Blogger Hacks

I have three hacks to blogger widgets that I have implemented on my blog. You can see the effects both in the posts themselves (an advanced "read more" post-summary hack) and the sidebar (hide/show widget and label hacks). A more complete description of each follows. You can get the instructions for implementing these hacks on my gadgets and hacks webpage

The Hide/Show Widget Hack
Do you have 8 million labels that go on and on down the page? Do you have some widget that takes forever to scroll thru? Ever wish you could give your readers the option of hiding these long widgets to shorten your blog page up? That is what this hack will do. (See the blog archive and label widgets on my blog linked above for examples)

The Advanced "Read More" Post-summary Hack
There are plenty of "Read Only" hacks out there, including in the blogger help files. They all follow a basic pattern which involves manipulating styles in the template and adding a "fullpost" span to your default post html. I have taken that as a basis, and added two additional elements.

Label Widget Post List Hack
I like how the blog archive widget has an expandable list of posts at the month level but always wondered why the label widget didn't do the same thing. After all, wouldn't it be nice to see a list of posts that have a particular label without having to go to a new page and scroll through/page through all the posts under that label? Well, this hack solves that problem. Now you can have an expandable list of posts under each label just like you do under each month in the blog archive.