August 29, 2009

A Geek Call for Blogger Template Help

I've seen various calls for help in my time - both explicit and implicit. I've reached a stage where it's time for me to Call for Geek Help.

In Blogger (August 2009), you can have a tag cloud in a sidebar widget. That's great, but I'd like something different. I have 621 "labels" (as Blogger calls tags) and that's too much for the sidebar.

What I'd like is to have a blog post that presents the label-cloud / tag-cloud in the big content area, rather than in the width-constrained sidebar. Once I can get those labels/tags into the content section, I think I may be able to do some interesting things with the data.

UPDATE I've managed to place it on the page where I want it. What I think I need to do now, is to figure out how to only display the TagCloud when the page title is equal to "tag cloud".


What I've done is I've created a post titled "Tag Cloud". It's at this url: http://vannevar.blogspot.com/1981/10/tag-cloud.html. (I date my special function pages in October 1981.) This is the page where I want the tag-cloud / label-cloud to appear.

I've realized that I probably can't procure the labels through the Blogger Content Management System (CMS), so in an attempt to touch the flow pre-compilation I've amended the Template to execute certain code only when my "Tag Cloud" page is summoned:



The code above generates the following output on the Tag Cloud page:

What you see is the output from the "special code", followed by the actual content from the Blogger CMS (in this care, *****).

I am striking out. I can get it to output the tags-labels for this individual post, but not for all the labels. I believe it's because I'm calling for the data in the wrong context, but I can't figure out (or find) the syntax for an appropriate data call.

This is an S-O-S to my fellow Geeks: Can anybody offer advice, please?
Thanks.

2 comments:

thur said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
thur said...

Sorry, a new one:

Hi vannevar,

(Posted this on the Bloggerforum too!)

I have seen your question before ... and I have really really tried to come up with an answer.

To begin with: that is an interesting case (I am impressed!).

But whatever I try: I think this is the wrong way. Whatever you do, as long as you are calling the labels within a single post page ... so you have fetched that single post ... and the other labels are (simply) not available. Stated otherwise: you cannot start a new loop (fetching all posts/labels) within a single post loop (fetching one post)!

(I am not very familiar with the Blogger engine or the Blogger loop ... but I presume the loop follows, so to speak, the normal relational concepts.)

Maybe I am wrong here, but I cannot think of anything to get this to work.

I know: no help at all.

Regards.

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