A Consuming Experience

I'm now pleased to unveil... the Magical Sheep Spring Collection of New Blogger Widgets! Designed for the cool New Blogger about town who wants to grab some widgets for their blog using New Blogger's neat Add Page Elements feature. Brought to you by the Magical Sheep team, Kirk and Improbulus.

Yes, you too can now add a widget to your blog simply by clicking a button or two and dragging the widget in Layouts, if you're using the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta. G'wan, whatcha waiting for? (Produced since people can now make and share their own widgets to enable bloggers to easily add third party widgets to their blog layouts with a few clicks without having to know any coding, e.g. the Bluepulse widget.)

The widgets collection

At the moment, the collections page just has Technorati stuff for widgets relating to the blogosphere search engine Technorati, plus links (for completeness) to some clever widgets etc for New Blogger by Kirk:

• Technorati Blog Top Tags tagcloud widget -see further this post, the Technorati tools page and Technorati blog post
• Technorati Blog Authority widget - see this post, the Technorati tools page plus this intro and further explanation from the Technorati
• Technorati Link Counter widget for individual posts - see this post, and Technorati's link count page, blog intro and David Sifry's blog
• Kirk's Picasa Web Albums widget maker
• Kirk's Blogger label cloud instructions.
  

I thought it would be helpful to have a bunch of widgets together on one page, and I do plan to add to the list in future. More importantly, I'm using Google Pages for those Add widget forms because Blogger is still messing up the code on this blog on publishing when the forms are within a Blogger post, so if you tried the buttons from my previous posts and they didn't work, that's why - sorry about that, they should work fine on the new page.

Technorati tag cloud design; Technorati bugs

Now, more on the Technorati tagcloud. The comment by Tantek Çelik (Technorati's chief technologist) about how to get the cloud to look better in my blog was helpful, but it only applies to my specific blog. Your mileage may vary.

Far be it for a novice still finding her way to beg to differ from a CSS guru, never mind one who's had a hack named after him. But I still think Technorati could have, and can yet, make it easier for us mere users, especially non-CSS experts (which means most of us!) to tweak the format of the Technorati cloud to tie in better with the designs of their own individual blogs - as Delicious have done with their own tag cloud. For more details, see further my response to Tantek's comment, which I won't repeat here.

I'd be interested to know what others think of this issue, and of course whether Technorati will be improving things at their end. It's great that David (I assume that's Dave Sifry, Technorati CEO though he seems to have a different Blogger profile now) has just reported that a bug causing legit blogs not to be indexed has finally been fixed.

But I won't be holding my breath about stuff like styling clouds, given that their ongoing problems with tags is still extant despite David's acknowledgement of my bug report and assurance way back in February 2006 that they'd get to the bottom of the issue. Now that he's reporting on the state of tags as well as the blogosphere generally, surely it's more important than ever that Technorati should be accurate in its recording of tags. Which it won't be, if it still keeps inexplicably missing out on picking up the tags from entire posts on reams of blogs.

Labels: blog metrics, New Blogger, tagging, tools

NOTE: the original date/time on this post is 4/21/07 at 3:40pm. I'm going to edit this and republish now and see if that changes...

UPDATE: I've changed the date/times of the posts back to their originals now. Thanks to Spiderzilla I had taken a local backup of my site recently so I could pinpoint the original date/times from the copy of my blog on my hard drive.

FURTHER UPDATE: nope, it's fine now, no change at all in the original date/time when I edited and republished this post. So there must have been something odd at Blogger's end this morning/early afternoon. I can't think of any other explanation for this. I do know what I'm doing when editing posts, I've done it often enough! Thanks to Kirk for the comment explaining the redirect on New Blogger (good stuff that, thank you Team Blogger, very helpful); still learning stuff about New Blogger all the time, and still a long way to go!

OK, something weird is going on.

Today, when I edited some old posts to update some links in them, Blogger republished them dated TODAY not the original date. The Keep Current Time script is not meant to affect old posts, i.e. when editing old posts the box is not ticked, and I am very sure they're still not ticked (I checked on one of them before hitting Publish, too). Could be a conflict with the "Publish Now" script which I was trying out but had recently disabled.

