorship of HP where HP is working with them to offer 31 prize packages - one a day for 31 days during a period from 09 May through 08 June 2008. Here are the details of the price package (which btw is worth well over USD 5000 in retail value):Display: 20.1? diagonal WUXGA ...
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Poll result
2007-01-03 21:16:00
I had conducted the following poll a couple of months ago on my blog, but forgot to post the poll results after ending the poll. Better late than never:
More About: Poll , Result

Translate your posts into 14 languages (Updates added)
2007-01-01 08:35:00
Dear Friends,This is my first add-on goody for the year 2007. Hope you will like it. Brainiac came up with a suggestion to add more languages to my Google translate for posts hack. As the number of languages provided by Google is limited, I decided to use the BabelFish code, offered in a language translation widget by Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration. I have been using this hack in the "Translate" section of my navigational bar (at the top of the page).- This code offers 14 languages, to which your readers will be able to translate your posts.- There is also some translation code that Spanish Bloggers can use to allow their readers to read their blogs in English, French, Russian, German and Italian.(See comments for credits)I have modified that code so that you can use it in your post footers and allow your readers to translate individual posts (if they like). To learn how to add some thing to your template's post footers, visit this page.Update: Added code for English to Trukis...
More About: Dates , Post , Updates , Languages , Your

More hackers now on the 'new blogger' hacking scene
2006-12-31 15:17:00
Hello Readers,Life has been very busy for me in the last couple of weeks and therefore I have not been posting any new hacks or code. However, the the hacking scene has not gone cold. Lots of stuff has been happening in the blogger hacking space.1. You might have looked at Ramani's lightining fast Neo template. If not check it out here.2. Classic Blog ger 's favorite hacker, Aditya of last word has moved to the new blogger and is now making hack for the new platform. Check out his page here (looks great!).3. Deepak of Blogger Hack ed is spinning out quality Ajax based hacks also displaying strong coding skills. I highly recommend checking out his hacks.That's what I have noticed recently. Hope this keeps you busy for sometime! Happy hacking and a very happy 2007.
More About: Hacker , Hackers

Tamed rounders template now hacked and downloadable
2006-12-24 07:48:00
Hello all,Deniz of imessengr has taken the three column rounders template and hacked it to include most of the popular hacks currently available for the new Blogger. He has done this for all the variants of rounders that are available on Blogger.Visit here to download this template and install it in your blog.
More About: Download , Hack , Rounder , Plat , Template

Blogger Feature or Bug: Edit link disappears and Blog unable to recognize i
2006-12-20 20:14:00
For quite a while now I have been facing problems with my Blog ger blogs and layout editor. Every time I edit a widget and save the changes the edit link for that widget disappears from the layout. To understand what I am referring to have a look at the two images below.Once I update the "Subscribe | Syndicate | Bookmark" widget the edit link disappears. I actually have to click on the page elements link to reload the layout editor which is very irritating. I have not heard anyone else complain about this so I wonder if only I am facing this problem or if this is some cool new Blogger feature that I don't understand :)Not just this, for some strange reason, my blogs don't identify me as the administrator even if I am logged into blogger. There is a possibility that the widget quickedit links are not shown as I might have messed up some code in the template. But that's not the case as I don't get to see those links even in any new blogs (where the HTML has not been touched) create...
More About: Feature , Link , Pear

Blogger News: Welcome the "New Blogger"
2006-12-20 02:59:00
Hello Readers,Just a quick update here. Blog ger has announced that they are now out of beta. This is shown by the change of URLs. The sign-in link on beta blog navbars no longer points to the beta.blogger.com link. It now points to www2.blogger.com.Classic Blogger users can learn more about Blogger Beta the New Blogger here.
More About: News , Welcome , R News

Adsense inside your posts and only on post (item) pages
2006-12-16 09:39:00
Loui$$ from Blogging Secret just asked me how I was displaying adsense ads only on post (item) pages and inside the post i.e. in the beginning and the end of each post. For this I use the same if statements from my hack Display widgets only on pages you prefer but widget are not involved in this one as widgets cannot go inside a post.First let me acknowledge the sources from which I learnt some essential adsense tricks for Blogger Beta:1. Using adsense code in beta template by Loui$$.2. Using adsense in posts by Deniz.I recommend checking those out before proceeding with this hack. As always, please back-up your template before proceeding with this hack as you will be modifying some important portions of your template. Now for the hack. Simply look for: <p><data:post.body/></p> ;in your template's <div> section and replace it with the code given in code boxes below: ([Your Adsense ] in the each of codes given below must be replaced with the ad...
More About: Sense , Post , Page

