Computers and the Internet have revolutionized how we communicate and share. Messages can be sent nearly instantaneously. Entire songs can be reduced to small files and portable storage devices can hold thousands of them. Video is rapidly joining audio in compact portability.
Somehow the entertainment industry has fallen behind. They continue to attempt to enforce outdated copyright laws which where written and designed before current technology was even conceived.
Lets face it, the harder they try to control how things are shared online, the harder someone will work to subvert the system and do it anyways. Hollywood and the music industry should spend more time and money trying to conceive of a new business model that embraces the new capabilities of Internet technology. Instead they keep fighting a losing battle to preserve the current.
It just boggles my mind.
After a poking around the xml template for my site, and playing around with the Digg code, I’ve figured out how to add a Digg button to my posts.
Listed below is a quick how-to for adding this functionality to your website too.
- Make sure your blog is set to enable Post Pages and you are using the new Blogger, not the classic version
- Go to the customization section of your blog, on the Template tab select Edit HTML
- Make sure to click Download Full Template and save a backup copy to disk – just in case.
- Put a check in Expand Widget Templates.
- Search for
<p><data:post.body/></p>
Update: November 5th, 2008
It has come to my attention that some templates use a slightly different formatting. If you cannot find the text listed above – try searching for <data:post.body/> and follow the rest of the instructions.
- Paste this on the line directly before it:
<div style='float:right; margin-left:10px;'>
<script type='text/javascript'>
digg_url="<data:post.url/>";</script>
<script src='http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js' type='text/javascript'/>
</div>
- Preview your template to make sure it looks right – the Digg icon should appear at the top right of all your posts. Hover your cursor over it and make sure the link URL matches your post URL.
- If all looks well, click Save Template and then View your blog
Happy DIGGing!
I decided it was time to clean up the page layout, tweak the AdSense to make it less annoying and add some modern features.
One of the things I like is label clouds. It’s a nifty concept which before now I was never able to add to my site. I cannot take credit for coming up with it – I just followed the step-by-step instructions listed here. Note this requires you to be using the new version of blogger and already have some labels configured with your posts.
In case you are not aware, a label cloud is a list of blog labels where the more frequently appearing ones are made larger, thus giving an instant visual indication of the most popular labels.
I’ve also added a Digg button, but I’m still working on figuring out how to code it for individual posts on a blogger.com site.
Edit: I now have this working.
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