And yet you can still get to the original posts if you go to the original direct URL (e.g. this Haloscan one and this flag bookmarklet one) - the original links are redirecting them to today's version, somehow. So I suspect it's New Blogger rather than the script not "taking". What gives?

I don't know what's up but please ignore my other "posts" today, as they're edits of old ones. I'm leaving them for now as I have to go out as I'm going to be an hour and a half late to a do! I'll have to redate them and hope that'll work. If only I can remember their original dates... well months will have to do, I can get that from links to them elsewhere.

Very odd.

Labels: New Blogger, problems

This post is on fixing the Blogger toolbar problem with the Keep current time Greasemonkey script. It might be of interest to those trying to fix other Greasemonkey userscripts which produce the same toolbar problem.

The problem

After a recent upgrade to the free Greasemonkey extension for the Firefox browser, my Blogger post editor toolbar stopped working - click a toolbar icon, nothing happened, even the preview link and the button for posting pics stopped working.

I tracked the problem down to a conflict with Jasper's Keep Current Time userscript, which Aditya had updated for the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta.

That free userscript, for those not familiar with it, is essential if you write draft posts for publishing at a later time - because if you don't have the script, you have to manually change the post date and time before you hit Publish, otherwise Blogger gives your post the date and time of when you originally created the draft, not the date and time you published it (which in my case can be weeks or even months later!). Then you wonder where the post has gone... (more on Greasemonkey and Firefox for those not familiar with them). The script adds to the Blogger post editor a "Keep current date/time" box, pre-ticked, which ensures that your post is "stamped" with, you guessed it, the current date and time of when you publish it:


Fortunately, Kirk came to the rescue yet again. That man's armour is even shinier than the mirror on the LG Shine, I tellya. Well, he sure spanked that monkey into submission.

Fixes and changes

He's updated the userscript to:

• fix the toolbar problem - it's working properly again!
• fix a bug that bit when you published a post between 12 noon and 1 pm (which gave the post a time of 12-something am - I only noticed it because I happened to publish a draft post at that time, and wondered where my post had disappeared to), and
• sort the spellcheck problem which Kato spotted, it's working on my system and Kirk's too, at least - bonus!
• tweak the part which keeps the post options field open automatically - it closed when you toggled between edit / compose mode, but now it stays open.
  

If you've suffered the Blogger toolbar icon or spellcheck problem, you can now download the updated script from Aditya's blog. Use that instead, and you're sorted. You should be able to install it over your existing Keep Current Time script, if you've already got it.

What's more, Kirk's solution for the toolbar issue may be of more general interest, because it might help others solve similar problems with the Blogger toolbar conflicting with some other Greasemonkey scripts. So I'm going to set out Kirk's explanation here, in more detail, for developers and others interested.

The reason for the problem, and the solution

The issue is down to a timing mismatch between the Greasemonkey and Blogger scripts. Either Greasemonkey is now running faster, or Blogger is running slower (or both!).

In other words, either Greasemonkey version 0.6.8+ is generating its scripts a bit faster than before, or Blogger's addition of new scripts (which they recently did, for the video stuff Kirk spotted) has delayed their form script in the execution order so that it comes in later than it did previously.

Greasemonkey always waits until the DOM is loaded before it executes (it needs a page before it can modify it), but what was happening was that with the new Greasemonkey version (or Blogger's adding of new scripts), Greasemonkey was executing the Keep Current Time script just a tick or so ahead of the Blogger script.

The Keep Current Time script adds a form checkbox with an ID. The Blogger form.js comes in just behind it, and does some checking and looks for forms - but with names instead of IDs. And this is where it was choking. It had a new form element which didn't have a name as expected, causing the whole Blogger script to fail... and the formatting buttons etc in the toolbar not to work.

It's not uncommon to have to make Greasemonkey wait a little longer with Blogger, as some of the things in the post editor don't get added until all the scripts load, and you can't work on them until they do (for an example see the Magical Sheep Technorati tagger).

What Kirk basically did was to wrap the whole Greasemonkey userscript in an onload function, so that it now waits until all the Blogger scripts (in particular the form.js) have loaded, before executing. And that solved the problem very neatly.

Thanks to Kirk the Monkey Master, as always!

