I’ve added a new feature to daveXtreme.com, called eXtremities. During my web surfing I come across lots of interesting sites that seem worth a link, but don’t need an entire post devoted to them. The main page will always show the five most-recent links, and every link will be available in a separate archive page. An RSS feed of the links is also available. (Note: if you came here via a direct link to this article, go to the front page to see them.) LiveJournal users can add LJ User davelinks to their Friends’ pages (though due to LJ’s poor content aggregator, they won’t get the links in HTML, and the first time they add davelinks to their page they’ll get 15 entries at once).
Setting up a Sideblog in TypePad
At first I wanted to use a links TypeList to handle it all, but there’s not yet a way to create an archive of TypeList items, and I didn’t want to have to create a new RSS feed that I’d have to manually rebuild each time I posted a link. Advanced users can use the following method to include a similar “sideblog” on their pages:
- Create a new weblog. For example purposes, we’ll call it “sideblog.” In the configure tab of the new weblog, enable syndication in the “Publicity & Syndication” mini-tab. I recommend syndicating the entire post, as they’ll usually be short and you don’t want the HTML to be stripped.
- Design the weblog to look however you’d like. While you’ll be including the posts into the sidebar of your main page, you’ll still want a pretty template for the sideblog archives.
- In the “Edit Template Sets” mini-tab of the “Design” tab, find the design you just made and check “Convert.” Click “Convert” to clone your template into an advanced template.
- Click “Edit” next to the name of your new advanced template. This will take you to the advanced template editing screen. Click “Create new index template,” give it a name, and put “sideblog.inc” in the “Output File” field. This template will be the HTML that your main weblog will display in its sidebar.
Here is a simple example template you can use. It will display a title, the five most-recent sideblog entries, and links to the sideblog archives and RSS feed.
<h2>Sideblog</h2> <ul> <MTEntries lastn="5"> <li><$MTEntryBody$></li> </MTEntries> <li><a href="http://yoursite.typepad.com/ sideblog/archives.html">Link archives</ a> | <a href="http://yoursite.typepad.com/ sideblog/index.rdf">RSS</a></li> </ul>
I’ve split up linebreaks for formatting above. Here’s the template file without them that you can paste into your page. (Right click to download — your browser may try to render the HTML.) You’ll have to replace yoursite with the address of your site, and if you named the new weblog something other than “sideblog,” you’ll have to change that, too. 6. Save and publish the new template. 7. Now switch to your main weblog, and go to the design tab. In “Edit your Template Sets,” open up the sidebar template you’d like to put the sideblog in. (It will probably be called “sidebar,” sidebar1,” or “sidebar2.”) Paste the following code into the sideblog (remove the line breaks to make it one line and modify it to match the name of your page):
`<!--#include virtual="http:// yoursite.typepad.com/ yoursite/sideblog.inc"-->` - Save and publish our sidebar template.
Your sideblog should show up on your page now. Of course, you’ll have to add some content to your sideblog, and to make that real easy I’d suggest setting up a QuickPost bookmarklet. With one, you can just select it whenever you find a page you want to post into your sideblog, and it’ll fill in the address of the page automatically. (Remember to enable TrackBack so that you can notify people you’re linking to their pages.)