Blogger Archive Calendar

UPDATE - Sep 23, 2008 - Due to a change in the way Blogger does its feeds, folks who have previously installed this may find the links underneath the calendar not working correctly. I've made changes and updated the scripts to fix that (and hopefully guard against future problems) but if you have already installed the calendar check out this post on what to do for the quick update. Everyone else can just follow the instructions as is.

I had built an archive calendar for New Blogger and had it mostly finished around the end of January and put it up here soon after. I always intended to polish it off, and put up the instructions but I kind of got a little lazy on that. I've had more than one person commenting on it the last few weeks, so here it is. Finally. I think I have pretty much tested it out, so it should work ok (although who knows). Personally I have tested it in Firefox, Opera 9 and IE7, so it at least works in those browsers. An old version worked in IE6, so I assume this one does as well (if someone can verify that it would be nice). Safari, Konqueror etc, well you guys will just have to let me know (Not that I'll do anything about it, just nice to know).

As per my usual, the setup page is offsite at my googlepage. If you run into issues with the instructions or the script than let me know. Caveats : This is for New Blogger and Layouts templates only. Classic Templates aren't supported (at least not yet). FTP blogs can't use it. Private blogs can't use it. Also, the JSON calls I use are throttled at 100 entries each, and I didn't think it was worthwhile to check for more. So if you blog more than 100 posts in a month, this isn't for you.

Blogger Archive Calendar Setup

Is the main page, with supplemental ones for styles, and configuration options.

Styles Page

Settings Page

Translations

Ricardo Santos has made a Portuguese translation available at Widgets para o blogger - Phydeaux3

Deepa has made a Tamil translation available at Calender க்குள் பிளாக் தொகுப்புகள்

Notes

I'm still not really convinced that a calendar is a great navigational device. But people like the bling. When New Blogger announced their JSON feeds, one of the first things I thought was someone will use it to make an ajax-ish calendar. I waited for someone else to do it, but no one had. So I took a stab. Of course, while the results are ok, the underlying code is ugly as hell (a by-product of my not knowing what I do). But it seems to work. The calendar basically works off targeted JSON calls, using the published-min/published-max query options to get just the posts from a specific month. When the calendar is drawn out, the post titles are listed neatly underneath and the days with entries on them are linked. The linked days in the calendar itself also use targeted calls to the Blogger search page (so it can show all the posts if more than 1 are made on a single day). For some reason, on the blog search the parameters are updated-min/updated-max rather than the published. But it all works out.

I think most of the code is my fault, I took a few things from a few sources, but only small parts. I looked for a calendar already made that I could jump into, but the ones I found I couldn't figure out, so I did it meself. Had a starting off point from a calendar widget in NVU, but that was really just the base structure. Also want to shout out to the Strange Zen of Javascript for providing the simple but brilliant solution to a problem I was having with Firefox/IE and the way they handle hidden table rows, Table rows...revealed!. Of course when I went there, I found they are starting their own how to build a calendar series...

As I was finishing this up today, I just happened by PurpleMoggy's blog. From his comments, it seems he saw mine up, but without any instructions was inspired to come up with his own. And a nice job he did. Purple Moggy's Calendar. Very slick..uses the yahoo calendar control as it's base (wish I had seen that before rolling my own). So anyone may want to check his out before making a decision on which one to use. Definitely PurpleMoggy writes cleaner code than I do, he must know what he is doing. :-)

Also calendar fans might want to check out the original Old Blogger archive calendar, which isn't so much a calendar script as a navigation device for archive pages really. But it was a start. And of course there is the excellent one started for Old Blogger by ecmanaut, Adding calendar navigation to your Blogger template which is absolutely the best you could do on Old Blogger without JSON feeds.