Add background colors to comments
2006-12-15 04:11:00
Hi all,This is a quick & dirty or a simple hack (if you want to call it that) that allows one to add a background color to the comments. I have this set in my blog and you can simply check the post page for one of my posts that has comments to see what I am talking about. Here is an image for your convenience:Interested? Please backup your template before proceeding with this hack.In this hack you can assign a different background color (and text color) for the blog author’s comments (see the image above) and to do this you must have this Hack (Author comment highlighting) from Hackosphere installed.Once you install the author comment highlighting hack from Hackosphere, your comment code will look similar to this:/* Comments --------------------------------- -------------- */#comments { margin:0; }#comments h4 { margin:0 0 10px; border-top:1px dotted $borderColor ; padding-top:.5em; line-height: 1.4em; font: bold 110% Georgia,Serif; color:#333; }#comments-block { line-height:1.6e...
More About: Men , Ground , Colors

Google page creator: headache
2006-12-14 19:07:00
Google's Page Creator software is seriously pissing me off:I hope I don't end up breaking my monitor, keyboard or mouse the next time I see this:BTW Google should hire someone who has written error messages for Microsoft :)) Coz: "oops! I don't like your error messages". Better still don't give me the donuts, just get the page working. Just a thought (pun intended)Update: Page creator behaves much better after I turned off the experimental features.
More About: Google , Head , Googl

Hack Round-up
2006-12-10 21:12:00
Hello Readers,Well, I had no new ideas (except for a few which require CSS knowledge) so I have no new hacks of my own as of now. However, this post points to some good hacks/add-ons/template mods that I have seen in the neighborhood recently:1. Hack ed Son of Moto template by Deniz of imessengr.2. Adsense beside your posts in blogger beta by Deniz of imessengr.3. Adsense between the posts (adding adsense directly to the beta template) by Loui$$ of Blogging No Secret.4. Template theme switcher (and tutorial to host Blogger Beta CSS externally) and hacked Blogger templates with this functionality (inbuilt) by PurpleMoggy.In addition, I have found my interaction with Deniz and posts from "Blogging Secret" very informative with reference to Adsense related tips (especially for Blogger Beta).BTW this post is done directly from a nice but nifty Firefox extension called Performancing. I really like their idea/design and concept, especially because I am yet to see my first post from Google ...
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Control your Layout editor’s layout
2006-12-05 15:53:00
Hello Readers,I was going through the stock dots dark template when I came across a section labeled “Page structure tweaks for layout editor wireframe” just before the closing skin tag in the template head. Soon I realized that I can use this section to modify the looks of my layout editor in the following section: Template > Page Elements > Add and Arrange Page ElementsFor those of you who couldn't follow me, here is a visual of what I am referring to:After converting to a three-column layout in my dots dark template, for many months my layout editor was in a mess. This happened because I changed my template’s outer-wrapper width such that there is no wastage of space on a typical 1024x768 resolution screen or in other words I stretched the template to fit snugly :) I did not bother my self with the layout editor and learnt to live with it.Here’s how my layout editor looked after switching to three columns and then the widebar layout. Call it an example of a bad layout in ...
More About: Your , Edit , Control , Editor , Layout

Adding a wider-sidebar to your blog
2006-12-01 01:12:05
Impressed by Wordpress?s Andreas04 template, I wondered if we can have some thing similar for Blog ger beta. The answer is yes. Please view the image to understand the layout I am referring to:It is much easier to play around with the template in Blogger beta because of its easy to understand template script language and the flexibility to view the template in collapsed and expanded widgets view (about which I will discuss a little later).Co-incidentally this layout is same as Ramani?s blog design (where he calls the third sidebar a widebar and for simplicity sake I shall also do the same). Click here to preview the implementation of this hack in Blogger beta.Before we proceed and learn how to implement this layout, I would like to discuss some nitty-gritty of the beta template. I do not want to give a detailed walk-through of the template here. You can find that here.Wrappers are an important part of the Blogger beta template and in simple terms they are used to allocate/fix some th...
More About: Your , Wide , Sidebar , Side

Now about phishing
2006-12-01 01:12:05
I wrote a post on spam, praised Gmail and now I get a phishing e-mail that even Gmail couldn?t block.Whosoever wrote that mail was such a dumbo. It had a glaring spelling mistake. They ?tanked? me for my patience :)). Here is a picture of the e-mail with a link pointing to a bank?s website. The link appears to be legitimate and normal at first glance.And once I hovered my mouse cursor over the link, the real link underneath was revealed. Also, observe the ?Tank? right underneath (lolz)To know more about phishing check this wikipedia page. Until next time.
More About: Phishing , About , Phish , Shin

