How to show links to related posts

Over at Hoctro's Place, I found a great hack which can help you show links to related posts (by label) beside each of your blog posts (in the sidebar section). This can be a very useful hack because many visitors to your blog will land on a "post page" rather than on your home page, and these links can direct them to other posts of interest on your blog.

This hack uses the JSON Callback technique to retrieve post titles from your blog's labels feed. Also, the inclusion of more than one label set is possible, so if you have more than one label for a post, related titles will displayed for each of these labels.

You can choose the maximum number of labels to display as well as the maximum number of posts for each label, which is handy if you feature a great many posts under one particular label.

Hoctro's instructions for this hack are very good, and take you through the modifications to your template step-by-step. It is advisable to pay close attention to the instructions though as the modifications are quite extensive!

For the full tutorial, please visit the "Showing Related Articles" tutorial over at Hoctro's blog.

Although I don't currently feature this hack here on Blogger Buster, I will certainly make use of this when my template is upgraded in the next few weeks! I will also look into the possibility of featuring the related posts links right beneath each post instead of in the sidebar, which I will post as tutorial once I am more sure of how this can be achieved.

Technorati Tags: related+posts | javascript | widget | labels | feeds

Mobilize your blog with Widsets

I recently came across a new service from Widsets which enables you to syndicate your content for people to read as a widget on their mobile phone!

Using WidSets, you can create a widget using your blog's Atom/RSS feed which can be read on a mobile phone. Readers can subscribe to your WidSets widget and receive updates on their mobile device where a regular feed reader may be unavailable. You can see an example of the subscription button for WidSets in my right sidebar.

WidSets is a free service for both subscribers and publishers, and may be very useful in generating traffic from the new wave of readers using their mobile phone to surf the web. To create your own account and begin creating widgets to syndicate your blog content, head on over to WidSets and register your account details. You will be sent a confirmation message to your mobile phone and email account, and can begin creating your WidSets widgets straight away.

Do note that the text message sent by WidSets will contain a link for you to go online with your handset to download the WidSets software, which enables you to view your widgets from your phone. You do not need to use this software in order to be able to create widgets; you only really need to verify your email address.

Please let me know your opinions of this widget using the comment form below.

Technorati Tags: widsets | widgets | feeds | atom | rss | mobile

Free PageRank display button for your blog

Many blogs and websites show off their PageRank with a button like this:

You can use this free tool to generate your own PageRank button display which updates dynamically each time your PageRank is updated, so you can always be sure that your correct ranking is displayed.

To use this free tool, simply enter the full URL of your blog and click "Check PR. Your blog's current PageRank will be displayed, along with a selection of buttons you can choose from to display in your site. When you click on a button style, the code will be generated for you to copy and paste in your blog where you would like the PageRank display button to appear.

Create your free PageRank Button Display

What is PageRank?

Google PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is on a scale of 0-10. A website or blog with a high PageRank is considered more important than one with a lower PageRank. Read more about PageRank on this post.

(At present, Blogger Buster does not yet have a PageRank. This is because I created the Blogger Buster domain just after the last PageRank update. Hopefully this will soon change!)

Please leave your comments and suggestions below.

Technorati Tags: pagerank | google | button | widget | traffic

Tic Tac Three Column Template (Blue) available to download

As requested by a few people now, I have modified the Tic Tac Blue template to add a second sidebar. Here is a screenshot for you:

You can see a demonstration of this template in the Tic-Tac Three column demonstration blog.

You can download this template using the link below. This is a zip file which contains the XML file for this template.

Download Three Column Tic Tac template (blue)

To use this in your blog, you should extract the XML file from the zip folder and save it to your computer. Then go to your Blogger dashboard, and click on Template>Edit HTML. Near the top of this page you will see a link where you can upload a new template from a location on your computer. Browse for the saved template file and click "upload". This will then install your new template in place of the old one.

All the images used in this template are hosted by Blogger Buster. You do not need to upload them to your own hosting providers.

You are free to modify this template as you wish, however I do ask that the author credits within the template itself remain in place. Please do not redistribute this template without a link back to Blogger Buster!

Very soon I will also be uploading the "green" version of the Tic Tac template available for download, along with widened versions of both the blue and green templates (which feature more space for blog posts).

Please leave your comments and suggestions below.

