Pages-Related Articles-Your Own Photo: A Blogger's Utopia!

According to Blogger in Draft, you can now add your own pic as a background.

Blogger in Draft: Use Your Own Photo for Your Blog’s Background

This is cool, I'm thinking about moving Hoctro's Place layout up to speed with the new Template Designer as well. Not to mention the Pages feature - which, as being one of the erliest "hacker" trying to work with the Beta Blogger template code (circa Sep 2006) to write a "label as horiz or vert menu" for that very purpose - this is Blogger's heaven time. Along with my latest version of "Related Articles", my blog will definitely have the new "look and feel" of Blogger.

Sometimes I wish to travel back in time to be around Sept 2006->Sept 2007 to be engaged in creating new hacks alongside with Ramani, Singpolyma, Hans, Purple Moggy, Phydeaux, BlogU, and last but not least, by "promoter" Avatar of Bloggeratto whom reported to the blogging world every new hack of mine and of others:

http://www.bloggeratto.com/2006/09/introducing-hoctro.html

You can see his posts around September 2006 to see how it was excited to be engaging in figuring out all the nuances of the new Blogger template, and later in using JSON + Ajax to write exciting hacks. Just look at Ramani's Neo template. 4 years and many moons later, nothing can come even close to that hack. To me, Hackosphere's one-page-fits-all-purposes is a testament to the creativity of earlier 2.0 Blogger hackers. The Neo paging system is the best hack i've ever seen on Blogger. (Somehow at the moment August 2010 it's no longer a 3-column format like it used to be, but the JSON functionality still amazingly works.)

http://hackosphere.blogspot.com/2009/07/wondering-why-peekaboo-post-hack-doesnt.html

Now there's a lot of those JSON hacks are not required any longer, for we have every Google API possible to deal with AJAX. Now, unlike in late 2006, we don't have the engaging spirit among hackers anymore. Everyone is sort of quit, or doing it on their own, myself as one example as well. Since I am now back to the blogger scene, but mostly concenterated on my vietnamese blog, I kinda using Blogger + YouTube APIs to create widgets. The new widgets are for I - and others - can search for music without spending much time. That's how recently I came up with the latest Related Article, first used as a tool to turn labels in to search input for showing up YouTube results:

http://hoctroviet.blogspot.com/

If you like to have that widget for yor blog, let me know here and I'll post it up.

Cheers,

hoctro