Del.icio.us Now With Private Bookmarks

Del.icio.us now has private bookmarking available as announced on the del.icio.us blog (private saving ryan). To implement, log into del.icio.us, go to your settings page, under experimental click on private saving. That will take you to a page where you can turn off or on private saving. To turn on, check the box and click on the save changes button. From then on, when you save a bookmark the option "do not share" will be available. Checking that box and the bookmark will be viewable only to you.

Some people don't seem to like this new feature, saying it goes against the 'social bookmarking' nature of del.icio.us which has made it so popular. I can see that point, but I think it's only a good thing. There are many cases where you don't want to share some bookmark (or make it known amongst friends/peers that you have a certain something saved) and this will be handy for that. For the most part, I think most people will still share the vast majority of their bookmarks and only use the private when it's, well really private.

One good thing this does for anyone using the Blogger Categories with Del.icio.us method is you can make private your 'personal' bookmarks while still using the same account for your 'categories' on Blogger.

30 Days In The Hole

Chicago Green, talkin' 'bout Black Lebanese A dirty room and a silver coke spoon
Give me my release, come on
Black napalese, it's got you weak in your knees
Sneeze some dust that you got buzzed on
You know it's hard to believe

30 days in the hole

Well it wasn't exactly 30 days in the hole...but at least 16 hours in the Blogger Hole. While most of blogspot.com was up and functioning, certain blogs (including our favorite Phydeaux3) was in the hole reporting 403 Forbidden errors. Phydeaux3 was in the hole from 7pm CST Thursday 3-16-05 until 11am CST Friday 3-17-05. But that's ok. Nothing a little 'Durban Poison' won't help.
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Drop Down Menu For Categories

Update April 11, 2007 - This methods/scripts etc described in this post are obsolete. Do Not Use Them! They relate to a category method for Blogger BEFORE Blogger introduced their labels. Use New Blogger, Use Labels. This is just up for historical reasons, or if someone using the code already needs it. Comments are now Closed. Thanx.
Since I've had a few questions on it, I thought I would post the code for getting a drop down menu listing of the categories used with my category method. This is only useful if you are using that method which is outlined in this post(Part One). Thanks to Marcos from Oracle Data Mining and Analytics for revamping the code so it works in a drop down menu.

<div id="delicious">
   <noscript>Javascript must be enabled for Categories</noscript>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/tags/XXXXXXX"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
   var sel = document.createElement('select');
   sel.setAttribute('target','_blank');
   sel.setAttribute('width','200');
   sel.setAttribute('style','width: 172px');  
   sel.setAttribute("onChange","location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value");
   sel.options[0] = new Option('- Categories -','/');
   var i=1;
   for (p in Delicious.tags){
         tagURL =encodeURIComponent(p);
         var strip = p.replace(/_/g,' ');
         var otext = strip +' ('+Delicious.tags[p]+')';
         var ourl = delTagPost+'?'+tagURL;
         sel.options[i] = new Option(otext,ourl);
         i=i+1;
         }                    
    document.getElementById('delicious').appendChild(sel);
</script>


The instructions are the same as for the original flat listing of the categories. The only thing that has to be modified is your delicious username put in place of the XXXXXX at the beginning of the script. This code can be used with the code for the "Category Cloud" (Tag Cloud 9) so you can have both, but don't use it in conjuction with the flat listing of the categories.

Update: Now seems a good enough time to also add the code to hide the category post/archive when the recent posts/archive lists are also in a drop down menu.

Here is the sample code from Blogger Help for getting the 'Recent Posts' lists in a dropdown.

<h2 class="sidebar-title">Recent Posts</h2>
<select id="posthide" name="archivemenu" onchange="document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;">
  <option selected>- Recent Posts -</option>
     <BloggerPreviousItems>
  <option value="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><$BlogPreviousItemTitle$></option>
     </BloggerPreviousItems>
</select>

The part highlighted in red is an id that needs to be added if you already have the menu for the following code to work. And to hide the category post in that listing paste the following code unchanged after the recent posts listing.

<script type="text/javascript">
// Cloak the Delicious Tag Post - Drop Down List
      rec = document.getElementById('posthide');
      for(i=0; i < rec.options.length; i++){
            value = rec.options[i].value;
            if(value == delTagPost){
                  rec.options[i] = null;
               }
           }
</script>

Here's the default code for creating an archive listing with a drop down, again the id that needs to be added if you already have a drop down listing is highlighted in red.

<h2 class="sidebar-title">Archives</h2>
<select id ="archivehide" name="archivemenu" onchange="document.location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;">
  <option selected>- Archives -</option>
    <BloggerArchives>
  <option value="<$BlogArchiveURL$>"><$BlogArchiveName$></option>
    </BloggerArchives>
</select>
 

And here is the code that needs to be placed unchanged after the archive drop down listing.

<script type="text/javascript">
// Cloak the Delicious Archive Post - Drop Down List
      rec = document.getElementById('archivehide');
      for(i=0; i < rec.options.length; i++){
            value = rec.options[i].value;
            if(value == delArchivePost){
                  rec.options[i] = null;
               }
           }
</script> 


With both of those in place, the category post and archive containing the post will also be hidden in the drop down menus. I had to change the original way I came up with for hiding the select option because apparently IE and Opera don't allow a style="display:none" for a option tag while Firefox does. So changed it to set the option to null which seems to work in all 3. I'm assuming it's ok in other browsers, but if you run into any issues with it lemme know.

IE7 and ClearType

I downloaded and installed the IE7 Beta Preview a few weeks ago. I uninstalled it 15 minutes later. The only real thing I can report on the Beta Preview is the uninstall works flawlessly, for that I am grateful.

I couldn't really get a feel for it, as it crashed within the first 10 secs of opening the browser. Then I couldn't go to more than one or two websites without it crashing again. But hey, it's a Beta Preview (whatever that is) so I'm not complaining about that. It just doesn't work well on my system for whatever reason.

But the one thing I could notice was the display of fonts, which I thought looked blurry and horrid. Turns out the culprit is something called ClearType, which according to the IEBlog is turned on in IE7 by default, regardless of the systems settings.

I hadn't even heard of ClearType, so that shows how much attention I've been paying. Apparently it became availiable with Windows XP, but is turned off by default. I decided to turn it on for the whole system to see if that was what looked odd in IE7 to me. Enable ClearType via Microsoft.com (IE only of course)

Well my initial impression, it was what looked odd to me in IE7. Now my whole systems font displays are funky. The fonts actually 'look' better, meaning they seem a bit prettier. But they are washed out, kinda blurry. Very very hard for me to read. I'll leave it on for a bit to see if my eyes get used to it. It may just be the change that I'm not used to yet. I can already tell that some larger font sizes look great, but the smaller ones are problematic. Maybe I'll be a ClearType fan in a few days. We'll see.

Swimming In A Sea Of Tags

Nothing to see here really...

Just testing out some of the features of a revamped Technorati tag adder for Blogger. This is just an update of the original script that Improbulus forced me to make compatible with multiple word tags. The current version is described by Imp in her post Updated Multiple Word Tag Creator..

The version I'm testing out has a bugfix, a couple of new features, and some styling changes along with some cleaning up under the hood. All in all a good example of why people who don't know they are doing shouldn't try to write javascript. I do just need to make sure technorati picks up the tags with the new features (it should but wanna make sure). If it goes through and Imp approves, I'm sure she will post about it soon and make this version available if anyone is interested (yeah, we need another tagger).
screenshot
Click to Enlarge


Screenshot showing some of the new features and styling of a revamped Technorati Tag adder for Blogger.
Magical Sheep (or is it Seep) Version.

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