Internet Web Help

Since from the very beginning of this blog, I had in mind that most of people do not use Blogger just because of its “limitations”, or whatever they think blogger has, so I have decided to creat unique templates that would blow people’s minds not only because of their designs, but also for its many unique and out-of-the-box features.

Now I bring you a template that no one has never made for Blogger: a video template. Yes, now you guys can showcase your videos using blogger! ins’t that awesome?

The fact is that I am very excited about this template, because this one may turn out in a revolution on Blogger templates, People will now see that Blogger is not as limited as they thought it was, believe me: I didn’t even start describing its features yet.

I have been working on this template for the past weeks, finding a way to improve it each time I put my hands on it. The best thing was the help I have got from my gift-minded friends Abu Farhan and Aneesh (from Bloggerplugins.org). They are (seriously) the best and fastest Blogger developers that I have ever known, I am very lucky to get to work with this guys.

Now let me present you BloggerTube: A video template that creates a perfect link between Blogger (The best blogging tool in my opinion) and Youtube (The biggest and most used online video service on the internet).

There are many reasons for my excitement, but I can summarize them in two simple ones:
 #1 – This template is totally automatic, anyone can use it, and even the most newbie guys will be able to post videos on it.
#2 – It is the first of its kind, So this will motivate me to release new version and implement new features each version.

Check out the live demo and you’ll what I am talking about!

BloggerTube Instructions:

Note: A really nice user from our community (Thanks Mesothelioma) has just made this great collection of video tutorials for Bloggertuts, Please check it out, specially beginners. Make sure you watch them before asking for help!

How to post a new video on BloggerTuts

1 – You’ll only need 2 things: A post sample (Please download it here and save it as post sample under your Blogger settings) and a video URL from youtube.

2 – Go to Youtube.com and grab a video URL:

3 – Now head to your Blogger dashboard and create a new post, It will open up the posting page with your previously saved post sample:

4 – Note that you have 2 important elements:

- “endofvid” – Will be used to tell the template that your video URL has finished, you should paste your URL right before it, with no spaces!

- [starttext] and [endtext] - Those are your post content wrapper, so if you need to write anything, post any picture on your post, please do it inside these two lines. This is an important step, if you write anything out of these two lines, it will not be shown on your post.

5 – Here’s how the your post should looks like:

I have highlighted the important elements just for your reference, but you should not do that on your posts.

How to install the “Recent Videos” widget”

Just go to your Page Elements section, click to edit the HTML/Javascript Widget called “Recent Videos” and paste the following code inside:

Automatic features on BloggerTube:

Once you have made your post, BloggerTube has taken care of it, let’s check it out the awesome automatic features on this neat template:

Automatic video thumbnails on home page:

BloggerTube will automatically create a thumbnail out of your video, and show it only on your home page, in a nice and organized gallery style.

Automatic embedded video on post page:

 You’ll get your video automatically embedded on your post page, together with your description/post below it.

Automatic slider for the last featured videos

This one may be the most cool feature of this template, it is completely mind blowing, and you doesn’t even to touch the code to get it, It’s already installed and running for you!

BloggerTube Highlights

Custom star ratings from js-kit.com :

Recent videos widget from Bloggerplugins.org (adapted specially for this template):

Exclusive scripts from Abu-farhan.com created specially for this Blogger video template that makes it totally awesome and intelligent.

Note: if you are experiencing any problems with the page navigations, go to your Edit HTML pade, check Expand Widget models, and replace the following url:

for this one:

Final Words

I hope everyone enjoy this template, I have put so much effort to show people that blogger can really be awesome and to break all the limitation walls that some people create for this great blogging platform.
Feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed, and Follow me on twitter.

• Live Demo
• Dowload Theme

SideWinder is a quick and easy way to check posts about a website in Google’s new SideWiki service.

SideWiki is a service hosted by Google that allows users to leave comments about any website they are visiting for other SideWiki users to view. This isn’t a new idea, and other companies have tried to introduce similar services in the past. What makes SideWiki more likely to succeed is it’s ease of use by being integrated into Google’s search toolbar and the large number of established users that represents.

Despite this you may not be using Google Toolbar, or otherwise not want to install it just to check into what people are saying about a particular website. In that case you can still get the SideWiki information through Google’s new SideWiki API.

SideWinder is a simple implementation of this API letting you add a bookmarklet to your browser and click it to load SideWiki data for any website you might be visiting.

Drag this link to your browser bookmarks toolbar:

Blogger just brought us one of the most wanted features on any kind of Blogging platform: Avatars on comments. From a long time ago I have been looking for a way to implement Gravatar or any other way to show avatars on Blogger comments, but never really found a way that was really customizable, so no sucess.

Now as one of the Blogger Birthday feature series, the Blogger team allow us to show profile pictures besides every comment, what increases the idea of “community” in your templates and give it a more “netwroking with users” feeling, at least for me.

Unfortunaltely that feature does not immediately work for users with highly modificated templates such as me and many people around, but don’t worry, I have made this little tutorial on how to implement that on your blogs.

How to activate avatar on your blogger comments

Go to your blogger Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML. I recommend you to save a copy of your template in order to do changes safely. To do that just click the “Download Full Template” link.

