March 10, 2012

Blog Cleanup

Generally speaking, I don't try to mess around much with the blog settings since it took a lot of work tweaking it to where it is now.  sure, I'll change out the featured blogs in my header and mess around with the labels order, but that is usually my limit.

I started with a wordpress template from "Free Blogger Templates" and went to town customizing it.  There is a lot of coding I cannot begin to understand.... definitely some javascript, and a few bits and pieces of freely loaned code I mashed together to get what I wanted.


One thing I had at the top of each post were some buttons from Add This.  For some reason the icons looked a bit messed up, like there was something additional behind them.  While the service was decent enough overall, but sometimes I had problems using it to tweet new blog updates.  Instead of a shortened URL it would list the full URL and it always had some self-promotion added to the end that I had to manually remove.

The cool thing with Add This is that they capture some awesome analytics.....well they are awesome if you use them, which I don't.

Yesterday I tried to switch over to Share This.  I liked the icons better, which was one of the most important things since i assume few will use them, but everyone will see them.  The had an easy to use Blogger feature, but it didn't play nice with my site.  All that showed was a small empty widget box.  I fiddled around with it for a while, stupidly trying to manually insert the code into my site, but it didn't work.  Blogger has this "interesting" feature where if you try to insert bad code into your html it just crashes when you save.  Sometimes, if you are lucky, it will simply not save and tell you what line your error is on.

Eventually I finally wised up and went back to Share This and tried again, opting to get the html code instead of a Blogger widget.  It worked, but I didn't like the placement at the top of the blog posts.  It took me a while of trial and error placing the code until I got what I wanted.  Of course I was going about it the wrong way.  Another interesting thing with Blogger is that when you go to edit the html it doesn't show you all the code unless you specifically ask for it.  By this time I was getting pretty frustrated and just making stupid errors which were rewarded with crashes and error codes that didn't make sense.

I tackled the issue fresh this morning and sure enough it was an easy fix.  I was even able to locate and remove all the old Add This code without any issues.

Sometimes you just need to step back and take a breather.

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