Saturday, March 31, 2007

Member Fonts and Colors on Team Blogs

In this tutorial I will show you how you can have different fonts and colors for team members on a teamblog.
It is a simple hack, easy to install to your blog, and much asked for!

In this tutorial we will assume that you have a teamblog with 2 team members (Barbie and Ken). We will change the font color of the post body. Barbie's posts will be in red, Ken's will be in blue.

Edit your Blog's template in HTML-mode, and expand all widget teamplates.

Inside the skin of your blog (that is between the <b:skin> and </b:skin>-tags), add the following styling definitions:

.post-body-barbie { color:#ff0000; }
.post-body-ken { color:#0000ff; }

Now scroll down to the widgets-part of the template, and find the post-includable. Look for the following lines of code:

<b:includable id='post' var='post'>
....
....
   <div class='post-header-line-1'/>
   <div class='post-body'>
      <p><data:post.body/></p>
         <div style='clear: both;'/> <!-- clear for photos floats -->
      </div>
   <div class='post-footer'>
....
....
</b:includable>

What you see here is a post-header line (which is empty), the post-body, and the first line of code for the post-footer. Now we will change this code, so that Barbie and Ken each have their own color:

<b:includable id='post' var='post'>
....
....
   <div class='post-header-line-1'/>

   <b:if cond='data:post.author == "Barbie"'>
      <div class='post-body-barbie'><p><data:post.body/></p>
        <div style='clear: both;'/> <!-- clear for photos floats -->
      </div>
   <b:else/>
      <div class='post-body-ken'>
         <p><data:post.body/></p>
         <div style='clear: both;'/> <!-- clear for photos floats -->
      </div>
   </b:if>

   <div class='post-footer'>
....
....
</b:includable>

Now save the template.

If you have more than 2 team members, the principle is the same: you just have to add some extra if-else statements, that are nested.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Recent Posts Widgets In Many Languages

Many of you are very excited about the Recent Posts Widget and the Recent Comments Widget, but you would like to have it in your own language.

So on my new Beautiful Beta Wiki I started a new project to assemble as many language versions of these widgets as possible. Take a look here to find the language versions that are available so far: English, French, Spanish and Dutch (Portugese will follow soon I hope).

So here is my challenge to you: translate the widget in as many languages as possible!

Recent Posts Widget Improved

One of the most annoying things of the Blogger Post Feed was that it is sorted by date of post-update. As a consequence, old posts that were updated appeared on the feed as if they were new. Very annoying if the alteration is just a minor one, for example repairing a broken link, or correcting a small mistake.

Well, this problem (if we may call it a problem) has been solved now by Blogger. You can have your post feed sorted by Published date, or by Updated date.

If you have the Recent Posts Widget installed to your Blog, there is a slight modification in the code you have to make. Edit the Page Element, and change the code like this:

<script src="http://beautifulbeta.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=published&alt=json-in-script&callback=showrecentposts"></script>


Notice the orderby-parameter: there are 2 possible values: published and updated. Omitting the parameter is the same as updated.

The Recent Posts Widget Installer has been improved, and now supports the orderby-parameter.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

Beautiful Beta Wiki Launched Today

Today I can proudly announce the release of the Beautiful Beta Wiki!
Anyone who is interested to contribute to building a strong Blogger community, and wants to share knowledge and ideas, is welcome to apply for membership of the Wiki.

The Wiki has a Knowledge Base (that will be filled the coming weeks with Beautiful Beta stuff and - hopefully - your contributions as well) and a Forum. On the Forum you can post your questions, and that will be much more easy for me to answer than the per-post comments, that are not really easy to follow and to answer.
And on the Forum, you all can help eachother to improve your Blogs.

And ofcourse, I hope that the Wiki will be just as clear and nice and helpfull to you as this Blog has been so far!

Sunday, March 18, 2007

What's Up Here

It has been very quiet on this Blog for the last month. I have been very busy with my daytime job, and besides that, lots of activities in the family life.
On the Web-front, my activities have been focused on Google Maps, and I built a great application to map my families travels to and through the United States next summer.

And ofcourse my curiousity has wandered around the web, where I discovered the great power of Wiki's. And I noticed the great potential of Wiki's in supporting you, my readers, in finding usefull tips and tricks, and sharing knowledge about Blogger. You see, more than 400 people are now subscribed to the feeds of this Blog. Isn't that what we call a Webcommunity?

So I started to build a Beautiful Beta Wiki, that will contain a Knowledge Base that is ripped from the Weblog, and a Forum where you can post questions, and help other people to improve their Blogs. And this Wiki will be open to you all, so that you can make contributions to the Knowledge Base and the Forum.

So let me know if you like to participate in this Beautiful Beta Wiki, and I will give you notice as soon as it is released.