The World is Flat ? Thomas L. Friedman (Book Revie...
2006-12-01 01:12:05
ISBN: 0141022728Tagline: The Globalized world in the Twenty-First centuryHanging around for almost a month with The World is Flat, I finally completed it despite all the time constraints I was under. I have never read such a thick book back-to-back in my life until this one and this book is very special not just in that sense. I could have completed it within a short span but the sheer density of information and ideas in this book forced me to read it slowly and in parts. So I used to read a couple of pages and then sit back and ponder about them in my free time in order to assimilate the information well.After reading the first few pages of this book I understood how important and dense this book was and to beat the density which posed such a challenge, I actually used a pencil to underline important points as I read this book. Why? This isn?t just a book to be read and kept in the cupboard to gather dust; it can serve as a great reference book for a variety of purposes.About the A...
More About: Book , Thomas , The World , Fried

The Tipping Point ? Malcolm Gladwell (Book Review ...
2006-12-01 01:12:05
ISBN 0349114463Tagline: How little things can make a big differenceI was looking forward to reading books by Malcolm Gladwell and finally got my hands on The Tipping Point . It is not a very big book and I managed to finish it in three days, reading only in my free time. Most of you might be aware that The Tipping Point is popular bestseller and a highly appreciated book. I am glad I was able to take time off to read this one.About the AuthorMalcolm Gladwell covered business, science and medicine for the Washington Post before becoming the New York City bureau chief. Currently he is a staff writer for the New Yorker. He has also authored another popular book by name BlinkThe Tipping PointThe Tipping Point is a book in which the author tries to explain why certain things happen the way they do. In the numerous examples that he explores, he shows that for a big-time change to occur, very minor change (involving the right set of numbers) tends to be the cause. For example, Fashion chang...
More About: Book Review , Review , Book , View

Listen to your blog and blog podcasting
2006-12-01 01:12:05
I have recently added a ?Listen to this article? link in my post footer and a link to my podcast feed in my blog?s sidebar. Using the link in my post footer, you can listen to my articles by way of streaming mp3 audio. Isn?t that cool?Yes. But how did you do that?I was never into podcasting and had no clue about it. However, while browsing instabloke, I came across a link in its post footer which read ?Listen to this post?. Through that link I found out about Talkr.Talkr is a podcast server that?s very easy and free to use. To learn more about Talkr click here registering at Talkr, you can submit your blog?s RSS feed to them and the. Aftery will create a podcast feed with your posts converted into speech perhaps using some ?text-to-speech? software at their end and it?s pretty fast too. So you don?t have to use podcast creation software, host the prepared MP3 files somewhere and setup a feed to it. Talkr will take care of it all. Talkr will also contain instructions on how to add t...
More About: Pod , Podcasting , Podcast , Blog , Your

Auto-hide blogger navbar like Windows taskbar
2006-12-01 01:12:05
Hello Friends,Avatar from Blog ger atto has put up a comprehensive post on how to get your blogger navbar to auto-hide like the Microsoft Wind ows taskbar. This means that after using the code from his post you can get the blogger navbar to hide and appear only when one hovers the mouse cursor over the navbar section.To view what I am talking about, just view my blog in Firefox and check out the navbar section. See how the navbar appears when you bring the mouse cursor near it and auto-hides when the mouse cursor is taken away. You can learn this hack on Bloggeratto from here.
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Rake in feeds with blogger beta and OPML (updated)...
2006-12-01 01:12:05
I am not sure about classic blogger, but I can definitely tell about blogger beta, that it has a number of options to choose from as far as feeds are concerned. If you have the right idea, you can use all of these feeds to offer your readers the flexibility to choose what they wish to read and how.Full posts feed of your blog:http://[your blog].blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full (updated as per blogger buzz)Summary posts feed of your blog:http://[your blog].blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary (updated as per blogger buzz)Full post feed for a label (topic):http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/[bl og id]/posts/full/-/[label name]Summary feed for a label (topic):http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/[bl og id]/posts/summary/-/[label name](or)http://[Your Blog ].blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/ [label name] (updated as per Phydeaus3)Full comments feed:http://beta.blogger.com/feeds/[blog id]/comments/full(or)http://[your blog].blogspot.com/feeds/comments/full (added as per blogger buzz)Summary of Comments fe...
More About: Blogger , Beta , With , Update