Technorati Tags: templates | xml | tic+tac | three+column

All about blog feeds (part 4)

This is the fourth and final installment of a short series of posts written to help you achieve a better understanding of your blog feeds, and how you can use them. In this post, I will explain how you can use services like FeedBurner and AddThis to syndicate your blog feeds and attract more subscribers to your blog.

Services such as Feedburner and AddThis aim to help you publicize your blog feeds, and make them more readily available for readers to subscribe to. If you use Feedburner to syndicate your feeds, for example, you can offer your readers the option to subscribe to your blog feed as a daily email digest, which for those unacquainted with feed readers may well be a pleasant and accessible option!

How FeedBurner works

FeedBurner is probably the most popular feed management system to date, and is completely free to use. Many services are offered to members to help publicize and optimize your blog feeds, and attract more readers to subscribe to them.

To create your own free Feedburner account, simply go to the Feedburner registration page and provide your details. Once you have set up your account, you can begin burning your blog feeds right away!

To "burn" (or "syndicate") a blog feed, all you need to do is enter the feed URL and click "Next". On the following screen, you will be provided with a Feedburner address which you can offer to readers for subscription to this feed. This URL can be changed to suit your needs if you prefer, so long as it hasn't already been used by another member. Click "Save" and your feed will now be managed by Feedburner! However, you may want to consider using a few of the publicizing and optimization options available to you in order to let your readers know that the feed is there for subscription.

Some of the most popular tools provided by Feedburner are:

• Feedburner Stats: get an accurate overview of your subscribers, click-throughs and site traffic.


• Chicklet Chooser: use a friendly graphic as a widget in your sidebar to let readers know about your feed subscription links.


• Email subscriptions: offer updates by email in a daily digest.


• Pingshot: automatically pings pinging sites for you each time you post.


• Headline animator: create a headlines widget featuring the most recent posts from your blog in rotation.

Redirect your blog feeds through Feedburner

You can now choose to redirect your default blog feeds through FeedBurner! This is a great solution for ensuring your subscription statistics are kept up to date, and can offer you a better understanding of your readers. To activate this, you should already have a Feedburner account. Then, go to your Blogger dashboard and click on Settings>Feeds. On this page you will be able to redirect your default blog feeds to your Feedburner feed URL (this is the URL you created when you first burned your blog's feed). Enter this URL and click "Save". From now on your default blog feeds will be redirected through Feedburner instead.

Note: only the default Atom feeds will be redirected through Feedburner; the alternative RSS formats cannot be redirected in this way. So if you also want to have statistics for feed subscribers to your RSS feeds, you would have to burn these manually through your Feedburner account as described earlier in this post.

How to use AddThis to syndicate your feeds

AddThis offer a free, non subscription feed syndication service which generates a button link readers can use to subscribe to your feeds using their favorite feed reading system (eg: MyYahoo, Bloglines, Technorati). To create your own free widget, simply visit the feed widget creation page and enter the feed URL you would like to syndicate. AddThis will then create the widget code which you can easily add to your blog's sidebar and offer to your readers as a subscription link.

You can also choose to become a member of the AddThis site, and get statistics for those who subscribe using this widget, as well as statistics for your site.

Overall, this is a very simple and easy way to help publicize your blog feeds.

Syndicating customized feeds

By "customized" I refer to the non-default feeds, such as label feeds, summarized feeds and alternative RSS feeds. If you would like to publicize any of these feeds using the methods I described above, just enter the appropriate URL including any variables as I described in the previous two installments. Foe example, if you want to syndicate your summarized posts feed using the AddThis widget, enter this as your URL:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary

Similarly, if you want to syndicate your full comments feeds using Feedburner, enter this instead:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/full

The one thing I would advise against is trying to syndicate per-post comments feeds using a third party service, because it is much more efficient to provide a link to per-post comments feeds on the post referred to by the link, as outlined in this post. Trying to add Feedburner or Addthis links for such a feed could really get messy and complicated!

Summary

I hope this short series has helped your understanding of your blog's feeds and how you can publicize them for readers to subscribe to them. If there is anything I haven't covered here, or if you have any comments about this series, please feel free to leave your message below.

<-- Part 3

Technorati Tags: feeds | feedburner | feedburner101 | addthis | syndication

All about blog feeds (part 3)

This is the third installment of a short series of posts written to help you achieve a better understanding of your blog feeds, and how you can use them. In this post, I will explain about the "Label" and "Per-post" feeds, and how you can create links to these feeds in your blog.

