Parrothead Jeff

Very few, if any, will notice that I haven’t posted anything in the past few days. I do have an excuse. No, I wasn’t harassing the Cammo Dudes at Area 51. No, I wasn’t geocaching my way from here to Brazil. No, I wasn’t out at Nellis for an incentive ride with the Thunderbirds, nor was I hanging out with Jimmy Buffett in the Caribbean.

I was actually working on adding more functionality to this blog.

Really - I swear! OK, maybe I was working and occasionally sleeping, but I’ve spent quite a few hours making this thing easier to use. I hope you like the changes and I hope they make life a bit easier. Of course, feedback is always welcome!

Details below the fold…

Much of the work went into setting up a feed with feedburner.com and integrating it into this blog. Lots of juicy new stuff is now available thanks to feedburner.

Instead of only offering rss and Atom feeds from Blogger/Blogspot, feedburner publishes a feed that can be subscribed to by any feed reader client. It is also browser friendly, so someone who manages to go to my feedburner feed by clicking on a link to it will get to a webpage with instructions on how to subscribe along with a nicely rendered, readable version of the site.

Adding even more functionality, there is now a form in the sidebar so that readers can subscribe via email. Just enter your email address, click submit, and click the confirmation link in the email that’s sent to you. After that, you’ll receive each day’s new posts in your email inbox.

Not just for functionality (although it’s nicely functional), I managed to grab something to spiff up the looks of the blog with an animated graphic subscription link. Feedburner also gives you the code to make a little link appear below the graphic which reads, “Grab this Headline Animator.” I tried it out on my test blog first and it worked so nicely that I figured it might be a good idea to display all of the graphic links for my blog in a central location with the “Grab this Headline Animator” intact. So just click on the link in the sidebar to go to a webpage which has all of the animated graphics for this site, click on the link below the graphic, and follow the instructions!

? Grab this Headline Animator

You’ll notice a couple of new things at the bottom of each post as well. Both on the front page of the blog itself and on each post’s individual page, you’ll see three new links - “Subscribe to this feed,” “Email this,” and “Google bookmark this.” Thanks to Feedburner, you can now subscribe to the feed for this blog, email each post, or add a post to your Google bookmarks in the Google Toolbar with just one click.

Something not attributed to Feedburner are the “Email the author” links at the bottom of each post. Feedburner’s feedflares have a way to put the “Email the author” in with the subscription and email links, but it only works if your feed includes an author email. Mine doesn’t, so I had to do it myself. I know it’s a fairly easy expression in HTML to create an email link, but that’s only half the battle with this one.

I had to figure out just where to put the link code in the template. The fun part is that after converting to the new “Layouts” style of template for blogger (which makes setting up the sidebar and such so much easier) the code in the template isn’t just normal HTML, it’s XML. After quite some time of working by trial and error, I finally figured out that I could place the code near the end of the code for the labels.

All of this might not sound like that much work, but it does take quite some time when working by trial and error.

I hope you enjoy the new look and features!