Techinfo

There’s several answers to that question. First it’s a classic Greek text, which is more than 2000 years old. Now you can ask “What is does it have to do with this blog” ? Have suddenly turn all the Geeky things and gadgets ?

The answer is “No”, obviously ;). “Lorem Ipsum” happens a common place holder in Computer science, and more specifically in site design. I’ve already wrote about creating a test blog, Lorem Ipsum is how you’re going to inject a little bit of “Meat” into your blog in order to make more real. Here’s an example of the kind of text it generates :

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aenean at velit. Vestibulum nibh metus, blandit sed, porttitor quis, adipiscing in, enim. Praesent convallis nulla eu lacus. Donec purus. Maecenas in mi et eros volutpat congue. Aenean posuere libero a elit. Etiam risus. Curabitur et arcu et tellus fermentum accumsan. Mauris nulla elit, auctor sit amet, dapibus a, convallis quis, nibh. Morbi vel quam. Sed vel sem eu velit dictum tincidunt. Quisque eget nibh non lacus blandit tempus. Nulla ullamcorper. Mauris elit dui, blandit eu, aliquam ut, commodo sed, dui. Praesent ante.

With that handy tool, you can make your test blog/site more meaty. For more details about this Random text generator, you can check directly the Lorem Ipsum site.

Some may wonder what’s the point to have a test blog. They may argue that it’s already enough work to maintain one without having another one sitting on your lap. Well that’s true, maintaining a blog can ask a lot of dedication. But sometimes you may want to make some deep change into your blog (that’s also true for a site, and an software development in general) that can have huge repercussions to your blog, rendering it inaccessible.

The best example is when you’re putting you’re dirty fingers in your blog template. When you do that, you can reallllly easily wreck havoc into your blog and render totally inaccessible.

So now that we’ve seen why let’s ponder the how. That’s pretty simple in fact. Go to your Dashboard (if you’re using blogger) , and click on "Create Blog". You will have to follow the same step you followed when you create your first blog.

Now go back to your Dashboard and Click on "Settings" for the blog you’ve just created. Then go to Settings > Permissions. On that page check the section "Blog Reader" and change the select item in "Who can read this blog?" to "Only blog author", like this :

Here you do, you now have a nice test blog where you can do whatever you want before trying it on your real one.

Alex

Social networks and more particularly social bookmarks are everywhere nowadays. Any blog or site you see around is likely to be linked through that kind of network. There’s a flurry of sites, among them we can mention Del.icio.us, or Digg, but there’s many many other. Each of your reader can have his favorite network so there’s no need to really try to force him to use one or another. Furthermore, there’s so many that it can be cumbersome to list add links to all of them.

So to me the easiest is just to provide that choice to your reader. Thanks to nifty script available here and there on the net it is very easy to give the choice to your reader

So far i’ve selected two that are (there’s plenty of other but you have to make a choice):

• MadKast
• AddThis

Those two seem to me the most famous/used one, and they are quite easy to install.

As for Blogger this one is the easiest to install. First you can go to MadKast site. Be sure that you’re already identified to on your blog site. There you will be ask to provide you email. After that you can click that magic ‘Get widget’ button that will take you back to your blog administration page :

You don’t really have to give it a name, just click on it and Voila! the new widget is added to your site. Now you have a nice button on your posts.

The other one AddThis is a bit more tricky, but i find it much lighter than madcast. You can go the the site page and automatically add it as widget to your site, but it’ll be added as a plugin in the side bar, but note at the end of each post.

Now if you want to have it display at the end of each post (or anywhere else you want) it’s a little more complicated. You will need to edit you template. Here’s simple steps to do this :

1. First go here, and grab the script code for addthis. Select the look and feel of the button you like, then select next to "Where do want to put the button" select "On Blog" and finally "Blogger" for the plateform (other plateform are also available)
2. Press on "Get Your Free Button" the code should look like this :
   
   
<div><script type=’text/javascript’>addthis_url=’<data:post.url/>’; addthis_title=’<data:post.title/>’; addthis_pub=’YourUserName’;</script><script src=’http://s7.addthis.com/js/addthis_widget.php?v=12′ type=’text/javascript’></script></div>

3. Then back to your blog, go to you Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML.
4. At the top of the page you should see a link called "Download Full Template". Click on it in order to save it somewhere on your disk.

1. Now is the tricky part. Click in the text zone labelled (3) and search for Go to where you save the template and open it with you favorite Text editor, and search for some code like :

   <div class=’post-body entry-content’>    <p><data:post.body/></p>    <div style=’clear: both;‘/> <!– clear for photos floats –></div>

2. Paste the code you got previously just after the "–>". Now Click on "Save Template"

Now you should have a nice button at the end of your blog post.

Alex.