Blogger User » Blogger Help

Post Summary – Read More Feature for Blogger !

Pradeep Kumar Singh — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:15:00 +0000

Blogger’s Birthday has some very special gifts for Bloggers now. The “Read More” or say “Continue Reading” feature was really most requested and awaited feature of Bloggers. Many had applied this hack in their blog going through the entire long html editing process which was really complicated. Now Blogger as a part of its Blogger’s 10th happy birthday feature has announced the “Read more” feature with just simple steps, which it preferably calls the “Jump Breaks”. With this, you can now easily have the summary of the post with the “Read More” feature in your blog index pages.

You can activate this feature in couple of ways. If you have made “Blogger in Draft your default dashboard or just use it, you’ll see the “Insert jump break” icon in the editor’s toolbar. Alternatively you can also activate it from the Settings tab (Basic) of your respective Blog’s dashboard. See the Image below to get the idea of using the “Jump Break”.

One more thing, if you still find the old editor comfortable like I do, you can still use this feature. All you need to do is just add the code manually. In your “EDIT HTML” section of creating post, add the code where you want to use the Jump Break feature.

The default code will enable you to have the summary of the post with the “Read More >>” title at the break. If you need to change this to something else you can do it by editing the “Read more” text by clicking Layout and then Edit the Blog Posts widget.

For those who use custom templates, you may not be able to enjoy this feature. If you are using classic templates, blogger probably has some solution for you. Follow the instructions at the bottom of this help article of Blogger.
For more and detailed help of using this feature with customized templates, you can read the post of Bloggerbuster “Read More function to Customized Templates”
Oh yes, you Might as well jump! Like official blogger blog says while announcing this feature.

Share Posts from your Blogger NavBar

Pradeep Kumar Singh — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 21:22:00 +0000

I guess most of you have removed the NavBar from your Blogger Template if you are using some custom versions of the template for your blog. Well, its now time to get back the NavBar again in your template. But not really if you don’t like to use this new feature of Blogger, which allows you to share posts directly from the NavBar. NavBar of the Blogger starting from august 27, 09, includes a “SHARE” button. This button will help you to share posts to popular social networking sites and even e-mail them directly. Social Networking sites have been really popular and a lot many people use those medium to gain readers by sharing posts on such sites. Social Bookmarking widgets are really popular in the blogosphere and now it seems easier when the blogger itself comes with idea of including that in its NavBar. And I know many of you don’t like this blogger’s idea of feature being introduced in the NavBar. Anyway, you can learn how to use this feature and things you can do with it in this post.

To use this feature it’s essential that you have the NavBar in your Template. Don’t worry if you have removed the NavBar already but still interested in this feature, here is how you can add the NavBar again.

NavBar Restoring Instructions

1. From your Blogger Dashboard go to Layout > Edit HTML.
2. In most of your templates, the Blogger Navbar is not displayed just because it’s hidden. Now search for this code within your Template

#navbar-iframe {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none;
}

3. Delete this code from your template and now Blogger NavBar should be appearing in your template.
OK if you now have the Blogger NavBar in your template, you can see the “Share” button yourself in your blog.
Now if you want to use this feature, you need to click on that “share Button”, a pop-up menu appears with links to popular networking (sharing) sites “Facebook” and “Twitter” and also the “Google Reader”. (see the Image Below). If you happen to use this feature on the item pages of your blog, you shall gain access to the “Email” feature too.

If you use this New feature of Blogger there’s a hack you can try. The blogger buzz notes the hack as
“Here’s a fun hack: each URL that gets shared has a specific parameter appended (?spref=nn, where fb=Facebook, tw=Twitter, and gr=Google Reader). If you’re using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your blog, you can search for those strings to see how much traffic you’re getting from each source.” Via Blogger Buzz

My comments:

This is one more feature announced from Blogger as a part of its 10th Birthday. It’s really good to see ongoing improvements in Blogger with often addition of new features. Frankly this feature is not great though. At least, not for users like us who choose to hide the Blog NavBar. But in case if this feature persuades you to keep the NavBar back, then its sure going to be of your benefit. Or for users who are displaying the NavBar, this is sure going to be an additional important feature for their blog.

You Say

Did you really find this feature useful? What could have been done to make it more useful? Or did this feature really persuade you to keep the NavBar back for your blog? Let us know by adding comments in the box below.

Blogger has Label Clouds Now!

Pradeep Kumar Singh — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 15:37:00 +0000

Blogger is releasing many features as a part of Blogger’s 10th happy birthday. Many bloggers (Blogger User) requested Blogger to change the label gadget or make it more flexible when the blogger team invited suggestions from them last April. And as of blogging groups wish, Blogger has made this feature available. It has now improved its “Label” element, thus making it more flexible and customizable according to blogger’s need and wish. With this improvement Blogger user can easily change the old format of Labels display to “Labels cloud”. You can also choose among your labels to display in the gadget. We shall be discussing two major changes from blogger in this Labels widget below.

