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November 19, 2007

Blogs, Blogger, and Blogrolls

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You may have noticed my slight change in layout: I've added a blogroll to the right-hand sidebar. According to Wikipedia's list of blogging terms, a Blogroll is "A list of blogs. A blogger features a list of their favorite blogs in the sidebar of their blog." And, according to the latest Google Reader Blog Post, Steve Lacey of the Google Reader dev team decided to implement a blogroll generator for the aggregator. Adding a blogroll to your blogger blog is a cinch:

Head over to the "Tags" section on the settings page, make one of the tags you use for subscriptions public, and click on "add a blogroll to your site."
The resulting window gives you three options: look-n-feel (including title, and with a snazzy preview, but not very customizable), Add To Blogger, and C&P javascript code. The Add to Blogger button brings a new window which lets you choose which blog to add the blogroll to (assuming, of course, that you actually have a blogger blog), verify your blogroll's title, "Edit Content" (JS tags) and "Edit Template" (blogger template XML). Not exactly sure of the usefulness of those last two, but whatever ^_^ the feature is still in the Google Labs phase, after all. Clicking the Add Widget button takes you to the Edit Template page in Blogger (I believe you have to verify, via Blogger, that you are adding content from Google the first time you do this), where a new widget has been added to your layout. As with all the other page elements, it can be dragged about and configured as normal. However, unlike Google Ads, for example, the colors are not yet customizable via javascript variables. The specific tag that I've added here is "tech blogs." You may have also noticed, at one time or another, a Google Tech News RSS feed at the bottom of my pages. Regrettably, I don't really keep up with Google tech news as much as I keep up with the RSS feeds in my blogroll. Ugh. I believe I've reached a point of Blogorrhea, "meaning excessive and/or incoherent talkativeness in a weblog." So I'll just stop now and proofread tomorrow XD