WebGuru’s Blog about Digital Life

Thanks to the new upgrade, blogger finally gets Category option to its bloggers in its both newer and classic versions. I know there are a lot of new features, including this Category one, in the newer blogger, but I still like the classic version because of my FTP setup. So how to create a sidebar with Categories Links is a task of my own instead of waiting for blogger to upgrade its classic version again.

First of all, I really do not want to spend too much digging into the code to put dynamic category sidebar like the new version of blogger. Fortunately I do not have many changing categories for my blog. So a very dumb, simple but effective sidebar was created with the following steps.

Continue reading ‘How to create a categories link sidebar in classic blogger’

A while ago I wrote a post to explain how to create expandable summaries in classic template and layouts. With this trick, you can choose to display an arbitrary amount of text from the beginning of each post, as a teaser for the whole thing. Then users who want to read the rest of the post can click a link to see the full text. This is handy if you have lots of long articles all on one page. Note that you’ll need to have post pages enabled in order to make this feature work.

Continue reading ‘How to jump directly to the rest of the post when you create expandable summaries in Blogger’

I already had a webblog, which was hosted on www.blogger.com. But it did not have a category feature which one of my clients needs it very much. So I did a lot of researchs to find a good webblog software for him. Either a free webblog hosting, or an easy-to-install blog module put on his web hosting server.
I found both wordpress, Movable support category feature. Both of them are written in PHP, but his web hosting platform is Windows which only supports ASP or ASP.net. Typepad is the biggest blog hosting, but it needs hosting fee. Wordpress.com looks great but lack the FTP feature as blogger since we need use my client’s own domain name.

So I tried some ASP.NET webblogs. .Text was everywhere but I was told it is already discontinued and replaced by communicateserver component which I have to pay (if I need to pay, why I not buy sharepoint service. sniff :-)). DotnetNuke has a blog module now, but it is too much than what I really need now. So I decided to give dasBlog a shot, since everyone says it is pretty easy to get it running.

Guess what? The web hosting provider, networksolutions, does not have any control panel for me to create a virtual directory even it has a directory pointer feature. I uploaded all asp.net web files of dasblog to the web server, but had the following errors:

Parser Error Message: It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition=’MachineToApplication’ beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.

Called the tech support, and was told they would get solution back to me within 24 hours. What I should do? Just waiting….

Anyway, since I have to wait, I decide to give wordpress a shot. So I downloaded the source code and installed it on my own Unix web hosting server. Oh, yeah! 2 minutes later, I have this nice blog already.

Maybe I will start to use webblog now!!