Category: Personal Publishing

Each day webloggers across the world post news, comments and little fragments of personal information onto their sites. And everything that they post will be forever associated with that specific day in history. But they’re not the only sites to connect a piece of writing or a picture with a day. In fact all over the internet there are hundreds of ‘[something] of the day’ or ‘on this day’ sites – from “Astronomical Picture of the Day” through to “Dilbert Cartoon of the Day”. There’s a whole category on Yahoo dedicated to these things.

This hack allows you to put an automated link on the bottom of each of your posts to the Dilbert cartoon (or astronomical picture, word of the day etc.) that was published on that day. You can use it to add a little context to the events on your site or just to show off your interests.

First things first – what are we trying to link to? These sites often have simple URLs that are based upon the date on which they were initially displayed. For example the “Astronomy Picture of the Day” for February 23rd 2003 has the URL:

antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030209.html

…where the six numbers near the end are the year (03), the month (02) and the day (09). The Dilbert cartoon for the same day has this URL:

dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20030209.html

…which uses almost exactly the same format except with a the year spelled out in full (2003).

So in order to insert these links on a day-by-day basis, we’re going to have to put the basic URL in place without the date elements, find some way of inserting those date elements and make sure that they’re formatted so they’ll work as a link. We’re going to do this by using some of Moveable Type’s most useful and versatile features – the <$MTEntryDate$> tag. If you insert this tag into your templates by itself it will use its default setting – which is designed for reading and will look a bit like this: “September 9, 2003 11:44 PM”. But you can easily override this by using the format attribute and one or more date-tag variables. Here are a couple of examples of how you might format <$MTEntryDate$> and what the result would look like on your published page:

<$MTEntryDate format="%d %b %y"$>
would look like "09 Sep 03"
<$MTEntryDate format="%Y: %B, %e"$>
would look like "2003: September, 9"

Here are what some of those letters mean:

Month:
%b - name abbreviated to three characters
eg. Sep
%B - name in full
eg. September
%m - presented as two digits padded with a 0 if necessary
eg. 09
Day:
%d - two digits padded with a 0 if necessary
eg. 09
%e - two digits padded with a space if necessary
eg. 9
Year:
%y - two digits padded with a 0 if necessary
eg. 01
%Y - four digits.
eg. 2001

So to make those daily URLs all we have to do is change the original URLs to include the <$MTEntryDate$> tag like so:

From:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030209.html
to:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap<$MTEntryDate
format="%y%m%d"$>.html
From:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-
20030209.html
to:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-
<$MTEntryDate format="%Y%m%d"$>.html

So this is what you’d put into your template:

<a href="http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap
<$MTEntryDate format="%y%m%d"$>.html">
Astronomical Picture of the Day</a>

This hack was originally supposed to appear in the ill-fated O’Reilly “Blogging Hacks” book. I’ll be putting all my contributions online over the next few days / weeks.

The instruction manual for Movable Type contains detailed instructions about transferring your weblog from Blogger and Blogger Pro, and these instructions work extremely well if you have not been maintaining your site for very long. But while it’s rare for there to be a problem with the importing process, exporting weblogs from Blogger isn’t always so easy.

The normal transferral process is essentially three stages:

1. Replacing your Blogger template with one that formats your data in a way that Movable Type will understand.
2. Changing your Blogger settings to produce one very large file containing all your data.
3. Inserting that file into Movable Type’s import directory and pressing the import button.

Stage one is the simplest stage and presents no problems. You simply copy this text into your Blogger template page:

<Blogger>

<$BlogItemBody$>


		

One of the neat features that comes with Blogger Pro is the ability to have your weblog posts e-mailed off somewhere when you publish them. And this presents opportunities to extend your tiny empire right off the web and into people’s inboxes. Why not set up a one-way e-mail list which people can sign up to instead of slogging over to your site each day? Or maybe you would like to start a full discussion list with new debates inspired by your daily fevered rantings!

