TypePad Hacks

I'm looking for someone who is comfortable working with Advanced Templates and CSS… basically, the sort of Hacks documented here at TypePad Hacks. If you can show me examples you've done of most of the hacks a la carte listed on the Hacks for Hire page, then let's talk. Ideally, you would also be comfortable working directly with clients to assess their projects, provide an estimate and complete the project. If you'd rather just code, that's fine, but I'll pay more for someone who can work without my intervention or attention. If you're interested, drop me an email from the contact page or call me at 231.584.2710 between 9-5 Pacific time.

I love the new format… Not only is it prettier, but it seems much more functional than the old style of comment notification.... Also, I way blew it on reporting the last big design change that dealt with TypeLists… If you haven't looked at your lists in the last month or so, there are a lot of major improvements to the TypeList interface. especially the ability to easily see the correct code for adding them to Advanced Template blogs (under the Publish tab). A quick tip I've been meaning to share: When you go to the Publish Tab for any Typelist, there's a list of links to all your advanced templates sets.... When I work on a redesign for those sites, it's handy to be able to easily open the design page for each blog by clicking the links on the TypeList Publish tab.

The simplest solution is to encourage your readers to subscribe to your blog's feed and read your posts in RSS… But of course, when they do that, they don't see your nifty widgets at all, nor any of the rest of the site design you've worked so hard on. Also, not everyone understands RSS (for a truly brilliant explanation, you might want to put a link to How to explain RSS the Oprah way below your subscribe button).... The hacks described in the extended entry of this post will show you how to create a fast-loading blog that matches the overall design of your blog while stripping out the slow bits.... How to create a fast-loading secondary blog: Fred's second solution for slow page loads is a little more work to set up, but is a really great idea: He created a second blog that mirrored his content.... Rick answered my question with the following: We have a commercial publisher front-end to FeedBurner-hosted feeds called FeedFoundry, and one of the features of FeedFoundry is the ability to create custom XSLT pages that will style a feed.... What you'll want to do is create a copy of the index page and sidebar templates for your blog based on your current design, and edit out the items that slow down load speeds.

In the duplicate, you'll tinker with the <MTEntries> tag as I outline below, paste in your AdSense code, save the new module, and then swap out the default entry-list module for the new-and-improved module in your Main Index template.... 6) Now press Command + V (Ctrl + V) again to paste a second copy of the original entry-list code directly beneath the first set. The module should now contain two identical sets of <MTEntries> containers.... Step 5: Alter the <MTEntries> tags in the custom entry-list-main module 1) In the first <MTEntries> tag, set the value of the lastn attribute.... In Parent Hacks, I display a single post before my AdSense unit, so my first <MTEntries> tag looks like this: <MTEntries lastn="1"> ...... </MTEntries> (In English: show the next nine entries, starting with the second entry) If, instead of a single AdSense unit between the first and second post, you want to insert AdSense after say, every second post, your entry-list-main module would look something like this: <MTEntries lastn="2"> ...

MajikWidget creates and hosts a library of widgets that you can use to extend your blog's capabilities. They have an interesting model going… when you sign up, you get an automatic 25 credits to let you try out the service and see if you like it. In addition, if you head over today and sign up for the First Mover Advantage Club, they'll deposit 100 additional free credits into your account.... As explained on their request page: Linkware allows other users who use your suggested widget to setup an automatic link-back to your blog from your widget.... As of today, there are three widgets available for use: Post Rating Widget Polling Widget All Links in New Browser Window I'll be trying out some of the widgets here in the next couple days.

I've been delaying the post until I can get it to work across all browsers… right now, it doesn't display properly in Internet Explorer but seems fine in all the other browsers I've tried.... Actually, what I'm really hoping is that someone cleverer than I am can figure out a better way to add the search field to the CSS menu so that it does work right in IE.... So I enclosed the google code in it's own div tag, used some CSS for alignment and text style and pasted it in just above the menu list as shown below.... <div id="chromemenu"> <div style="float: right; font-weight: bold; color: #494949; padding: 4px; "> <!-- SiteSearch Google --> <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">Search: <input type="text" name="q" size="5" maxlength="150" style="width:150px;" /><input type="hidden" name="domains" value="http://www.typepadhacks.org/" /><input type="hidden" name="sitesearch" value="http://www.typepadhacks.org/" /></form> <!-- SiteSearch Google --></div> <ul> <li><a href="http://www.typepadhacks.org/2006/03/start_the_purpo.html">Manifesto</a></li> When I figure out a better way to do this, I'll replace this post with clearer instructions.... Oh, and if you're using basic templates and want to add google search to a typelist, you can find great instructions for that in this post at Everything TypePad.

This widget will install an invisible snippet of JavaScript on your site that will scan the page for links that point outside of your domain, and force those links to open in a new browser window. Any links that point inside your domain -- archive links, category links, individual entry links, etc. -- will open in the current browser window. Note that because this Widget just installs JavaScript on your blog, there will be nothing for you to preview during the Widget installation process.... No problem… I just added it to a basic blog, viewed the source code, found the JavaScript and pasted it into one of the TypeLists here. ...<script type="text/javascript"> (function() { var x = function() { var links = document.getElementsByTagName ?

Navigate to this page in TypePad's Knowledge Base (preferably in a new tab or browser window) and copy the entry-individual template module code.... Scroll down until you see the following line of code: <h3 class="entry-header"><$MTEntryTitle$></h3> Replace that line of code with the following: <h3 class="entry-header"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></h3> Click save. Navigate to this page in TypePad's Knowledge Base and copy the entry-list template module code.... Scroll down until you see the following line of code: <h3 class="entry-header"><$MTEntryTitle$></h3> Replace that line of code with the following: <h3 class="entry-header"><a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a></h3> and click save.... If you created new template modules in the previous steps, follow the next set of instructions: If you created new template modules for entry-individual and entry-list, return to the Design tab.

Not only does this give you an idea of which items your readers are most interested in, it gives you some sense of where they go when they're done reading (assuming they don't just close the tab or window when they move on). My Blog Log stats can be added to Basic and Plus accounts using a Widget, or to Pro accounts by adding a simple bit of javascript into your blog templates.... I've added it into my templates, so you should be able to see how it works by mousing over a few links on this page (if no one has a clicked a link since the last hourly update, it displays no information). You also get a stats report visible only to yourself, and can add a sidebar item that tracks the top outbound links of the day if you desire. When I went to look at my outbound links this morning (after 12 hours of activity), I was aghast to find that 11 of the top 20 outbound links last night were porn links that had been inserted into several of my most popular posts via comment spam.