Label Clouds of Blogger

Labels in blogger were displayed as a long list with the numbers of post in the specified label previously. Though we could customize our widget to make changes according to our wish with the help of adding codes or using stuff such as javascript, it was bit tough. Now it’s relatively easier. You could just define what you need from the Blogger widget itself.
To add this feature you need to have already added the Labels page element to your template. If you haven’t added this widget, just go to PAGE ELEMENTS section under LAYOUT and “Add a Gadget” and choose “Labels“.
If you have already added the Labels Element in your blog, you can click on “EDIT” for the “Labels” widget.
See the Image below, you will get after you add or edit your “labels” widget.

Under the display option check that “Cloud” radio active button as shown in the image above. This will change your view of labels and you will get the new feature “Label cloud” in your blog.

Selected Labels to Display

Another Important change in the same “labels” gadget is the ability to choose the Labels to display. Previously, all Labels were displayed in the blog and this often limited to using labels if you have used the labels section for displaying the category one. Now you can select from the labels to display under the category widget (if you are using) or the same label widget.

As shown in the image below, you can edit the labels and choose by placing tick in the box adjacent to the specified labels you want to display. Deselect the labels you don’t want to display in your widget.

My comments:

I really like this feature of blogger and really appreciate it. However limitations such as actual differentiation among the “tags” and the “labels” remain even if we use under those topics.
This post is to make Blogger User aware of the new feature that is introduced lately. Blogger Buzz: Partly cloudy, chance of labels notes the feature “This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger’s 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!”
We wish to see more improvements soon as part of the tenth birthday of Blogger.

You Say

Let us know if you liked this new feature or any other opinions related to this by adding comments below.

Top 10 Google Services for Blogger

Pradeep Kumar Singh — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:41:00 +0000

In a sentence, “Google owns blogger”. Ok, so the giant internet Industry Google is behind the blogger you use. It’s really a matter of great thing probably because of the reasons which we shall be discussing ahead in this blog post.First of all, let me make you aware most blog’s future relies upon the giant search engine “Google”. After all it’s the only most popular search engine that drives the most traffic to your blog. And also the page rank which most bloggers take care of is determined by the same Google. Well, these are just simple examples of why Google connection to the blogger is important. The most important thing why Google is important to your blog is that Google owns a lot of services which in many ways are very important to enhance and enrich your blog and blogging career.

Discussing some very important Google services and the ways we can use them to enrich our blogger blog can be really useful. So here are the Top 10 services from Google that you use to make the most of blogger.
1. Google Webmaster services:

Google webmaster services are crucial for blogger blogs. You can have more visibility in search engines with the proper use of this Google service. You can submit your site and sitemap to this Google webmaster service. You can also know how many pages or links of your blog are indexed in the Google search and much more. For details on using this service and other important tasks you can perform, you can read another blog post, “Google Webmaster for bloggers”.

2. Google Analytics:
With Google analytics, you can track all the details of blog visitors. You can have all details of your page views, unique visitors, site referrers, bounce rate and much more. You need not use any other stats counter if you use the Google analytics and even using this is simpler than using any other counter codes. You can use this service and know more about this on another blog post “Google Analytics for Bloggers”.
3. Google Docs:

Bloggers can easily create documents, spreadsheets and make presentations through this Google service. One more thing this Google Docs is helpful for bloggers is that they can directly publish their created documents to their blog.
4. Google Feedburner:

Feedburner is the most important tool for bloggers. It has not been much google realized its importance and made it own. It is a pompous online web content feed management program. Almost all bloggers use this tool to easily let other bloggers subscribe their blog content. The most advantageous thing is that your blog users can easily subscribe your latest content via email. This will certainly help to increase your blog readers. You can know more on using Feedburner in our post “Feedburner for Bloggers”.

5. Google Adsense:
If you are really interested in making money through blogger, then you need to go for the Adsense program seriously. You will be finding a lot posts in this blog about the Google Adsense and the ways you can benefit through it. Well, Blogger is also making the use of Google Adsense easy for bloggers and there is not too much to do to get started with it. You can learn more in general about the adsense program through our post “Adsense for Bloggers / Blogspot”.
6. Google Earth:

Using Google Earth really makes it easy for bloggers to create required maps for them.

7. Google Reader:
If you want online feed reader, Google Reader can be a good choice. You can subscribe to Blogs via Google Reader and follow them too. You can learn in detail about this program in our post “Using Google Reader for Bloggers”.

8. Google You Tube:
With this most popular video website, you can create videos and embed them directly in your blog. You can also search for the videos you need for your blog and use them directly. Most importantly you can help other bloggers by video blogging through this. This will certainly help you to drive traffic to your blog and thus make your blog popular.

9. Google Picasa:
You must have noticed the photos you upload in your blogger blog are stored in Picasa account. You can use this Picasa to manage your uploaded photos and much more. Read our another post “Google Picasa For Bloggers” to learn more about this.

10. Google Groups:
Using Google Groups is really useful for your blog in terms of driving traffic to your blog by creating your own group. You can also use Google groups to share common information with similar interest bloggers. You can learn in details of using Google Groups in our post “Google Groups for Blogger”.

Conclusion:
There are also other services such as Gmail, Google Toolbar, Orkut, Google Video… which you can use along with the above listed popular Google services. All these services in a way help to make your blogging career successful.

Make a good use of all those services and also let us know why any service is most important for you. Also let us know any other popular Google services for Blogger if we have missed any.
Enjoy blogging…..

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