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2 Blogger Hacks to Enhance its Functionality

I’ll get this out of the way early: I love Blogger. It’s a great blogging platform. I’ve often been tempted to switch over to WordPress.org, but quite frankly, Blogger’s simplicity is hard to beat.

However, simplicity very often means a missing feature or two. Blogger is no exception. Its main problem is a lack of extendibility – and that it offers lesser functionality out of the box than other blogging platforms like WordPress.

So, below are two hacks that utilise jQuery, and provide some extra functionality to your Blogger-powered blog.

  1. Styling Author Comments

    Author comments need to be styled differently, period. Sadly, Blogger doesn’t provide us with any way in which we can style author comments using CSS selectors. It would add a nice touch to your blog if you could style author comments differently from the rest.

    Luckily, Jeremy Martin has produced some JavaScript code which is really easy to implement and will in turn allow us to style our author comment using typical CSS selectors.

    He’s published an easy-to-follow tutorial to get this job done. See it here. I’ve published two test comments on this post to check whether it works as advertised.

    Note: make sure you have enabled the Profile Widget. Go to your blog in Blogger, click Layout, and then Page Elements. Add the profile widget to your sidebar (not sure how?).

    Make sure that “Share This Profile” is ticked, otherwise the script won't be able to work.

    Like it or not, you have to enable the profile widget. Luckily it's trivial to hide it. Simply add the following line of code in the style section of your template:

    #Profile1{ display:none }
  2. Post Summaries

    Blogger has been neglecting this feature addition for a while, and I (along with many others) regard it as essential. The helpful team at BloggerBuster have come up with a very easy way to implement this feature using some more jQuery.

    Advantages include being able to adjust the length of the excerpt, and a customisable way of showing the rest of the post (either using an expander or using linking to the post page). Also, you don't need to go through the tedious process of editing every single post on your blog. This plug in works with what you've already got.

These two hacks will hopefully go some way to extending the functionality of your Blogger-powered weblog. Please note that too much JavaScript on a page can slow down its loading time somewhat.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a test comment - showing a regular comment.

Simon SC said...

This is a test comment as the author of the blog.

Thanks to the jQuery script, my comments should be styled differently than the anonymous one above.

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