Labels: Blogger, Greasemonkey, New Blogger, tools

Technorati have now officially launched their blog-specific tagcloud, which I blogged about yesterday. They call it the "Blog Top Tags" widget and you can use it to display the 20 top tags used in your blog as a tag cloud.

One-click New Blogger Blog Top Tags widget

Bloggers on New Blogger (Blogger Beta) using Layouts may be interested in the New Blogger widget I produced yesterday (see this post), which lets you add a Blog Top Tags tagcloud to your blog with just a couple of clicks by clicking an "Add to Blogger" button without having to know any coding or delve into the HTML of your template: get tagcloud for your Blogger blog. [updated to link direct to page with the button.]

I've also provided the code there for Old Blogger blogs which you can copy/paste into your template without having to change anything in the code.

And included a note about continuing bugs with Technorati tags which may prevent the tag cloud from reflecting your blog tags accurately.

(Linking to their blog post from yesterday's post won't get that post to show up in the "blog reactions" for their post because blog reactions don't pick up updates to existing posts (it's the same with Google Blogsearch and backlinks - a flaw with both systems, I feel), so I'm doing this separate new post, which hopefully will show up in their "blog reactions" in order to point people to the New Blogger widget.)

Labels: New Blogger, tagging, tools

Blogosphere search engine Technorati helped pioneer tags (intro to Technorati tags). But they've taken their time introducing a tool for ordinary users to display tag clouds easily on their blogs. Well, we won't have to wait much longer, hopefully. UPDATE 11 April: now officially launched, see this post.

In working on a form (strictly, debugging my attempt at a form!) for New Blogger users to add the Technorati blog authority widget to their blogs with a couple of clicks, Kirk noticed that the underlying Javascript file used by Technorati for their widget had some references to tagclouds.

So, clearly, you'll soon be able to show clouds just for the top Technorati tags specific to your blog (which they're calling "Blog Top Tags"), rather than all tags used by everyone. But Technorati haven't announced this officially yet, e.g. via their blog (UPDATE 11 April: now officially launched, see this post.) Still, the ever clever Kirk has worked out from their script how you can get a tagcloud for your own blog, based on tags picked up by Technorati - now, if you want it.

For an example, mine looks like this (at the moment the live version's in my sidebar on the right):


If you too want a Technorati tag cloud for your blog (shows the top 20 tags) in advance of the official release, here's how. But note the gotchas, below.

Technorati tag cloud widget code

Use this code in your template (but change URL to your blog's URL, bearing in mind the note in my previous post that you mustn't include the "index.html" or similar part of your homepage URL):

<script src="http://widgets.technorati.com/t.js" type="text/javascript"></script><a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/URL?sub=tr_tagcloud_t_ns" class="tr_tagcloud_t_js" style="color:#4261DF" >View Cloud</a>

How to add Technorati tag cloud to New Blogger blogs with one click

UPDATE: Blogger keeps messing up the code in the form on publishing, so I've given up.

You can add the Technorati tag cloud to your blog using the Add button which you can find (with a few other "add widget" buttons) here.

Click the Add to Blogger button below (any mistakes are mine not Kirk's, please let me know if you spot any! UPDATE: this is odd. Blogger Help say you should escape code inside the widget.content and widget.template bits. But escaping anything inside the b:includable tags seems to muck things up so the button below doesn't work. NOT escaping that makes it OK again. Hopefully this version should work now):

Step by step instructions on how to add New Blogger third party widgets to your blog: see my post on the Technorati link count widget (the steps relate to the linkcount widget launched last year, but the principles are the same). For this widget I'd recommend leaving it in your sidebar as it's for the whole blog and not just a particular post. You can see it in mine on the right.

(Created for your convenience as people can now make and share their own widgets so that bloggers can easily add third party widgets to their blog layouts with a few clicks without having to know any coding, e.g. the Bluepulse widget, on New Blogger.)

