Some Cosmetic Enhancements for Stitches™

While on a short "Halloween" vacation, I tried spending my free time toiling around on some cosmetic improvements for my blogsite. The last time I added some goodies was when I posted the Cool Rating Widget. That wasn’t ages ago, though. But I personally and generally like CHANGES; therefore, do not be surprised if "continuous enhancements" will always be one of the dynamic activities of this blog.

Among the new enhancements that I recently implemented here were:

Peek-A-Boo View: I thought of finding a way to make it easy for my readers to go through all my recent posts within the main page of my blog. This is because if the entry is too long (more than 2 or 3 paragraphs), the viewers will find it very hard to quickly locate the topic of interest to them since they need to scroll down a lot. The solution to this, of course, is to show only the summary rather than the entire article in every post. In this way regular and irregular visitors alike can choose which of the recent posts appeal to them the most.

In Peek-A-Boo View the main page will show only post summaries and when you click "Read More", the full post appears in the main page itself. It is also possible for the reader to go back to the summary mode by clicking the "Summary only..." link with which they can collapse the post back to summary.

I managed to find this "post-enhancing" hack from Ramani and Hans. They collaboratively worked on the codes and made them available on their sites.

Social Bookmarking Widget: Social bookmarking, according to Wikipedia, is a way for internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. Social bookmarking, likewise, allows you to suggest something worthy of note to people who share your interests.

Maintaining your bookmarks on a host site allows you to access your favorite websites from anywhere. This makes your bookmarks reachable and always backed-up no matter which computer you use.

Why is this widget important?

If people find the posts you wrote in your blog useful and informative they may want to share it with others. Making it easy for them to recommend and share may bring tremendous visit or steady flow of traffic in your site. Therefore, it makes sense that a widget to bookmark articles in your blog comes in very handy. By bringing in a social bookmarking widget in you site, your visitors can conveniently click on it to submit your site to their favorite Social Bookmarking networks.

I found a solution to this using the hack created by Hans. It is relatively easy to implement and looks very cool and bubbly at the foot of every post. For a working example, you can view the footer of this post.

Tag/Label Cloud Widget: A tag cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of content tags used on a website. Tags are typically listed alphabetically, and tag frequency is shown with font size or color. ^[1] Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with that tag.

The advantage of using Tag/Label Clouds is that it takes up a whole lot less vertical space than the default label/category list in Blogger, especially when you have a lot of labels to show. You can also vary the colors & font sizes of the "clouds" according to the number of post in each label/category to make your presentation more enticing.

The codes I used for my label cloud were from phydeaux3. The implementation instructions are very easy to understand. All you have to do is visit his site and follow the procedures very carefully.

There you have it all folks!

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Cool Rating Widget

Widgets are undeniably great tools for website & blogsite designers. They are found everywhere on the net and are almost always free. But one special feature of these gadgets is that they are completely easy to implement and are mostly or absolutely customizable to meet the designers’ demanding requirements of matching their sites look and feel.

Well, for today’s post I decided to share what I have recently came across with while looking for an additional aggregating device for my blog. The cool & exciting widget is called Spotback.


In Amit Kaufman widget review he explained that this control tool provides the power of content rating and recommendation that once was only available to billion-dollar services such as Amazon. From the widget site, this is what they have to say…

Spotback is a personalized rating system that recommends relevant content based on personal rating history using collaborative filtering and aggregated knowledge technologies. When embedding the Spotback technology onto your website you are providing your users a unique personal online experience. When they rate your content, they will immediately be exposed to more relevant content from your website. This results in longer visit lengths, increase in page views and guaranteed user satisfaction.

When you add the Spotback widget to your website or blogsite and allow users to rate everything you publish, your visitors will enjoy personalized recommendations and referrals to additional content on your site. The widget is free, easy to install and guaranteed to improve your online experience and increase page loads.

Spotback provides three widget types - slider (for ratings), stars (for ratings, but different style) and sidebar (for serving related content). The latter of these three also automatically generates tag clouds. All widgets are very customizable so you can match them to your blog or website very easily.

So, what is my verdict? If you are a blogger or one who maintains a site I suggest that you go and get it.

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Decorated Drop Caps

After laboring extensively for my archive calendar, I started browsing the net again, this time, in search of common typographical effects, such as those used widely in print materials like magazines, books, news papers, journals, photo albums, movie posters, letterheads, scrapbooks, manuscripts, etc., to further enhance the appearance of my posts in this blog.

This typographical effect is called Drop Cap and can be effectively employed in a blog or any website using CSS snippets.

The first thing I did was to locate any site which have entries with easy instructions on how to do it. It didn’t take long enough, though, for me to find suggestions from LateNightEngineer’s How to Display Drop Caps with CSS? & Beautiful Beta’s Magazine Style Drop Caps. Both sites gave the CSS snippet definitions to use and where these instructions must be pasted on the blog template. I quickly followed the recommendations and came up with what I initially desired. I found out later, however, that the basic and default PC fonts are the ones being used by popular browsers and that if one needed fancy, unusual or decorative fonts the use of embedded fonts have to be exercised and executed instead.

In Larisa Thomason’s CSS Tip: Get Any Font You Want at NetMechanic® she clearly described the reasons why embedded fonts have to be implemented when one needed to further use decorative fonts. As a result of these learnings, I followed the tips along with creating an EOT file using Microsoft WEFT for the font style I wanted to carry on in my blog.

With minor changes, just a little tweaking here and there I saw a takeoff that goes like what you see in my decorated drop cap.

From here on, you will see that these decorated drop caps will become an integral part of all my posts to come.

Cheers!

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Archive Calendar

I have been in pain searching for a perfect calendar widget that works with Blogger. Finally, I chanced upon one that is very slick which suits my taste. Phydeaux3 has created the codes and gave along easy to follow instructions. My calendar has been on since 16 September 2007 and has caused me no single trouble in the implementation, despite my complete ignorance on CSS & JavaScript programming.

In addition, he further created a set of variables (whatever it means)/css so you can use the Blogger Font/Color page to pick and choose your calendar look with the WYSIWYG approach, for idiot-proof personal styling.

So, what are you waiting for? Log on to this calendar widget post and see & feel for yourself how straightforward it is to implement the widget.

Meanwhile, I will keep myself tuned at his site to wait for any major development or update on this brilliantly crafted Blogger tool.

Many thanks, phydeaux3, for saving me from my long agony.

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