Blogger Template Hacks: Auto Embed Links

A couple of days ago, I wrote about some of the changes I have been making to the Blogger template. One of these took minor effort but has already produced big results.

The Blogger default template is designed to generate basic information for each item you post: title, the post itself, date, permalink, and various other footer-type fields. Blogger lets you insert images and format text easily enough, but that's about it.

One of my goals for this blog is to support WebLens and to introduce people to the resources there, and I was quickly getting tired of hand-coding links. Fortunately, it's easy to embed a link in the template that gets inserted automatically into each new post. You see the result at the top of this post, and the WebLens stats are already confirming that it's working.

Your auto-content could be anything: a link, a photo, a small piece of text. I used a web badge in this case, made with Luca Zappa's Brilliant Button Maker.

The key is to put the code in the right place in the template. For it to appear below the date, place your code after the <⁄BlogDateHeader> tag.

This little tweak creates all kinds of possibilities, especially for anyone concerned with blog traffic or site promotion. Hope you find this helpful. Stay tuned for another template hack later today. Even better, subscribe to my feed and get it automatically.