How to add Technorati tag cloud to Classic Blogger blogs

Copy/paste the following code into your Old Blogger template, wherever you want the Technorati tag cloud to appear:

<script src="http://widgets.technorati.com/t.js" type="text/javascript"></script><a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/<$BlogURL$>?sub=tr_tagcloud_t_ns" class="tr_tagcloud_t_js" style="color:#4261DF" >View Cloud</a>

Gotchas, and how to style the Technorati tag cloud

UPDATE 11 April: now officially launched, see this post, but the styling's still not easy. First, the Technorati tag cloud widget isn't official yet. This is just a sneak preview based on some detective work - it's not even an official "pre-release" version. So it may not work fully yet. In particular, you'll see the formatting's not as nice as it could be, in fact it looks a bit messy, but there we are. Hopefully they'll be adding an easy way to style the tagcloud, before they officially launch this widget.

UPDATE: Technorati haven't made it easier as per my suggestion below, nor have they given us the info needed to tailor things easily ourselves, but Chris Looseley has with experimentation worked out the classes Technorati have used, what they're named, how they've used them, and - most !importantly (pun intended) - how to override them so that you can tailor the look and feel of the Technorati tag cloud to tie in with your blog's individual colour scheme. Chris has kindly shared his findings in his comments to this post - please see the comments from this one onwards. Thanks Chris!

Second, the widget only displays a cloud of tags as picked up by Technorati. If Technorati fail to pick up properly-coded tags from your blog (and they often fail!), their tag cloud obviously won't reflect your blog tags fully. Their ongoing problem with tags "missing" from their tag pages has afflicted countless numbers of bloggers since Technorati introduced tags. They've still not got to the bottom of those bugs, just see e.g. this post - my latest report to them of tags not getting indexed or displayed, maybe a month or two ago, went completely unanswered, so I don't hold out much hope of their fixing this issue. I've kinda given up blogging about the issue or trying to help pinpoint the problem, they really have to get their own house in order now.

New Blogger label cloud - better alternative?

If you're on the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta, you can already display a Blogger label cloud on your blog courtesy of Kirk's own New Blogger Tag Cloud / New Blogger Label Cloud code.)

Blogger labels also get picked up as "tags" on Technorati (or would, if Technorati wasn't so buggy), but you have more control over them. Plus, Kirk's cloud uses label data from Blogger's own databases, so you can rely on it accurately reflecting your Blogger labels (unlike Technorati tags). So you're probably better off using labels (unless you want e.g. to split out labels/categories from tags/keywords, which is another matter altogether).

Labels: Blogger, New Blogger, tagging, Technorati, tools

Blogosphere search engine Technorati recently launched 3 new widgets, including what they've called the Technorati Authority widget.

It's a bit of Javascript code that you can put in your template sidebar to display, live, your blog's current "Technorati Authority (the higher, the better)" (according to the Technorati blog post on this by Tantek Çelik).

If you're keen to add the widget in your blog, below is how you can do it easily, for both New Blogger and Blogger Classic blogs.

But read on after that if you're interested in an observation or two about "Technorati Authority", and also something about the New Blogger template tag for a blog's URL.

How to add Technorati blog authority widget to New Blogger blogs with one click

UPDATE: Blogger keeps messing up the code in the form on publishing, so I've given up. See the Add button plus other "add widget" buttons here. Just click the Add to Blogger button below (UPDATE: this is odd. Blogger Help say you should escape code inside the widget.content and widget.template bits. But escaping anything inside the b:includable tags seems to muck things up so the button below doesn't work. NOT escaping that makes it OK again. Hopefully this version should work now):

Step by step instructions on how to add New Blogger third party widgets to your blog: see my post on the Technorati link count widget (the steps relate to the linkcount widget launched last year, but the principles are the same). For this widget I'd recommend leaving it in your sidebar as it's for the whole blog and not just a particular post. You can see it in mine on the right.

Give it a couple of minutes for things to "take" on Technorati - the badge won't appear on your blog instantly.

(The Add form tool above is a Magical Sheep production (as in, I have a go at something, and Kirk fixes my mistakes and vastly improves on it!), created for your convenience as people can now make and share their own widgets so that bloggers can easily add third party widgets to their blog layouts with a few clicks without having to know any coding, e.g. the Bluepulse widget, on the now feature complete fancy New Blogger, formerly known as Blogger Beta)

How to add Technorati blog authority widget to Classic Blogger blogs

Copy/paste the following code into your Old Blogger template, wherever you want the blog authority badge to appear:

<script src="http://widgets.technorati.com/t.js" type="text/javascript"> </script><a href="http://technorati.com/blogs/<$BlogURL$>?sub=tr_authority_t_ns" class="tr_authority_t_js" style="color:#4261DF">View blog authority</a> 

How to add Technorati blog authority widget on other blogging platforms

The code given by Technorati is quite straightforward, use the Old Blogger code above but change <$BlogURL$> to your blog's URL.