The Goal ? Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox (Book ...
2006-12-01 01:12:05
ISBN: 8185984131Tagline: A process of ongoing improvement.The Goa l was not on my reading list. However, it was lying around in the house and I decided to go ahead with it. The size of this book was very uninviting and from all the text on the covers and in the intro pages, I thought that I?d be better off reading this book during or after my MBA even though it seemed like a best-seller. However, once I started to read I realized that this whole "Theory of constraints" thing is actually presented in the form of a story which is very easy to grasp.About the AuthorDr. Eliyahu M. Gold ratt is an internationally recognized leader in the development of new business management concepts and systems, and acts as an educator to many of the world?s corporations. He is the originator of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) and his ideas have revolutionized the way companies work.In addition to his pioneering work in manufacturing management, he holds patents in other areas, ranging from medical devic...
More About: Book , Goal , The Goal

Displaying widgets only on comment, label, search ...
2006-12-01 01:12:05
Hello Friends,From certain site tracking services, I have been looking at the way people come to know about my blog and I realized that only few of them access my blog directly (using its main URL). Most of them come looking for some hack (like social bookmarking, Google Translate etc) and land on an individual post page. When they land on such a page, a lot of space under the article + comments section goes waste as my blog?s sidebars (in most cases) are longer than the length of the post + comments section. This is also the case on label, archive and search pages. I was wondering how to make efficient utilization of this wasted space so that such first time readers (of my blog) get enough information about my other posts and I am able to convert them to returning readers/visitors.I turned to instabloke for ideas and found that Blogbloke has made very good use of this space by posting a list of other articles, newsfeeds of his blog and adsense code. Inspired by his ingenuity, I dec...
More About: Widgets , Widget , Play , Men , Search

Google Docs & Spreadsheets (updated)
2006-12-01 01:12:05
You might have come to know by now that Google has released a service called Google Docs & Spreadsheets . In this service, one can use an online text editor (similar to Microsoft Word and others) to create posts and publish it to their blog.With this service, you can:- Have your documents published online (as a webpage) to share it with others (dedicated URL to each document, as in Google pages)- Export your online documents in word, openoffice, HTML and PDF file formats to store it on your hard drive.- Import various document (.htm, .doc, .txt, .rtf, .odt, .sxw) and spreadsheet (.csv, .xls, .ods) file formats into this service and publish them online instantly or save it to your hard drive in a different format. So if you want to convert a Microsoft Word file into Adobe PDF format, you can do it easily using this service.- Collaborate and work with others on projects and set access permissions to files.- Post to other blogging tools (other than Blogger) like wordpress, LiveJournal...
More About: Read , Sheet , Update

Host HTML pages for Frames in a blogspot address
2006-12-01 01:12:05
Dear readers,If you were a regular visitor to my blog, you might have noticed that I was using frames to display all the link-exchange chicklets until some time ago. I discontinued the use of frames, because they don?t display by default in Internet Explorer or IE (which still seems fairly popular).I was hosting my frame HTML document at Google pages (as Blog ger does not allow HTML file uploads) and it made my blog loading very slow for two reasons:1. There were a large number of chicklets and some javascript snippets in the frame.2. Every time my blog was accessed, stuff had to be loaded from google pages as well which is a completely different server/domain.All I wanted was to use a blogspot domain to host this frame HTML and I found out that it can be easily done.See these images to know what I am referring to: One simply needs to create new blog and strip it of its entire template code except for a few necessary sections. See image to note what needs to be retained:Basically, ev...
More About: Blogs , Page , Dress , Spot

New hacked template for Blogger beta and return of...
2006-12-01 01:12:05
Dears readers,The topics covered in this post are:1. A hacked sand-dollar template (with widebar) for blogger beta by imessengr.com2. "Flag blog" option now available for Blog ger beta blogs.1. Hack ed Sand Dollar TemplateDeniz from imessengr.com (the one who presented the recent referrers hack for blogger beta) has released a hacked sand dollar template for blogger beta. This template contains a variety of hacks and is based on the widebar design I had discussed earlier in my posts. You can preview this template from here and view this post to learn more and download the template.2. "Flag Blog" option now available for Blogger beta blogs.I just noticed that the "flag blog" or "flag this" button on the navbar which was available only for the classic Blogger blogs in now available for Blogger Beta blogs as well. With this, blogger has brought yet another feature of Blogger v2.0 into beta i.e. v3.0.
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Get socially bookmarked! (blogger beta)
2006-12-01 01:12:05
See the image links to the social book marking sites under each of my post footers?Working on Ramani?s original post regarding adding hotlinks to Del.icio.us and digit!. I learnt how to rearrange the stuff that appears under each post using the widget code in the template and also added images instead of plain text links for hot linking purpose. Thanks to one Cal Evans I was able to get all the images in one place from the plug-in file on this page. All I had to do was some coding. I must tell you that I am not a programmer or some thing and know very little about coding. But ever since Ramani modified beta blogger templates into 3-column templates I think I have moved from knowledge to knowledge while exploring its code. Thanks to him for that.While the tags for Del.icio.us and diggit! were with me from Ramani?s blog, I was lucky to stumble upon this site. It has additional hotlinks and I got the ?submit? URL from there. Here is how the code goes:http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=.. .
More About: Social , Blogger , Bookmark , Beta , Blog

