After two nights of no sleep I think I finally got Anita's site hooked up and ready to go. We grabbed all the old content that had never been crawled by search engines and posted it as blog articles. This is my first site using nothing more that blogger and google components (widgets). Unfortunately I am not able to use the Blogger Page Layout feature because I host the site via ftp... Not ready to give my wife's site to blogspot yet.

I learned quite a bit about how blogger pulls in the widgets and how all the Blogger tags output to html pages. This is not as easy as it first appears. While you may be able to use one of the readymade templates with out too much issue - there is very little room to modify the information. Since this is Anita's site I decided to use Blogger as a Content Management system for her. So the limitations didn't seem as though the would effect the site too much.

I chose Blogger over WordPress because of the ease of use with Google widgets and since Blogger is owned by Google it stands to reason that they would play nicely with one another. They do work together pretty darn good - definitely room for improvement but solid integration all around. I found myself involved with all sorts of possibilities (calendars, custom search, youtube and more). I will probably work in additional widgets and components as time goes on.

There were a few Blogger Hacks needed along the way and a lot of trial and error. I did not sleep or eat Friday night to Saturday afternoon... In the zone you know.... After a power nap (4 hrs) it was back to work and making improvements as I went along. I did go to bed Sunday morning at 4:30am. Spent some time with the family Sunday morning and back to it Sunday afternoon. The layout was done the template was working but post positioning and linking wasn't working real well. Not to mention the gallery and contact form being out side the blogger format.

In order to get the Flash component of the Gallery to display always at the top I had to be very creative with the code. Not sure I would call it a hack but it works and validates. Basically I wanted to include a swf file only on the photogallery page (which I created with the Label/Tagging system in Blogger). I tried an iframe which was a suggestion from a blogger forum... Not a fan of iframes... just felt wrong and not as clean as it should be. Next was a virtual include which would have worked except I didn't want the blog to be shtml or php for search engine purposes. Almost gave up and just made the entire thing php. Then at about 10pm Monday night while watching Indianapolis destroy Jacksonville it hit me. Javascript could probably do what I wanted with out too much overhead. After a couple of hours of research and 3 samples of javascript that did parts of what I wanted to achieve... I wrote my very own javascript solution:


Please note I am not a programmer and this took me a lot longer than it probably should have but I haven't really found a downside to this solution as of yet. The script is small - at most 3k... I know that has to load on every page but 3k is not enough for me to worry over. I know some hard core coders are shaking there heads right about now. Give me a better solution with out using php or virtual includes and I will take it under consideration. Maybe a nudge to Blogger to implement some features for those of us who choose not to host our sites on the blogger servers. I am too new at this to start making demands to Blogger.... give me a week to kick the tires.... Did I mention I am also a usability tester :)