What is on your Blogger Wish List?

If you could improve Blogger in any one area, what would it be? I have a few ideas on that subject and it appears that Blogger does also.

The Blogger Wish List page asks us to vote on a feature suggestion. How they came up with the six suggestions on this list, I do not know. But I have seen some of them harped about in zillions of comments spread across many posts.

Of the six suggestions, I really have a passion for two of them. I also have suggestions for what is obviously absent. Could it be that by the omission of certain discussions might suggest that they are not entertaining them? That I do not know either.


No. 1 - I want to show excerpts of my posts, with links to the full text.
This is, and should be, top priority for Blogger.

The use of the so-called "peekaboo posts" hack is only a band-aid. While the hack may hide the remainder of the post from the viewer, it does not hide it from a spider or readers who have javascript disabled. All elements of your Main or Archive page, including images and embedded objects, will still be loaded whether or not the reader wishes them to.

True excerpts will be "what you see, is all you get". Excerpts will cut down on duplicate content -- and thereby reducing the amount of Supplemental Pages in the Google index. This is a win-win for both Blogger and Google Search.

No. 2 - I want to be able to upload other files to my blog besides images.
Other files? That would be nice. How about CSS style sheets (.css), javascript repositories (.js) and Html pages (.html).

Imagine unloading all of the styles and javascript from the template/layout and moving them into linked files. This will go a long way to reduce page sizes which are seriously bloated as it is. There are methods of accomplishing this by using external sources such as Google Pages or your own web server. But why should we have to?

The other four items on the list did not interest me much. The item for Recommending a Blog of Note for instance, who actually cares? I do not frequent the pages that they are "noted" on.

Or suggest a new feature
This was a no-brainer. I had two.

• Provide a setting to Enable/Disable the Nofollow attribute in Comments.
• Provide for "in-post" comment forms

I think it goes without saying that these are probably on the top of everbody's list. Do you have any others to add?

Vote now and get noticed
Vote now. It is easy to do and will only take you a couple of seconds.

Spread the word about the Wish List and let's see if we can get them to notice. It is worth a shot. I will be stickying this post to my sidebar in plain view in the hope that others will notice.

If you create a new post with your vote(s)and/or suggestions and link to this post, I will notice it. I will link back to your voting post by listing it here. Alternatively, you could drop me a comment below and let me know how you voted.

And yes, I voted for more than one suggestion too! =)

I hope nobody sees that =) above and suggests smilies. Yuck!


Technorati Tags: blogspot, blogger, blogspot, suggestions, features, comments, nofollow, dofollow, post excerpts, external files, wishlist

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This post is for the tutorial Adding Categories to your Blogger Sidebar and is for reference only.

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Removing NoFollow from Blogger styled layouts

Blogger by default, and other blogging software such as WordPress, automatically adds the "nofollow" microformat extension to all links from user generated content. User generated content is defined as comments or external sources such as linkbacks and trackbacks.

I support the people of the blogging community who have chosen to remove NoFollow for blog comments and linkbacks/trackbacks. If you are reading this right now, you too are probably thinking about joining us yourself. It would be a good move, read on to find out why.

Before we begin

First, this removal procedure applies to the New Blogger styled layout. It is impossible, at this time, to remove NoFollow from Classic styled Blogger templates. This is due to the fact that those templates use the variable {$CommentAuthorName$} which encapsulates the anchor link around linking text. I am working on getting around this, because I have another blog using this style.

There are a number of tip sites out there explaining how to accomplish the removal of NoFollow -- and every one of them did not get it completely right. I have not found one yet who has addressed the issue of backlinks which also have the NoFollow extension added to it.

I have seen numerous comments left by readers of the tutorials stating that they could not find the NoFollow referenced in their layout template. Two reasons for this. They either are using the Classic template or more probably it is the same problem I encountered when I first went looking for it. I will explain why below, and it will be very clear as to why they missed it too.

Properly removing NoFollow from the template

Warning: Before beginning this procedure -- backup your template
.

Login to your dashboard and click on the Layout Link. If you are already managing your blog, then click on the Template Tab. Confused, don't be -- there really is a reason for that.

Click on the Edit Html Sub-tab for Templates.

Here is the important part. On the upper right of the template edit area, there is a checkbox labeled Expand Widgets. Make sure it is checked.

[ Click for larger version ]

Every tutorial I have read failed to mention the checkbox. The items we will be deleting are inside of sections, which in turn are inside of a widget. If the widget is collapsed, then we will not be able to see anything inside of the widget.

Now do a search for nofollow in your expanded template. You can either use your browser menu by clicking on Edit>Find in page or via the keyboard Ctrl-F. When the dialog box comes up, type in nofollow, and enter.

You should come across a line of code that looks something like this:

          <dt class='comment-author' expr:id='"comment-" + data:comment.id'>
            <a expr:name='"comment-" + data:comment.id'/>
            <b:if cond='data:comment.authorUrl'>
              <a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl'  rel='nofollow'><data:comment.author/></a>
            <b:else/>
              <data:comment.author/>
            </b:if>
            <data:commentPostedByMsg/>
          </dt>

Delete the portion of the code that says rel='nofollow' and Save Your Template.

Optionally remove Nofollow from backlinks

By doing another search for nofollow in your expanded template, you will find another one for your backlinks. You can choose to delete this as outlined above -- or not.

If you do delete the reference, do at your own risk. Backlinks are outside of your control and cannot be moderated. You can turn them off altogether via your Settings>Comments Tab. It is up to you.