Recently in Weblog Goodies Category

Creating a custom button for your blog to be used on the Google Toolbar is a great way to promote your blog. Once installed, the button can act as a graphical bookmark to your site. You and your readers can search your site using the search bar in the Google toolbar, without having to be on your site. In fact, you can highlight any text on any web page, click on your custom icon in the browser, and you will perform a search the text you just highlighted on your blog. The custom button can even list your last several entries, with data pulled from your feed.

I recently updated my Google toolbar for Simply Recipes and created a new one for a new site, Food Blog Search. (If you want to see the Google Toolbar in action, follow the instructions to add a button on the Food Blog Search site.) Google's instructions for making a custom button can be convoluted and overwhelming. It took me several hours over several days to work out the correct code for the toolbars. So to save any of you similar pain, I'm presenting the steps here.

Step 1: Install Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar requires using either IE or Firefox for your browser. Go to this page at Google to install it.

There are a couple of ways for one to easily add a poll to one's blog.

1. BlogPoll

BlogPoll is a free service that can host your poll. You use Javascript to display the poll on your site.

Note that the BlogPoll script uses a stylesheet that has a "content" class that may override your CSS "content" class in your blog stylesheet, causing some funky coloring on your site. If you experience this problem, to fix it, add a link rel tag right after the BlogPoll script code like so:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.yourblog.com/styles-site.css" />

Flickr Zeitgeist is a fun little flash-based goodie that shows the most recent public photos that people have posted to Flickr, a photo social network. (Note: I had a little bit of trouble gettng this to work; the problem was that the MT entry template automatically put line breaks in the javascript code. I adjusted the code so there are no more line breaks and it seems to work fine.)

It's still in beta, but pretty cool nonetheless. Click on any of the photos to get a bigger version and more information about the photo.

You can use the Flickr Badge utility to show a set of random photos pulled from your Flickr photo collection on your website.