Blogger.com's still lacks conditional "widgets"

Google's Blogger team has been quite productive since last year (2009). First the new handling of widgets, aligning this feature with iGoogle gadgets. Then little but much needed features like the menu bar for pages (or alternatively the link gadget). And of course the "read more" feature, new and improved gadgets... The biggest and most significant upgrade has been the Blogger Template Designer. With one stroke, it made our previous design tweaks to templates out-dated. Which we appreciate :-)
As of autumn 2010, the designer is a great, though unpolished, diamond. Lot's of little things which we would love to see improved.

But most of all we would like to be able to use "display conditions" for widgets / gadgets. Only show selected posts or gadgets on the homepage. Please let us select when to display gadgets, they don't need to be on every page or post. This would also make it so much easier to display "featured posts or articles" on the homepage. Ie, it'll be great to indicate if a gadget should be shown:

• "only/not on homepage"
• "only/not for posts which have the label/tag/filter 'ABC'"
• "only/not on pages"
• "only/not on page 'XYZ'"

Additionally, those display conditions would be great to combine with layout areas of the "Page Elements". IE, "only display the right sidebar if..."

We have of course tried to include those conditions when creating our own gadgets. But Blogger seems to parse the code and ignore those <b> conditions within widgets / gadgets. 

Amanda Kennedy has posted a nice and relatively simple tweak on her BloggerBuster. Of course, one "problem remains". If you change your template in the new designer, you will loose all tweaks which are not "within" blogger elements such as those gadgets.

tickerTXT site re-design: the "featured article" slide show (1)

So far so good.  Check out our prototype number 5.  Looks pretty good. What we now want for tickerTXT is a better "feature" section. This section should be pleasing to the eye, informative for the casual viewer and teasing the interested reader for more information. So we went looking for a so called "featured article" code for blogspot which teases selected posts.

The slider should include:

• an image as slide background
• a title or header
• a teaser or summary
• a link for further reading
• ... and if possible a code, that pulls all data from articles with a common "label" (solution at the end of the post)

Our prototype number 8 shows a slider we have copied from the driftwood magazine blogger template by be-insight. There are similar sliders in the following templates: MagzStyle Slider, and on RevolutionChurch, Alpha, Chucky, Hybrid News, and so on...  Most of these blogger templates have been "migrated" or "ported" from Wordpress Theme designers. If you check out the links, you will usually find a reference to the original designers.

Unfortunately, though the sliders were quite nice, we weren't really happy, because all of the templates mentioned above "hardcode" the content into CSS-html blogger script. So for non-designers or developers, changing the content is a no-no. So we abandoned that code and didn't even bother to smoothen the CSS details of our prototype 8.

I had found some other code before, "lost it" and then finally found this gem called Simplex Darkness.  You can see it in action here. And best of all, the designer described the slider code in two articles (first, second). The javascript pulls all content of the most recent articles by simply reading the explicit home URL. So rather than using http://www.tickerTXT.org/ we will use http://www.tickertxt.org/search/label/featured et voilà - only posts with that tag (or in blogger speak "label" will be pulled into that preview section.)

Of course we need to change the CSS and layout of that Featured Section, as we want the list of articles on the right side look more like a "1 2 3 4 ... menu" above or below slides. A bit like the magazine1 template described in this tutorial.