Now click “Expand Widget Templates”, and look for the following lines on your code:

and REPLACE it for the following:

After doing that, look for this line:

and ADD the following code right AFTER it:

Save it, and you are done.

How to replace the blank space for a 35×35 image (Update)

Note: I give credits to Soufiane from LeBlogger for this step.

First look for this line of code:

And REPLACE it for the following:

And for last, add the following code just before the line ]]></b:skin> :

Save it, You’re done.

Note: If this tutorial does not work, make sure you have enabled “Show profile images on comments?” on your Settings > Comments section.

Due to the success of Photoplus, I got many comments on it, and a lot of people were asking me to make a lighter version of it, so here’s it! I tried to use a different style of design, keeping it clean and minimalistic, but not less professional.

This template is for photography only, so if you need to show texts or anything else, It will not work.

I also would like to thank CSS Reflex for this great tutorial.

How to post on Photoplus Light

Your posts on photoplus should be only an image tag. This means that the title will not be shown on the main page, it has only SEO purposes. Same thing with Labels, It will serve you only to organize the main menu.

Here’s the post model:

Note: The thumbnail size should be 187×128 pixels.

I recommend you guys to save it as post model, it will make your life easier.

Features:

• Photography
• jQuery Special Feature
• Web 2.0
• Easy to customize
• 3 Column Footer
• Minimalistic
• White

• Live Demo
• Dowload Theme

Since I started dealing with blogger (about 5 months ago), I was able to experience a lot of good stuff, learn and share knowledge with many great people from this networl/niche. Everyday I surf around the web looking for inspiration and also new stuff that come up for blogging. Blogger is a pretty old (10 years old) tool, so since its creation people were able to make guides, tutorials, templates, etc, and that makes internet full of all kinds of things blogger related.

The problem is that when you get too much stuff, you can’t really tell whether all of them are trustable or not. You got to have good eyes to see if a template, tweak or tutorial is really worth to implement on your blog, because if not, you can simply ruin months/years of work.

So thinking of that, I made a little list of people I call “Blogger Gurus” and want to share with you. Those are the Blogger people I follow daily and trust every thing that comes from them. I don’t mean that they are the best people around, neither that they are the ONLY “Blogger Gurus”. Please understand that this is a personal list and you may agree or not with it. If you don’t please don’t hesitate to leave a comment, so we can let the conversation begin.

Amanda Fazani

This girl is fantastic, I learned almost everything I know reading her blog, It has a very useful list of essential blogger tutorials for beginners. Everything that comes from her is professional, including her templates. That makes her one of the best template author when it comes to selling blogger templates on ThemeForest marketplace.
Follow Amanda on twitter.

Klodian

He is my best friend on Blogger niche. Klodian has a great mind when it comes to good taste and choosing the best templates to convert. He is also very clever and a real good internet strategist. I trust him to death and his advices are the way to go.
Follow Klodian on twitter.

Claudia Contreras

Co-hoster of BTemplates.com, She does a great work designing templates, giving support, writing about bloggersphere. For me what she does best is to classify template submission in order to keep a great list of templates over at BTemplates (the best template collection in my opinion).
Follow Claudia on twitter.

Francisco Oliveros

BTemplates founder, He is a great blogger and lover of webdesign. Pioner developer of blogger templates, He also writes on his personal site about blogging and web development.
Follow Francisco on twitter.

Vin

He is one of the pioneers in blogger learning. Vin is very succesful on Google Blogger Help Group, he also maintains a kind of old blog with so many content, and so many people have been helped by him, that he must surely be considered a Blogger guru.
Follow Vin on twitter.

The main reason I found for creating this blog was to show people out there that you can use blogger to achieve almost everything. I mean, You can use Blogger to create ANY type of website, and show any type of content, If you know how to tweak it and admin your content of course. With this idead in my mind I have decided to create “out of the box” types of templates and help users using it, so they can see on their on eyes what I am talking about…

So since my users have got the idea of my templates they started commenting here like crazy, asking questions, congratulating me, etc. Due to that great feedback, I decided to answer (almost) all the comments, give my best to help people and answer all the questions they have, no matter how simple they were for me.

A couple of days ago I tried to search google for people using my templates, I got around 3000 results, then I checked some of them, and for my surprisingly happiness, I found some many GREAT blogs that have modified my templates in such a beatiful way that I could never imagine. Some of them have even won awards!

So I was here just surfing the net around as I do everyday looking for inspiration and came up with this idea: As I can not find all the great people using my templates by myself, I will create a post here and ask people to submit their blogs, only they ones that they think that have a great design, and are using a template of mine of course. It’s up now!

After taking a look on what you guys have submitted, I will create a section on this blog with the top blog designs using my templates, with a text link to your site, and maybe a short description. The more people that submit content, the more the post will be productive, so please spread this post around using the many social netwoerking features here, including the “Retweet” button.

Submit your blogs!

Here’s what I want:

• Name: Your website’s name.
• Link: A URL to your website.
• Description: Write a short description of your blog, what is it about?
• Template: What template are you using? What did you change from the original?
• Testimonial (Optional): If you want, Please write something about me, or my blog, like how I have helped you, or why would you recommend me, my blog or my templates to people out there.

Let’s see what you’ve got!