The URL required to find the feeds for Labels and Per-post comments are very different to those we used to find the blog-wide posts and comments feeds, and require a full post to discuss them! Rather than using the blog's url, we need to use the blog's unique identification number, and in the case of per-post comment feeds, the unique post identification number.

About Label feeds

Let's begin by looking at the format of the Label feed url:

http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/[yourblogID]/posts/[feedType]/-/[labelName]

First we notice that the feed URL is located at "www2.blogger.com", and that the feed is located by your blog's unique identification number. Notice also the "/-/" section: this is what defines the feed as being attributed to a label.

As in the previous examples, the feed type can be default, summary or full. The label name is that of a label you have defined in your blog. This is case sensitive, so ensure you have correctly defined the label name in the url (ie: Blogger is different from blogger).

Only posts can be shown in the label feeds: comments are disabled and cannot be displayed.

You may well want to experiment with this to see your label feeds for yourself. But how do you find your unique blog ID?

How to locate your blog ID

Whenever you create a post, or preview your template, you will notice your unique blog ID in the address bar. It should look something like this:

http://www.blogger.com/rearrange?blogID=7724685150636068124

The numbers highlighted in red would be your blog ID. Of course, this will be different for your own blog than the number shown here, since each blog has a unique identification number.

How to add links to the label feeds in your blog

Once you've experimented with the feeds for different labels, you may well want a way to display links to these feeds too.

You will have to do this manually each time you want to display a link to a particular label feed. You should do this in the format of the example link below, replacing the text and brackets with your own unique values:

< a href="http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/[yourBlogID]/posts/default/-/[labelName]>Subscribe to Label feed</a>

<a href="http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/[yourBlogId]/posts/summary/-/[labelName]>Label Feed</a>

If your labels have spaces between them, you should replace each space with %20 in the feed URL. Here is an example of how I could link to the "Blogger Templates" label feed:

<a href="http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/724793682641096478/posts/default/-/Blogger%20Templates>S|ubscribe for Blogger Templates updates</a>

About Per-Post comments feeds

The Per-Post comments feeds use the regular blog url for the first part, but require the unique post id to define the post from which comments will be extracted. The format of per-post comment feed URLs look like these examples:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/[postId]/comments/default

http://www.yourblog.com/feeds/[postId]/comments/summary

To find the unique post ID for an individual post, you will need to edit the post in question and look in the address bar for the post ID. The red text in the url below highlights the post ID for the post you are reading now:

http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=724793682641096478&postID=2922427856369980802

If you want to provide a subscription link for comments to a single post, you can do so in this format, replacing the brackets and PostID with your own unique post ID number:

<a href="http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/[yourPostId]/comments/default>Subscribe to comments for this post</a>

If you would prefer to provide such a link for all of your blog posts, you should follow the instructions on this page which explain how best this can be achieved.

If you use post-pages in your blog, you will usually find a link to the per-post comments feed right at the bottom of the page. (Note: I'm currently working on an "inline comments" hack for Blogger blogs which better highlights the per-post comment feed link, which I shall post about very soon!)

Changing the format, feed type and results for these feeds

As mentioned in part 2 of this series about blog feeds, you can change the format (Atom/RSS), the feed type (default/summary/full) and the maximum number of results shown for these feeds too. The only exceptions are as follows:

• Label feeds can only show posts, not comments.


• Per-post comments feeds can only show comments, not post updates

In the next post in this series, I will explain in general how you can syndicate your feed using Feedburner and AddThis.

<-- Part 2

Part 4 -->

Technorati Tags: blog+feeds | labels | comments | links

All about blog feeds (part 2)

This is the second installment of a short series of posts written to help you achieve a better understanding of your blog feeds, and how you can use them. In this post, I will explain how to find the main posts and comments feeds and how to make them available for your readers to subscribe to them.

Your main posts and comments feeds are the easiest feeds to find, and are also the feeds which Bloggers are most familiar with. By default, Blogger publishes these feeds in Atom format.

