tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31969655276426498512012-02-22T13:18:19.325+01:00Articles about topics ranging from technology and software to scientific research. Occasional book reviews. Topics of general interest such as lifestyle, and nutrition. Exploration of blogs and the technical side of blogging.Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-66836182883177151322010-12-30T21:36:00.009+01:002011-01-21T14:51:43.443+01:00

Apture toolbar with branding, share buttons, and search bar. Many websites have an interactive toolbar providing social and other instruments situated often on top or on the bottom of the page. Blogger has its Navbar, Wordpress has WordPress Bar, and there are many other toolbars with different functionalities that offer integration with basically any website. This article provides a comparison

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-19049984852762351872010-12-22T15:01:00.018+01:002010-12-24T11:15:29.476+01:00

Flattr is a relatively new social bookmarking and micropayment (or rather: microdonation) platform. After Paypal, BAC, and Visa and Mastercard bent down to political pressure, Flattr is currently one of the very few options left for people if they want to donate money to wikileaks and consequently Flattr is getting a fair share of exposure. In this post, I explain what flattr is, how you can use

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-47647911787122024342010-12-16T23:57:00.012+01:002011-01-01T20:01:40.043+01:00

In an earlier article on the importance of comments for a blog I summarized studies about blog comments, concluding that blog comments lead to more traffic, better search engine optimization (SEO), apart from being personally rewarding to the blog writer. I worked on many optimizations for this blog to make commenting more attractive. Recently I made a major change on this blog and changed the

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com79tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-65144507620554404922010-06-04T21:01:00.001+02:002010-12-23T16:17:28.262+01:00

A blogging platform is the combination of hosting service and software for the purpose of maintaining a weblog. The most common platforms are blogger.com, always hosted with google (usually with the blogspot.com domain), and the wordpress software, on paid hosting services or using the wordpress.com hosting service. Other popular services are Typepad or liveJournal. In this post I want to show an

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-2786155378145603722010-01-02T04:43:00.014+01:002010-12-20T09:25:50.146+01:00

Many blogs use a top navigation menu of main blog categories. To reflect your blog's focus you would usually create these menus manually and update them from time to time. An alternative is to have the menu automatically generated for you based on the frequency of the post labels (categories). This is what this widget does. You might want to try it out. This is a simple extension of the blogger

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-36505969533357109852009-12-29T17:33:00.007+01:002010-12-24T02:17:24.663+01:00

There are already many articles about how to put social bookmarking links on a blog. Why write another one? That's a justified question and I wouldn't have written this post without having an answer to it. Many ways to embed social bookmarks take long, slow down page loading, or lack some features. I will explain a way that is easy to install in any website or blog, is very fast in loading, and

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com46tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-42790421700806652292009-12-03T13:41:00.008+01:002010-02-01T21:13:18.023+01:00

Remark: This post explains how to create special pages by making changes to the blogger template. As of January 2010, blogger provides a simpler way for the creation of special pages than the way explained here. This feature can be found in the blogger draft dashboard, under posting->edit pages. Special pages are pages such as contact, feedback, or information for advertisers. The standard way

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-20511497968683582642009-11-30T18:48:00.004+01:002009-12-11T13:05:07.959+01:00

When I or other people used the searched function on this blog for some article they like they often couldn't find it, because the standard blogger search doesn't index all pages. This was annoying and either people left or they were forced to go through the article archive in order to find articles. There is an alternative to standard blog or google searches which allows people to always find

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-89505015733495843472009-11-22T12:51:00.004+01:002010-01-04T19:13:01.240+01:00

If you don't use pre-moderation of comments in your blog, inevitably some comment will sooner or later appear that you rather not wish on your site whether it contains obscenities, linkspam, or for other reasons. The problem is that if you delete the comment, there will be a message "this comment was deleted by a blog administrator." How not to show the comment at all? There is a simple solution

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com29tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-52411570910795063182009-11-20T10:51:00.009+01:002009-12-17T03:08:43.368+01:00

I think one of the principal motivations for people to maintain a blog is to exchange opinions and improve your thinking. By leaving comments, visitors can improve your article and give you pointers that you can follow. I think most bloggers are happy to receive comments, in fact it's unusual to find a blog that has comments deactivated. This post discusses how to get more comments. Comments

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-90461155675669106922009-11-15T13:37:00.007+01:002009-12-13T22:00:25.877+01:00

Yesterday I received an invite for google wave, google's new communication tool that had the potential to unify all of their services. I wanted to try how to embed a google wave in blogger. After some tinkering and trying I had it. Here it goes. Image taken from Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009. Credit: Rambling Librarian at Flickr. You can find a very nice introduction to

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-10081926332689484472009-11-07T22:22:00.005+01:002009-11-08T02:09:38.742+01:00

You might have noticed a greeting message on this blog. You would see different welcome messages depending on whether you come from a search engine, twitter, or entrecard. This post describes how to install such a welcome widget in your blog or website. Installation is as simple as copy-pasting a code. Credits for a welcome message to Visitors from Entrecard and Twitter goes to Laura from

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-33160687767145743552009-11-03T23:30:00.006+01:002011-01-04T15:40:23.688+01:00