One gotcha which Kirk discovered - you must use your home site URL without pointing to any specific pages. Technorati doesn't seem to like it, otherwise. So for instance using http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com would work, or consumingexperience.blogspot.com or even consumingexperience.blogspot.com/ - but not http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com/index.html (any "www" is fine, it's just the .html or similar at the end that will stop it working).

Technorati Blog Authority - what is it, really?

Now some thoughts about Technorati's "blog authority" figure.

See my blog's authority in my sidebar on the right? At the moment it's 201. See the screenshot from Technorati below?

Nope, I don't see a "201" there either. In fact, at present my blog's "rank" is 18,653. The closest number to 201 is 198, the number of blogs which have linked to my blog in the last 180 days (this Technorati blog post explains all three of the figures given for each blog on Technorati; a few months ago they tweaked how they produce those blog statistics).

As it happens, last night the two numbers did match - number of linking blogs, and number shown by the widget.

The "blog authority" figure is in fact the number of blogs who have linked to yours in the last 6 months, so like share prices it may go up or down. Why the widget shows a slightly different number from the live search on Technorati's site is beyond me, but I suspect the widget may take a while to catch up.

Here's a couple more screenshots to illustrate - in relation to Liz Strauss and John Tropea's blogs. You'll see that "authority" really is the number of blogs linking to their blogs; and that for them, at the time of this post anyway, the widget and Technorati's page do match:

Screenshot of Liz's info on Technorati:
Liz's blog authority badge:
I've used screenshots so you can compare the two, but if you want to see the live widget it's here: View Successful Blog's blog authority

Screenshot of John's info on Technorati:

His blog authority badge:John's live widget: View Library Clips' blog authority

So, this is a little confusing. Technorati have introduced another concept, "authority", which isn't in fact explained by them explicitly anywhere that I can see. And it is different from "ranking". Why they haven't introduced a widget for "ranking", I'm not sure - it would be easier for most people to follow, I think (the higher the rank, the better). Maybe they will, at some point?

New Blogger's data tags: homepageUrl

Now, a thought and questions on Blogger's data tags.

With New Blogger's layouts approach using widget tags, there are data tags which have replaced the classic Blogger template tags.

In New Blogger, the equivalent of the old tag which gave you the URL of the blog seems to be <data:blog.homepageUrl>. However, unlike the old Blogger equivalent, BlogURL, that data tag doesn't produce the main home URL of the site - for the homepage URL it in fact prints out, e.g. in the case of my blog, http://consumingexperience.blogspot.com/index.html. Yup, with the "index.html".

Result: you can't use the tag with the new Technorati blog authority widget, it just won't work (see the note above under other blogging platforms). Kirk, who spotted this, had to do his usual Javascript jazz to strip out the index.html from the URL output by the data tag, in order for the Technorati widget to work properly.

We're curious as to why Blogger designed the new data tag to do that. Will they be coming out with an alternative data tag that just produces the homepage URL, without the "index.html", for use in third party widgets that only function properly with the base URL? Maybe Pete, Eric or Lexi or someone else from Team Blogger might be able to enlighten us?

UPDATE: as mentioned above, another oddity is that if you try to include the form for adding widgets within a Blogger post, the Blogger post editor does something funny to the code. You're supposed to escape the bits inside widget.content and widget.template but the post editor just extra escapes it so the tags and script inside the template, once the widget is added, won't work properly.

I've had Blogger post editor do weird things to my posts before with lots of extra ampersands and semicolons in particular, when I've tried to set out example code within a post (or edit a post with code in it). I'd be interested to know if others have had that problem too. I've had it since Old Blogger. I guess that it's not a priority for Blogger as I suspect relatively few of their users post code. Maybe the lesson is, if you have to have code, or forms, put them somewhere else other than in a Blogger post (like upload them to Google Pages)!

Labels: Blogger, New Blogger, Technorati, tools