These feeds are found at the following URLs (where YOURBLOG is replaced by the name of your blog):

• For the main posts feed: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
  Or if you are publishing to a custom domain: http://www.yourdomain.com/feeds/posts/default


• It can also be found at: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml


• For the main comments feed: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
  Or if you are publishing to a custom domain: http://www.yourdomain.com/feeds/posts/default

You can change the settings of your blog feed, be it for the posts or comments feed, by changing elements of the URL and adding variables to it. The variables you can change are:

• The feed type (Atom/RSS)


• The maximum number of results (posts or comments) that are displayed.


• The amount of text displayed (summary or full)

So let's look at the feed URL in another way:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/[posts/comments]/TYPE/[variables defined here]

The feed type (Atom/RSS) and the maximum number of results are defined using variables which are added to the end of the URL. The amount of text displayed is controlled by the TYPE section within the default url.

Changing the amount of text to be displayed

Let's start with an explanation of the type. This can be either "full" (which displays the whole post or comment) or "summary" (which displays the first 250 characters or so). The "default" setting defers to whatever settings you have defined in your Blogger dashboard (which I will talk about in a later post). Using either "full" or "summary" in the url for your blog feed will override any settings you have defined in your Blogger dashboard. Here are examples of how this setting can be used:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary

http://www.yourblog.com/feeds/comments/full

Changing the feed format

To change the feed from Atom to RSS format, you need to add this variable to the end of the feed url:

?alt=rss

The question mark tells the browser that variables will be added to the feed url, while the "alt" function defines the alternative feed format (in this case, the alternative is RSS). Here are examples of how this can be used:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss
http://www.yourblog.com/feeds/posts/summary?alt=rss

Changing the maximum number of results to be displayed

Once again, variables at the end of the feed URL are used to change the maximim number of results to be displayed. This can be any number from 1-999, and is defined by adding ?max-results=[insert number here] to the end of the feed URL. Here are a few examples:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full?max-results=100

http://www.yourblog.com/feeds/comments/summary?max-results=10

By default, the feeds will return with a start index of 1; that is, they begin with the first newest post or comment. If you want to skip a few results, and start with the third post/comment for example, you can change this by adding ?start-index=3 to the end of the feed url, like this:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?start-index=3

Chaining variables in your feed urls

If you would like to ad more than one variable to your blog feed urls, you can do so by inserting an ampersand (&) between the variables, as in these examples:

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss&max-results=100

http://www.yourblog.com/feeds/comments/summary?max-results=10&start-index=5

http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full?alt=rss&max-results=15&start-index=2

In this case, you do not need to add the question mark (?) to all of the variables, only the first one to be defined. The browser understands that variables will be added when you include the first question mark after the regular feed url, so you don't need to add any more!

How to offer these feeds for readers to subscribe

Now that you understand the URLs to find the various site-wide feeds for your blog, and how to add variables to change them, you would probably like to offer these feeds to your readers so that they can subscribe to them. You can add these feed URLs to your template like any other link, either as a text link, or an image link. Here are some examples using feeds from Blogger Buster, with an explanation of how they are achieved:

A text link to the main Blogger Buster posts feed, changed to RSS format, summarized with 50 maximum results:


Subscribe to Blogger Buster Posts feed (summary only)

This is achieved by adding this section of code, which you could use in your sidebar:

<a href="http://www.bloggerbuster.com/feeds/posts/summary?alt=rss&max-results=100">Subscribe to Blogger Buster Posts feed (summary only)</a>

An image link to the Blogger Buster comments feed, with full comments displayed and a start-index of 3:



This is achieved using this section of code:


<a href="http://www.bloggerbuster.com/feeds/comments/full?start-index=3"><img src="http://templates.bloggerbuster.com/feed.gif" border="0"/></a>

You can experiment with different text links and images to suit your blog's style and requirements.

Many of your feed subscribers will add the feed url to their feed reader, or will subscribe using the automatic selection in the Firefox internet browser. You can make it even easier for users to subscribe by using your feed URLs to create Feedburner or AddThis feed widgets, as I will describe in a later installment of this series about blog feeds.

Summary

I hope this post has helped you understand the basics of your feed urls, how the settings can be changed by altering the URL and adding variables, and how these links can be provided in your template for users to subscribe to them.

In the next post of this series, I will explain about Label and Per-Post Comments feeds, which are a little more complicated to find (and even more difficult to feature as subscription links in your template!).

<-- Part 1

Part 3 -->

Technorati Tags: blog+feeds | feeds | rss | atom | posts | comments