Not being entirely satisfied with my new template, I changed it. What with DISQUS being tangled in the HTML, it changed as well. Now, regardless of whether a post has comments or not, it says "View Comments" instead of giving me the correct number (usually "0 Comments," but occasionally people do say things). Tried reinstalling DISQUS and apparently the code went in twice because it then said "0 Comments 0 Comments." This is when I learned that DISQUS's help files are practically nonexistent (the one for Blogger is "Coming Soon"). Okay, world, I'm not positively impressed by this!
[a few minutes later] Fixed this! I can't believe I figured out to fix this; I don't speak XML. Pure intuition--and it happened to work this time. But I don't think I should have had to rely on intuition in this situation. Surely many people who use DISQUS wish to redesign their blogs at some point.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
in-between thing: disqus
Ha. With an actual post, I see how DISQUS works. Yay: no one will be forced to sign up with DISQUS if they don't want to!
(No, I'm not saying how it works. If you've made it this far and you're curious, come comment on something from Thing 25 onwards. :) Yes, that's only two posts. I'm trying.)
(No, I'm not saying how it works. If you've made it this far and you're curious, come comment on something from Thing 25 onwards. :) Yes, that's only two posts. I'm trying.)
Thing 25: Bloggers' Toolkit
Okay, I got it: gadgets and widgets are blog bling. If I used enough of these, I could so successfully camoflage my writing that no one would ever find it.
The easiesttoys gadgets and widgets were the ones that required the least effort on my part (duh). Since all I had to do to take advantage of the Typealyzer and the Blog Readability Test was to plug my blog's address into a box, they were the first I played with. I'm really hoping that my blog's postgrad readability rating doesn't mean that 23 Distractions is about as pleasant to read as the worst academic writing! Also, 23 Distractions scores as an ESTP blog. I'm an INTJ, and I'm spending way too much time trying to puzzle out how an anonymous computer somewhere was so off-base.
Moving on to more serious/functional stuff, I eventually decided to sign up for DISQUS. I went back and forth on this because I couldn't figure out from what I was seeing how it improved anything. I suppose I signed up for it mostly to see how it worked. Although now I'm confused: since I had to shut Blogger's comments down to get DISQUS to work, do readers have to be signed into DISQUS to make any comments at all? Gah.
Site statistics intrigue me. I'm delaying signing up for any, however, since most of them looked like overkill. But I would certainly try to set them up on a library blog: we all know libraries live and die by their statistics! So far, this hasn't seemed like a blog that would benefit from adding audio or video gadgets. If I were writing a more personal blog, though, I'd probably want to add photos and the occasional video. As for a professional blog, I'm certain we could find a use for those widgets. With this particular blog, though, it really would be bling: flashy, eye-catching, but not much in the way of functional.
The time consumption is pretty high for this Thing. Installation and sign-up usually didn't take long, but working through lists of widgets, reading about them, sorting them out in my head, testing them, and so on took quite a while. I eventually made myself stop just so I could get this posted before February. Although if we do set up a library blog at some point in the future, at least my preliminary research is taken care of.
The easiest
Moving on to more serious/functional stuff, I eventually decided to sign up for DISQUS. I went back and forth on this because I couldn't figure out from what I was seeing how it improved anything. I suppose I signed up for it mostly to see how it worked. Although now I'm confused: since I had to shut Blogger's comments down to get DISQUS to work, do readers have to be signed into DISQUS to make any comments at all? Gah.
Site statistics intrigue me. I'm delaying signing up for any, however, since most of them looked like overkill. But I would certainly try to set them up on a library blog: we all know libraries live and die by their statistics! So far, this hasn't seemed like a blog that would benefit from adding audio or video gadgets. If I were writing a more personal blog, though, I'd probably want to add photos and the occasional video. As for a professional blog, I'm certain we could find a use for those widgets. With this particular blog, though, it really would be bling: flashy, eye-catching, but not much in the way of functional.
The time consumption is pretty high for this Thing. Installation and sign-up usually didn't take long, but working through lists of widgets, reading about them, sorting them out in my head, testing them, and so on took quite a while. I eventually made myself stop just so I could get this posted before February. Although if we do set up a library blog at some point in the future, at least my preliminary research is taken care of.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Thing 24: Refresh Your Blog
And we're back, ladies and gentlemen: blog revamped, avatar refreshed, ready to plunge into the next 23 Things.
I like Blogger just fine for blogging, but doing this Thing reminded me that I'm not happy with its layout capabilities, something I'd forgotten since the long-ago days of Thing 1. I could probably make it look like anything I wanted to if my HTML skills were good enough, but they're not, so I'm stuck with the templates. And much to my annoyance, I can't customize the templates very much. Oh, it looked like there were possibilites, but it didn't take long for me to realize that only some of the colors could be changed, that tweaking the font threw off the spacing, etc. So wait, in the months since I last posted here, Google added more gadgets but didn't plump up the template selection? Sigh. Well, I did manage to add a subscription gadget, so keeping track of my dazzling prose should be a smidgen easier.
I like Blogger just fine for blogging, but doing this Thing reminded me that I'm not happy with its layout capabilities, something I'd forgotten since the long-ago days of Thing 1. I could probably make it look like anything I wanted to if my HTML skills were good enough, but they're not, so I'm stuck with the templates. And much to my annoyance, I can't customize the templates very much. Oh, it looked like there were possibilites, but it didn't take long for me to realize that only some of the colors could be changed, that tweaking the font threw off the spacing, etc. So wait, in the months since I last posted here, Google added more gadgets but didn't plump up the template selection? Sigh. Well, I did manage to add a subscription gadget, so keeping track of my dazzling prose should be a smidgen easier.
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