Google translate

Okay, I couldn't resist another quick hack before going to bed. See the babelfish swimming along happily, just below the surface at the top right? He will take his best shot at translating this page to a few other languages if you ask him nicely. (Actually it's probably the Google pigeon farm at work again, behind the scenes -- I'll at least assume that a real babelfish would get closer to something understandable. :-)

And, for some reason, this particular breed seems very happy about exchanging the post date and the "next" link in the page header, when translating to the latin descendant family of languages. ¡¿Qué pasa?!

Categories:

• Blogger
• template
• translation

Blogger template overhaul

Now I've gotten to terms with many of the misfeatures I have been annoyed with in this page template; I've made myself a set of working next and previos links, the permalink icon looks nice, I drew up a snappy "external links" icon and got rid of the weird semantics of sometimes linking away when clicking a post headline, and to top that off, I also made myself a nice "Create New Post" link, that only I get to see (feel free to copy my createNew() function -- it solves the problems mentioned on the Blogger page about multiple authors without full admin privileges). Here is a quick brag screen shot of how one fully featured entry looks, when I browse around:


There was one feature I would like to add, which I did not fix today: a calendar that lists post titles when hovering an entry.

While theoretically doable using (server side unaided) AJAX calls, I decided against banging the server to get those titles, and rather feature requested template tag support from the Blogger guys to make pulling that off somewhat more resource sane. I appreciate any help from others feature requesting some additional template subtags. Feel free to borrow my wording (which might improve the chances of this feature request ending up on the TODO lists of our benevolent free hosting hero developers :-): "I want subtags to <BloggerArchives> to loop through ItemPages, tying in their BlogItemPermalinkURLs and ItemTitles, besides their ArchiveNames (=dates)."

Presently, all you can do with the <BloggerArchives> is really looping through the archive pages, sucking out their URLs (with <$BlogArchiveURL$>) and dates (with <$BlogArchiveName$>). In addition to that, I would want another optional nesting level below, call it <BloggerItems>, for instance -- which loops through all post Items of an Archive page, exposing item page URLs, their titles, and why not post time and optional link attribute as well, for completeness' sake. With that, blogger templates could be so much more reader friendly than they presently are.

I'm still not sure about whether I like the positioning of the previous and next links, on the index page. While it felt natural at the time to point to older posts on the left side of the page and linking to newer posts on the right side -- my brain is somehow surprised that it isn't the other way around. Reader opinions?

Categories:

• Blogger
• template