Monday, November 13, 2006

Feed, Social Bookmark Drop-down and a Recent referrers hack

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. Social Bookmark 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-down

From 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 for the help). You can download the text file containing this code from here. Simply download the text file and copy-paste the code directly into the post-footer portion of your template. See this add-on in action, here.(To learn how to work with post-footers in blogger beta, click here)

The advantage of this system is that you can give your readers the option of choosing from a large number of social bookmarking services without:

1. Sacrificing much space in your post footers.
2. Taking pains to host the social bookmarking icons (images) and then linking to them in your code.
3. Increasing your blog loading time by having a lot of images in the post footer.

In addition, inspite of the large list of bookmarking services in this drop-down, your readers should be able to locate a service (of their choice) easily as the list is in an alphabetical order. If you want to add more services to this drop-down you can look-up for them here and for an exhaustive list, go here (you may need to modify to code for blogger beta).

3. Social Bookmarking alternatives

Another good alternative to present a large number of bookmarking options to your readers without much trouble, is to use Extreme Socializer. Once a reader clicks on the Extreme Socializer icon, they are taken to the Extreme Socializer website where they can choose from a large number of bookmarking services.


Here is the code to be used in post-footers, if you want to use this service:

<a expr:href='"http://ekstreme.com/socializer/?url=" + data:post.url + "&amp;title=" + data:post.title' target='_blank' title='Bookmark anywhere with Extreme Socializer'><img alt='Socialize' border='0' src='[Your image source]'/></a>

You can pick the image for this one from blog’s my post-footer, but please host it on your own :)

Added on Nov 29, 2006: Deniz from imessengr.com has found another good service that offers a range of bookmarking, feed/podcast aggregating options. Please visit his blog to learn about the service and get the code for your blogs.

4. Recent referrers hack

Deniz from web-messengers has presented a hack on how to show a list of recent referrers to your post. You can check-out this hack from here.

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© 2006 Vivek Sanghi a.k.a Stubborn-Fanatic