Onset of a change

Yup! Yet again i was supposed to write frequently and i failed to do so. I have figured out one major reason for that. Inspiration. Yes, its the lack of inspiration. Then it was the look of my blog that did the rest of the job. You see, i designed the last 4-5 themes of the blog based on some other themes and they were not particularly ‘bug’ free. Since i’m into QA, which gets me my bread for the day, i had to sort the issues with the blog.

First it was the browser compatibilities. For that matter i hate IE more than ever. Firefox has been an absolute charm. More or less like Perl. Forgiving! But the harder i tried to get my head around issues in design, i realized that i was losing interest in doing so. So the end result of the close coupling of laziness and lack of interest lead to the downfall again.

Issue solved by me deciding not to do any deigns myself. So here i’m sporting one of the stock themes. And i must admit that i like it now. Better than the ones that i designed.

Now, the inspiration part. Yes it has really kicked in. Its 0030 on a rainy September night, i’m sitting in front of my laptop. With inspiration and euphoria filling in. Well i guess i wont be losing it again after all!!

“Tweet This” for Blogger Blogs

I had migrated out of blogger in 2007. Reasons for which i’m not quite sure of. One thing that attracted me in WordPress is the availablity of plugins and the ease with which i was able to work with the php code. So when i had to do a ‘tweet this’ link for each post on my blog all i had to do was write this at the right place -

    <a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Now reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>" target="_blank">
        <img src="http://jerrymannel.com/blog/wp-content/themes/SIM4.0/images/s-to-twit.jpg"
        style="border:none;">
    </a>

So yesterday, i was lazing around in the evening after a visit to the local library, one of my friends called. She was a smart-enough-techie for a business student. The only chick i knew who owned a Mac (i was so ready to dump all my girl-friends for her, coz she had a Mac. But her boy-friend owns an Audi so she ruled me out. 150cc Pulsar DTSi doest really stand a chance against an Audi). She had she blog up on blogger. Her problem how to get a ‘Tweet This’ link for each and every post on her blog.

I just dropped everything i was doing (nothing much infact) and got down to crack the problem. And this is how its done.

First get the full code for the .blogspot.com site that you have by navigating to Layout -> Edit HTML page. Check the “Expand Widget Templates” and copy the content of text area and back it up.

Next check the code that you have in had and make sure that its not the Classic Theme code. Just scroll and see you dont come across anything like <$BlogItemXXXXXXXXX$> in it.

Just like WordPress, blogger also loops and adds the blog entry(the simplest logic). So find a tag like <b:includable id=’post’ var=’post’>. This is the start of the section that will genrate the post-title, post-content, date-of-publishing, labels, etc. and similar miscellaneous information.

Now to add a “Tweet This” link to the each post use this code -

    <a expr:href='&quot;http://twitter.com/home?status=Now Reading -&quot; +
    data:post.title + &quot; &quot; + data:post.url' target="_new">
        Tweet This
    </a>

Depending up on where you are going to add that piece of code, you might have to add the necessary tags and define the properties. For eg. if you want the “Tweet this” link to be like the way its there at – http://jerryreghunadh.blogspot.com/ – this is the code that you need to add at the footer section :

    <div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-2'>
        <span class='post-labels'>
            <a expr:href='&quot;http://twitter.com/home?status=Now Reading -&quot; +
            data:post.title + &quot; &quot; + data:post.url' target="_new">
                Tweet This
            </a>
        </span>
    </div>

Thats it. I guess this fixes the problem for you too icon smile Tweet This for Blogger Blogs

 Tweet This for Blogger Blogs