In order to set something like this up, the first thing you need to do is find a free mailing-list site like Yahoogroups (http://www.yahoogroups.com). Set yourself up a basic list to start off with – and decide whether you want everyone to be able to join in with conversation on the list or not. The only thing you have to do is make sure that the e-mail address you (or you and your friends) use in your Blogger settings are signed up as members to the mailing list and are able to post new messages. When Blogger sends out an e-mail containing the text from your latest post, it will make it look as if it came from your e-mail address. So if that e-mail address is not a member of the mailing list, then it will just bounce right off and no one will get to read it.

The last thing you have to do is go to the settings page on Blogger under the e-mail tab and put the e-mail address of your mailing list in the Blogsend field. If you are using Yahoo then this will be formatted like so:

[name of group]@yahoogroups.com

And you’re done!

Just two more tips for turning your weblog into an effective mailing list. As soon as you click on publish, your post will be sent out to everyone on your list and can’t be taken back. So make sure to edit and revise your post carefully before you publish it – saving it as a ‘draft’ when you’re not working on it. And secondly think carefully about how many e-mails people like to receive in a day – if you’re a prolific poster, why not encourage people to receive all your posts in a ‘digest’ form once a day. That way they’ll never want to kill you with axes.

Some people read a weblog because they like the person who runs it. Maybe they think that person is a highly entertaining, witty and exciting individual. On the other hand, many weblogs are run by geeks (including this one). If you’re a social no-hoper – what are you to do? How do you get people to come to your site and experience the wonderful links you’ve found without forcing them to plough through all the rubbish you feel obliged to write?

The ‘random link’ code does just what it says on the tin. When your visitor clicks onto it, it gives every link contained on that page of your weblog a number, chooses a random one and then follows it. No muss, no fuss…

In order to put a ‘random link’ button on your weblog, you need to insert this simple piece of javascript into the of your Blogger or Moveable Type template:

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
// Surprise me button
function goRandom()
{
var numLinks = document.links.length;
var randomNum = (numLinks - 1) * Math.random();
randomNum = Math.round(randomNum);
window.location.href = document.links[randomNum].href;
}
//--></script>

Now you only need to insert the link itself into your template to help take even the slightest effort out of your visitor’s daily visits:

<a href="javascript:goRandom()"">Random Link</a>

This hack was originally supposed to appear in the ill-fated O’Reilly “Blogging Hacks” book. I’ll be putting all my contributions online over the next few days / weeks.

Simple weblogging applications like Blogger can make it a breeze to update your site, but there’s a cost attached – every post on your site has to look pretty much the same. Here’s a hack that means you can style your most recent post differently from the ones that follow. It works by staggering the tags that surround your posts.

Here’s possibly the most basic template for a Blogger you could get:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<p>My weblog</p>
<Blogger>
<p style="background-color: red;">
<b><$BlogItemDateTime$>)</b><br><br>
<$BlogItemBody$></p>
</Blogger>
</body>
</html>

The important thing to notice on this template is that the paragraph tags (<p></p>) that enclose the Date/Time tag and the BlogItemBody tag are styled so that they have a red background. This is being done with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) but you could equally do it with table cells or <font> tags. The important thing is that since everything inside the Blogger tags will be repeated for each and every post, all the posts will will be styled in the same way.

Here’s how you’d lay it out if you wanted to style the first post differently:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<p>My weblog</p>
<p style="background-color: red;">
<Blogger>
<b><$BlogItemDateTime$>)</b><br><br>
<$BlogItemBody$>
</p>
<p style="background-color: blue;">
</Blogger>
</p>
</body>
</html>

What you’re looking for in this template is how the paragraph tags have been staggered around your weblog content. The first paragraph tag is outside the Blogger tags and so – because it isn’t repeated for each post – it just changes the background color of the first post. But the </p> and the <p style=”background-color: blue;”> tags at the end are repeated, leaving a paragraph with a blue background open when the next post is inserted. When the second post on the page appears, its background is blue – and this is repeated for every post after that. All that’s left is to close the paragraph tag that’s left open at the end of the page with a simple </p> and there you have it.

This hack isn’t restricted to background-color – you can change the font-face or size, make the whole post bold or put a background image behind it. You can even use CSS to change the posts position on the screen with margin and padding.

This hack was originally supposed to appear in the ill-fated O’Reilly “Blogging Hacks” book. I’ll be putting all my contributions online over the next few days / weeks.