Rotating Post Widget for Blogger Blog

In blogger best intentions is keeping the visitor as long as possible, keeping him busy with all the wonderful content you have. But, in many cases, due to the time-related blog building logics, your visitor is leaving the site, without even knowing how much interesting stuff he failed to read beside.

Many different widgets are trying to fill the gap, and random post widget for Blogger is one of them. If you have a blog with more than 20 posts than this gadget is just the thing you might be interesting in.

 

Main features:

1. Shows one post title at a time.

2. Links to the post.

3. Shows post excerpt also.

4. Every 5 seconds shows a new post.

5. Cycles through all the posts in the blog.

6. Starts a new cycle at the end of the list.

7. Once loaded continues cycling even when not connected to the Internet.

8. Uses official Google AJAX technology.

9. Can be used on other blogging platforms (not tested).

10. Hovering with mouse cursor over the post title halts the rotation till mouse moves off the gadget.

 

Drawback:

Posts are not random, the sequence is quite defined - from the newer to the older posts.

Code:

Get code from the developer’s post http://www.blogdoctor.me/2009/01/random-rotating-post-gadget-with.html. If you need to modify the widget as per your particular needs, review the questions and answers below the post. I removed the author’s name and date, for example, decreased dimensions and fonts in half, and placed it in the side column. You can review the Random Post widget modified in the right sidebar.

 

Note that there are three areas you need to put particular data from your blog to make it work. Change "MYBLOG" to actual blog sub-domain and "BLOG_TITLE" to actual title of your blog. Then paste the modified code in the Html gadget and save the gadget. Get your AJAX API key and put it in above code instead of 'PUT_AJAX_KEY_HERE'.

Installation:

1. Login at Blogger.com.
2. Click Layouts link on Dashboard.
3. Click Add Gadget link in sidebar on Page Elements subtab of Layout tab.
4. In popup window scroll down and click Html/Javascript gadget.
5. In Contents window copy the code below and paste after modifying it.

6. Move the new widget blog to the desirable location on your template.

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How to Fix Blogger Errors while Uploading New Templates

When you start your blogging adventure, you are so many things to learn, so at the first steps of your blogging career you just use basic templates available on the Blogger website. As time goes, you realize the limitations of the basic offerings and disadvantage that your site interface looks like thousand other basic blogs. There are some limited opportunities to tweak the HTML code of your template, but do you really want to mess with it? If you are not sure, just search online for “Blogger Free Templates” and you get many offerings to choose from. New template loading is easy and does not require any coding experience. If… everything goes smoothly. But if not, you are trapped. In this post, I will present the approach to resolve the typical templates loading errors to the Blogger interface.

Sample of these BX error codes are:

• bx-bliced
  
• bX-ev85ll
  
• bX-39cc9q
  
• bX-y6cz0v
  
• bX-982020

There are the following steps recommended for the problem resolution:

1. First of all, try to upload your new template in the Layout>Edit HTML section of your dashboard. Not all templates have been affected by this issue, so it is advisable to check before attempting to edit your template manually. If you do receive a bX-error code when trying to upload your template, you should proceed to step 2.
   
2. If your new template is an XML file (with the .xml intension), browse to where this is located on your computer and right click the file. Choose to open with Notepad (or your favorite basic text editor). If your template is contained within a text file (for you to copy and paste into the template editor), simply open this with your text editor.
   
3. Search for every instance of b:widget id= in your template, for example:
   
4. • b:widget id=’Header1’
     
   • b:widget id=’Blog1’
     
   • b:widget id=’Label1’
     
   • b:widget id=’HTML1’

Replace each of these IDs with the next number up. For example, Header1 should become Header2; Blog1 should become Blog2, HTML3 should become HTML4 and so on.

4. Once you have changed each and every instance of widget id to a different number, you should save the template under a slightly different file name (to be aware of your altered file). If this is an XML file, be sure to save with the XML extension.
   
5. Now you have made these changes, attempt to upload your file again in the Layout>Edit HTML section of your Blogger dashboard. Now you should not receive the error code and will be able to upload your template.

Note. If after following these steps you are still unable to upload your revised template, it is worthwhile to close your browser and delete all temporary internet files and cookies. Then restart your browser and try to upload again. Clearing all of these temporary files from your browser will ensure you receive a fresh page when editing your template. The reason why the bx-XXXX error occurs when you upload a template is because the Blogger developers changed the way template editor accepts certain third party code. They have seen a lot of data corruption due to ’bad templates’.

Now, with these advices, I know exactly what to do, when error pops-up. Before, if that happened, I just switched back, choosing the basic template from Blogger database, ensured that the basic template works, and than tried again to load a new template. In most cases, that worked, but sometimes I needed to repeat the procedure twice. Now I can understand, why the problem could be resolved by these actions.

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