The Holy Grail

I'm good me!

Over at my photoblog - Photao - I have managed to get the new template half finished and implement what Photoblog type users of Blogger have been searching for since the dawn of Photoblogs. A template that has a large single photo displayed - but also has thumbnails of previous images to be used as navigation to previous images. This is easy to do if you want to edit your template every time and manually insert the image source code - but as Blogger sometimes has horrendous publishing issues - this is not acceptible. To accomplish this I began by changing the text in the title field of each posting to the same http:// address as the image source.

 

I then set blogger to only show one posting at a time.

Within my template code, i removed the list of recent items completely (and the entire sidebar) as this only shows as many postings as you have told blogger to display on the screen (ie One). To create the section that shows the thumbnail images, I headed over to Feeddigest and set up an RSS feed of the Photao blog for free. Make sure you have the RSS feed turned on though! I then modified the feeds HTML template within FeedDigest to include an IMG SRC tag around the title field text - which then creates a link to the image itself rather than just displaying the text:

Feeddigest then allows you to copy some code into your blog which displays the feed. In this case it is just a feed of the last 15 postings made into images from the same blog! The free version of FeedDigest is restricted to the last 15 items. Here is the code I am using at the moment to get the feed into the footer area of the Photao blog:

 

This means that when I post a new image, I can make a standard posting through the Blogger interface, add in the image and text (if required) and as long as I put the URL of the image into the title field, the RSS feed will be updated correctly and (most importantly) automatically. And as I store all my images at the excellent Flickr, I can use the URL of the smaller size versions of the image which are created for you in the title field which makes loading times quicker. The only problem (a very minor one) is that you will also have to remove the posts title field from your Blogger template. So if you want to give your images smart and fancy names, you will have to enter it as standard text above or below the image.

The template is far from finished though - so watch out for more whizz-bang design changes soon! EDIT: Just found out that I got mentioned over on the FeedDigest website too!

Technorati Tags: photoblog, feeddigest, blogger, RSS, template, photao