Blogger Sharing Buttons and Custom Templates

So when I read this post on the Blogger Buzz Blog that said sharing buttons where now supported natively on blogger I was pretty stoked. Up until now I had been using a set of custom buttons from one of the sites dedicated solely to adding sharing buttons to pages and blogs. However, I didn't really like how they crammed you through their web page or blasted crappy advertising all over the shop.

Anyway, I excitedly enabled the feature straight away on my blog to no avail. I could see that it was working on other peoples blogs just not mine. The blogger help was anything but.... I searched a few times and couldn't find what I was looking for, I'd give up for a couple of days and then when I saw them on another blog I'd get annoyed and look again.

Finally this morning I finally found my way to this post on BloggerPlugins.org  it seems that the problem was that I had manually customized my template and it couldn't figure out what to do. (Annoyaronically* I had only customized it to add the other sharing buttons in the first place!)


Anyway if you're having problems with adding the sharing buttons check out the post lined above!

*My latest attempt at making up a word. Annoyaronically should be used when something is annoyingly ironic.

Adding Analytics to your Blogspot blog

So being a bit of a statistics junky I realised I needed to be able to get more stats off my web page. Obviously the best bet, considering this blog etc is all hosted on Google based servers etc, would be Google Analytics. So after a bit of poking around (I was going to say googling but then I don't want to be accused of trying to cram 'google' into my post too many times) I stumbled across this post on the Analytics Blog.

Obviously, this looks awesome but alas, as the post suggest it is still only in Private Beta even though this post is almost exactly a year old.

So, it was back to getting Analytics to work on the blog. Despite the misgivings induced in me by this post it was actually really really easy.

Firstly setup your Analytics account simply by going to google.com/analytics, everything is pretty straight forward, when it asks for the URL simply put in .blogspot.com (in this case tobytes.blogspot.com) and fill in the rest of the details. 

During the setup process you'll be presented with some code to copy and paste into your blog. Grab a copy of this and head back into your blog. Go into the layout tab and add a new HTML/Javascript gadget. Paste the copied code in and save the new gadget.

You're now setup, to confirm that you'll be getting data head into your Analytics account and select "Edit" for the account you setup for this blog. Click on "Check Status" and if you get a message "Waiting for Data" all is good.

Of course if your blog is as totally awesome as mine you'll be presented with loads of data on usage like this..

I guess I'd better get to work getting some good content onto this blog so I can get some more interesting stats.