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Tag: blogging

Hacking Blogger for Fun

This post is mainly a shout out (link) to those sites I’ve found useful when tinkering with my blog’s code. Lately, I find myself succumbing to a strange addiction: seeking out Blogger hacks just to read them and try them out for fun, sometimes incorporating them and sometimes not, often fixing what ain’t broke. Overall a great way to learn about HTML and CSS, about which I knew nothing prior to starting this blog.

One thing I wanted to find (because Blogger doesn’t yet offer it) is a categories method for archiving posts. I found Blogger Hacks – The Series on Freshblog, which had many a suggestion, and after experimenting with several methods involving services such as del.icio.us and Technorati, I went with the manual method described on theatre of noise primarily because I like the simplicity of it.

The randomly changing images of greyhounds and a cat that appear beneath my profile come from a small alteration and change in the placement of the javascript code provided by immeria. I also used the code in its intact form for the randomized blog description.

The other Blogger drawback is lack of a trackback system. After some tinkering I figured out how to get Haloscan’s trackback feature without the comments since I like Blogger’s comments. Making the trackback link look like part of Blogger involved playing a bit with the CSS tags and learning how that works. It’s probably not that big a deal, but it made me happy to figure out the logic of it on my own.

Coyote Mercury: The Blog

OK. So this is the Coyote Mercury blog, based in Austin, Texas. I don’t yet have a purpose for blogging except that this seems an amusing way for an obsessive writer to have some fun and maybe even pick up a few new readers.

The names of the blog and my main website are derived from a character in my first novel, A Place Without a Postcard. The character is surprisingly enough a coyote named Mercury who may actually be just a plain old dog, or – possibly – God.

Enough for now. I should get back to learning how this blog stuff works.