Adding code snippets to Blogger

As mentioned earlier, I was using Wordpress for my blogging attempts, but since I never went past 2 or 3 posts in total, its not something worth mentioning. But what wordpress had was easy support for code snippets.

Since this is going to be a technical blog, I needed ways to display code properly and in Wordpress, it was pretty simple using the "sourcecode" custom tag.

The equivalent of this is SyntaxHighlighter. View this post for a description as to how to add code snippets for blogger.

Widget For Tracking Blogspot Visitors

Ive been googling for some Blogger Visitor widgets and most of them seem to redirect you to specific sites for getting information after you add a bit of code in the templates. Services like comstat seem to do that.

Having used Wordpress before, I like their idea of seeing each post and how many users visited those pages from the admin pages. That's more intuitive and easy for the user. Infact, the earlier post I made about Monitoring Traffic for Blogger Hosted sites requires that you login to Google Analytics to view that.

Im thinking of writing a plugin that would gather information from Google Analytics (And they have an api) and show it as a widget in the Admin Panel. Im doing this just to learn a bit of how to write widgets for Blogger as well as make it easier for bloggers to view traffic info.

Is there something like this available already ?

Monitoring Traffic for Blogger Hosted Sites

I started using Blogger yesterday and from earlier experiences, I wanted to know how to monitor traffic for these types of hosted sites. It gives an indication as to what content is being looked upon more often (and its also a booster to post more if you have more people reading ur blog :-))

Blogger doesnt have a way to monitor traffic on its own unlike Wordpress, where the Dashboard will tell you on a post-by-post basis as to the number of people who visited that particular page. Instead we could do this through Google Analytics. Here are the steps

• Login using your Gmail account to Google Analytics 
• In the Dashboard section, create a new profile. This screen allows you to enter the domain name of the site where you want traffic monitored. Enter your blog address (xxx.blogspot.com) and give a suitable name for it
• The following page will give you a piece of javascript that you will have to copy-paste and add it to your Blogger HTML template. Within Blogger, go to your Layout page and onto the "Edit HTML" link. In the "Edit Template" textbox, go to the bottom of the page and just before the ending body tag, add this piece of javascript obtained from Google Analytics
• Thats it. Finish creating the setup on Google Analytics.
• When you visit the Dashboard for Google Analytics immediately, the "status" column will give you an indication as to whether you entered the javascript correctly or not. This doesnt happen immediately and might take upto 24 hours according to Google. In my case, it happened in about an hour or so. If the "Status" column indicates a warning symbol, then there could be something wrong and this page should say what went wrong. There is also a video available from that page that shows how to add the tracking code
• Wait for 24 hours and you should see data coming into Google Analytics.