Feed, Social Bookmark Drop-down and a Recent refer...
2006-12-01 01:12:05
Hello Readers,In this post, I have presented the following add-on for Blogger-Beta:1. Subscribe drop-down (on-hover) for presenting feed subscription options.2. Soci al Book mark drop-down for Blogger-beta post footers.3. Extreme Socializer ? A Social Bookmarking alternative.4. Recent Referrers hack by web-messenger.1. Feed Subscribe Drop-down (on-hover)You might have noticed the Javascript-based subscribe drop-down (activates on mouse hover) in my blog?s widebar. I had got this one from here. Just go to this link, follow the instructions there in, incorporate the code in a widget and say good-bye to that long list of chicklets occupying your sidebar and also present your reader with a large number of subscription options.2. Social Bookmark Drop-downFrom the same site I also found a tool to create a Social Bookmark drop-down menu (regular type). As this tool cannot create the links for Blogger beta post footers, I have modified their code and put it up for ready use (Thanks to Ramani ...
More About: Cent

Show recent posts under a label (category) in a drop-down from horizontal n
2006-11-28 00:41:00
Dear readers,Based on the new JSON format and the JavaScript code for displaying recent posts from Hans of beautiful beta, I now present horizontal navigational menus with auto (activates on mouse hover) drop-downs which display the most recent posts under each of your labels (say categories).To see this in action take your mouse cursor to the "Beta Hack" or "Hack News" section in the navigation bar in my blog's head section (i.e. just below the hidden navbar).This hack will allow readers to browse a particular label category by simply clicking on the label name in the menu or go directly to a specific post under that label by clicking the post title that appears in the drop-down. Therefore, this does not take away the navigational advantage of horizontal tabs in header and at the same time it allows a blog author(s) to give exposure to the most recently updated posts from various label categories.I found the code for this drop-down menu on dynamic drive at the following link. (Don...
More About: Cat , Show , Post , Cent , Down

Allow your labels to be searched in Technorati and Del.icio.us tags
2006-11-25 19:50:00
Hello Friends,I have developed a simple little add-on for your blog. To know what I am talking about, just see the labels in my post's footer. Notice the tiny Tech no rati pic beside each label. When clicked, it shows you all the posts from bloggosphere that have been tagged with the label in question. (See end of this post for Del.icio.us how-to)It is a good way to allow your reader to search Technorati using tags and serves as a sort of "related posts from other blogs" link. Installing this code is fairly simple. Just follow these steps:1. Edit your template HTML code and check the "Expand Widget Templates" box. Make a backup of your template if you are not used editing HTML.2. Look for your post footer i.e. look for <div>3. Then in there, look for the labels code i.e. look for <span>4. In there, look for the main label href i.e. look for:<a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'><data:label.name/>< /a>and immediately after that line add this code:<a ...
More About: Search , Labels , Your

What's with the backlinks?
2006-11-25 18:46:00
On recently published posts across all blogs I am seeing similar backlinks pointing to some page2rss thingy. The mess of links in there, led me here.What 's up with Blogger? What new feature or bug is this? :DTechnorati Tags: blogger search, blogger, backlinks
More About: Backlinks , Links , With , Hat

JSON, customizable widgets and other applications
2006-11-24 10:03:00
Hello Readers,There is some really good stuff happening in the Blogger hacking world. This comes after the recent announcement on Blogger buzz regarding Blogger (or I can say all of Google) moving to JSON (JavaScript Object Notification) data format for feeds.The hacks I am referring to are:1. Hoctro's Recent Comments/Posts widget.2. Ramani's Customizable Recent Comments Widget .3. Hans's Customizable Recent Comments Widget with date and post title (offered in one-click widget install feature).And this is not it, Stephen from Singpolyma-tech has announced an upgrade for his popular hack - Peek-a-boo comments on main page. All this is really good stuff!Technorati Tags: JSON, Beta_hacks
More About: Applications , Cat , Widgets , Other