Blogger Suicide

I almost committed blogger hari kari today. No I didn't try and 'top myself', but I completely screwed up my blog template so none of the posts were readable. The rest of this post will probably sound like gobbledygook gibberish unless you have a blog (and probably if you do too!) but here goes anyway.

What I wanted to do , should have been a fairly simple tweak to the blogger layout template and add a few new blogger widgets. I do make backups periodically but haven't done so in a while and I'm sort of a techie geek that should know better. *slaps himself on wrist*

There's a new blogger in-line comment feature which you can enable in draft blogger that finally puts a comment box below the post instead of having to click and launch a separate window or pop-up window.

I like it BUT......


a.) You have to do another code tweak to make it work if you previously tweaked the classic blogger template. This proved frustratingly difficult as the code refused to work "blogger incomprehendable error... blah blah blah!"

Twenty google searches later and tweak, tweak, tweak, like a budgie with bad pronunciation, it finally worked but not before a 30 minute slot where the only thing the hordes of people saw as they dropped by my blog was a small feedburner banner and no matter what they clicked on it just looped back to the same page. To those two unfortunate individuals, I offer my sincere apologies and please do come visit again!

b.) You can't sign up for follow-up comments on the new comment form which kind of sucks if you want to keep tabs on if/when your comment has been responded to (I love/hate this feature in all blog platforms.) I like being notified of a response to a comment I've made, but I hate being notified of 250 other responses i.e. 250 email messages, so I use that feature sparingly! Thankfully Gmail wraps the blog response emails in a cloak of the same conversation so its easier to manage. Hotmail has a lot to learn from the new kid on the block!

I found another hack that lets you add a link to the old comment form so your visitors can comment on either the 'new' or 'classic' version of the form. This worked fairly well except I kept messing up, since I had both the real blogger dashboard and the draft blogger dashboard open at the same time as I modified stuff and one would overwrite the others changes - argh!.

Finally it's working - well sort of - I still have some alignment issues!
... but you can now comment the old way with email follow up (if you have a gmail id) or use the box below the post. Now I understand why people move to Wordpress , MoveType etc!

OK almost the end of techie gibberish post. I've also tweaked the comments for I DO FOLLOW (remove 'No Follow') so you get a little link love from your comments when the Google Spiders come crawling here!



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PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... C: wait... SD: wait...