I compiled a list of useful internet resources for blogging. Categories for blog tools include page design and cross-browser testing, testing page loading performance, seo tools, social media tools, and post editing. If you think any page should be added, please comment. Page DesignCombining Color Palettes and FontsTypetester provides a comparison tool for different fonts. Color Scheme

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-14189923494290272972009-11-02T01:55:00.003+01:002010-12-20T09:27:32.060+01:00

Blogger category (label) pages can be very annoying to visitors if they have to wait very long while page with many articles loads. One remedy is to add &max-results=5 to your category links, however then many articles probably won't be read, because you can't realistically expect visitors to thumb through many pages. Probably this solution is also bad for search engine optimization (SEO),

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-2071320646339144002009-11-01T01:05:00.002+01:002010-01-18T00:03:09.933+01:00

There are several widgets for wordpress to show most popular posts, however, as far as I know, there is no good widget yet for blogger. In my last article, I explained how to set up a blogger widget that shows most popular posts based on feedburner statistics. In this post I explain how to create a widget for your blogger blog that shows most viewed posts based on google analytics statistics. The

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-57427087087034704582009-10-29T23:48:00.005+01:002010-12-19T13:16:16.539+01:00

There are several widgets for wordpress to show most popular posts, however, as far as I know, there is no such widget yet for blogger. In this post I explain how to create such a widget for your blogger blog. A prerequisite is rudimentary knowledge of python. The installation is a little bit more intricate than other widgets on this site. I think anyone, with some patience should be able to do

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-272575041658916892009-10-28T17:55:00.012+01:002009-12-16T22:12:15.091+01:00

In articles about programming it is very important to embed source code so that people can see the code and even download it directly. Sometimes I include code snippets in my posts and the code reads much nicer if the syntax is highlighted. There are different ways to embed source code from different programming languages in HTML and in this post I comment on them. The different methods for

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-49414080739943920732009-10-22T02:51:00.002+02:002009-11-07T22:42:01.557+01:00

On some internet sites, you may be greeted with a message like this: You searched google for "Blogger Welcome Widget." On our site there are 500 articles corresponding to that query.I wanted something like this for this site. In this article I present a simple bloger widget that presents a short greeting message containing query and number of search results. Clicking on the message triggers a

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-38565863540122133342009-10-21T01:50:00.004+02:002011-01-03T13:08:08.097+01:00

There are different blogger widgets for translation. They differ in look and functionality. In this post I compare some widgets and publish my own blogger widget code for translation. The standard google translation widget for blogger and other websites looks like this: A bit bulky in my opinion. At google translation tools you can build a pull-down menu like this one: Select the language

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-62604978907688653352009-10-12T07:56:00.001+02:002009-10-12T07:56:00.242+02:00

There are different methods to list related posts in blogger. I have tried several of them and after reviewing, I think Yu-Jie Lin's blogger related posts is the best for several reasons. It is very fast and updates from feed once a day. Installation is very fast and can be done by installing the widget from Yu-Jie's blogger related post service and adding a code to your blogger template. However

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-25389324784051290422009-10-11T18:08:00.002+02:002009-10-23T13:40:56.971+02:00

The Blogger template edit box is tiny and you have to scroll constantly to edit the HTML. The input box for editing the template is just too narrow and too short. In this article I explain how you can increase the size. In a previous article I introduced Greasemonkey and Platypus, Firefox add-ons, which allow to customize web pages on-the-fly and make the changes persistent. In my last article,

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-14311450322948567052009-10-11T17:58:00.002+02:002009-10-11T18:10:21.974+02:00

An annoying thing with Blogger is the tiny size of the input box for editing a post. When you write a post, the box is too narrow and too short and you have to scroll constantly. Blogger does not allow to change that size, however you can adapt it using augmented browsing, for example a Greasemonkey scripts. Here I explain how. In my last article I introduced Greasemonkey and Platypus, Firefox

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-47878292539557283362009-10-06T19:18:00.002+02:002011-01-03T16:54:13.486+01:00

Ajaxlabels is a blogger functionality which allows previewing articles pertaining to labels without leaving the current page. This can be much faster than waiting each time for the label page to load. I found this cool hack at blogger-hacked. Credits go to Deepak Ranganathan. I explain it here, because I update it by a simple fix and because the way I explain you save hosting of javascripts. In

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-7496754500651535872009-10-05T23:37:00.014+02:002009-12-11T01:07:26.635+01:00

There are so many widgets, scripts, and multimedia to put on a website! And many of them are so nice. Problem is, if you put too many of them, your site will load very slowly. This will drive visitors away and will let search engines to rank you worse. The faster your site loads, the better. General advice: your site should load in about 10 seconds, otherwise people will get bored. Here I

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3196965527642649851.post-39957722720411318382009-10-04T00:55:00.002+02:002009-10-04T00:59:31.705+02:00

If you have a blog at blogspot you might have been annoyed by it before: the navigation bar. In blogger, by default, the navigation bar is on top of your blog in the browser window. Leaving the navbar has often been criticized as looking unprofessional and not many people find the navbar useful, although blogger is adding some functionality such as social bookmarking. It is easy to get rid of the

Benjamin Auffarthhttps://profiles.google.com/118440342400845052454noreply@blogger.com5