Floating Widgets in a Blogger Post

(Note: Those of you using ad blockers will need to turn them off to see examples in this post.)

In my last post, I explained what to do if your JavaScript widgets, added to the body of a post in your Blogger blog, weren't displaying. But doing that didn't solve all my problems and may not solve all yours. If your widgets are aligned to the left (or right if you write in a right-to-left language) and put an ugly break in all but one line of text beside them, this tutorial is for you. While I've only tried this with Amazon widgets, it should work with any copy-and-paste widgets with a preview page.

This   is what an Amazon widget looks like when it's an inline element, which the MP3 Clips widget is by default. It's fine for small images that are used as icons or to display foreign scripts that the user may not have fonts for, but it's ugly for images of any significant size, as well as for video embeds and most Amazon widgets.

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Floating Widgets in a Blogger Post

JavaScript Widgets Within a Blogger Post

When adding the Amazon song-preview widget to my last post, I ran into two problems specific to Blogger. Since I'm probably not the only Blogger blogger who uses Amazon Associates widgets or any other kind of JavaScript widgets within posts, I thought I'd share the problems and solutions here.

Amazon does offer an "Add to Blogger" option for widgets, but it adds them to your blog's sidebar. If you want to tie a widget to a specific post, you'll have to copy-and-paste the code manually. When I did this, the widget didn't display at all even after the post was published. (It's normal for them not to display in Preview or Compose mode, since <script> tags are suppressed in these modes.)

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JavaScript Widgets Within a Blogger Post

Hiding 1x1 Images in Blogger

Bloggers such as myself who are in the Amazon Associates program use invisible 1x1 images to keep track of how popular our links are. But Blogger's style sheets put padding around all images by default, creating an ugly space. I had trouble fixing this, but I finally found a way.

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Hiding 1x1 Images in Blogger

Twitter is a feed, not a blog

On a blog, you can take several paragraphs per post to describe things in detail, attach images or video clips, and receive equally detailed replies through comments.

In an RSS or Atom feed that's going to be useful to a typical reader program (especially one on a mobile phone), you only get one URL per entry, one line to describe that URL in, and no multimedia or rich formatting (such as colours, bold, italics and alternate fonts). But feeds are easier to read on mobile phones, both with and without browsers; Yahoo! offers RSS alerts via SMS, while Google offers a version of its Reader application for mobile browsers.

With its smaller post size limits (and the terser description that results), as well as a lack of multimedia or rich formatting, Twitter is really more like an RSS feed than a blog. Just as a blog can't be replaced with an RSS feed or vice-versa, neither is it interchangeable or comparable to Twitter. The apple doesn't make a very good orange.

Twitter is a feed, not a blog