Useful blogger design tools

This is for my friend Seppe and other bloggers out there... after working quite intensely to improve the layout of my blog, I figured I should share all the resources I used in a small compilation. Here it is, enjoy!

How to put your own logo on top of the page: see here or here. If you then want to hide the blog's title in the header, go to template --> html, find the style section for the header and add "display: none;" to header h1.

How to add a second side-bar: either you directly start with a three-column template (you can download some of the must popular ones here), or you can make it yourself. See also this workshop.

How to make "progress bars": see here.

How to insert a google map in your blog: see here.

How to programme the "snap" function (the little bulb that hovers if you point to a link): from here.

How to programme the "read more/lies weiter" for summary and full version of one post: see here.

How to make the "label cloud": here.

Put some funny language translation on your page. Be happy.

A clock for your webpage.

Your can integrate a flickr slide show in a your blog! Either as a slide show, but also in the side bar. A great tool for uploading photos to flickr is here. I made a separate post for slide-shows on blogger.

You can display photos from a picasa web album on your blog sidebar! Here is a fine widget creator for doing this. You can choose whether to display the title of your slideshow and the logo (you can also do it manually later by changing the pwaHeader and pwaLogo setting to "false").

How to embed flash (.swf) animations in your blog: here. For doing this, you might need to store your swf files on-line and link to them from your blog. If you have blogger (a gmail account), you also have a googlepage. Use this for easy upload. Googlepage can also be used for stocking mp3s and other files.

How to show a power-point presentation on your blog, see this post.

For an easy tree-menu, see here. I had the problem that with this given code, by default (when you load the browser) the list was open, whereas I wanted it closed. To resolve this, replace style="&{head};" with style="display:none".

Drop-down menus: here, or here.

Finally, counters. I use statcounter.com. See also google analytics.

Easy news-tickers or news-scrollers. Related to this, how to embed a flash-animation in your blog.

Submit your site to search engines:
how to do this for yahoo
and google
and msn (here the related inktomi search index).

In case you wonder: what is the status of your website in google?
and what about yahoo?

Good luck and have fun!