Tech Marshal

Free Embeddable Forums for Blogger & How to Embed These Forums

Its always great to have a forum on your website. Forums offer visitors to return, interact, have discussions on topics of their interest and help each other - hence a great platform for building an online community. And in return, boost the overall value of the site.

For users of blogger, there are only a couple of free options available for adding a forum to the site.

Nabble:

Nabble.com, available both in free and paid versions, offers a really simple forum with a neat layout and lots of useful option. Embedding it to your blogger/blogspot site is easy:

1. Go to Nabble.com, click 'start a new forum' and fill in the details. Verify your account.
2. Create sub-forums by going to Options > Structure > Create New Sub-Forum (Make sure you're logged in).
3. Now for embedding, head over to Options > Embedding options.

4. Copy the JavaScript code.
5. Finally, create a new page on your blog and paste the JavaScript code you copied in step 4 and paste it into the HTML editor mode there.
6. Publish your page.

That's it. You now have Nabble forum running on your blog.

Tal.ki:

Tal.ki by Lefora has been available for quite some time now. Like Nabble, it is also available as free and paid. The paid $5 version comes with no restrictions. However the free version is limited to 15 recent topics and 5 sub-forums. Tal.ki offers a seriously simple way of adding a forum to your website. Just paste the provided code to your page and suddenly the site has a fully functional forum embedded right there. You can load login with your Facebook, Google, blogger and a number of other accounts. The first person to login will become the admin.

Google Groups Forum

If you still have an active online community on Google Groups Forum, you can easily embed the forum on your blog. Simply head over to the HTML editor and add the following code:

<iframe frameborder="0" height="700" width="100%" id="forum_embed" scrolling="no" src="https://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?place=forum/NAME_OF_FORUM#!forum/NAME_OF_FORUM">

Be sure to replace the 'NAME_OF_FORUM' with your actual forum's name on both places.

About Blogger Conditional Tags and How To Use Them Properly

Conditional tags provide us better control over our templates, allowing us to specify what part of our template appears only under certain conditions.

You may wish to hide a widget or element on one page and display it on the other, need to remove the sidebar on certain pages, or even display buttons on select pages. This is exactly where conditional tags come into play. There are a number of tags available for blogger which, if applied correctly, will help you modify elements of your template.

List of conditional tags

The following are a select few conditional tags you'll require the most:

1. Homepage:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>

2. First post:
For targeting the first post on multi-post pages.

<b:if cond='data:post.isFirstPost'>

3. Specific page/URL:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "ENTER_URL_HERE"'>

4. Posts (item):

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>

5. Static pages:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "static_page"'>

6. Index pages (includes homepage, label pages and archive pages):

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>

7. Archive pages:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'>

8. Posts and static pages:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:post.url'>

9. Label-search pages:

<b:if cond='data:blog.searchLabel'>

10. 404 Error Page:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "ERROR_PAGE"'>

11. Mobile Pages:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "data:blog.isMobile"'>

How to Use conditional tags

Using conditional tags is simple. Each tag needs to be closed with a closing </b:if> tag. All you have to do is select the suitable tag and place the content between the opening and the closing tag like this:

<b:if cond='THE_CONDITION_GOES_HERE'>
...
</b:if>

For Example:
You need to display the content only on Index Pages (homepage, archives and labels page). The following tag will be applied:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
...ENTER CONTENT HERE...
</b:if>

The double equals " == " actually means TRUE. You can change the condition to FALSE, then just replace the first equal with an exclamation sign: " != ".

Reversing a Condition:

Example:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "index"'>
... THE CONTENT ...
</b:if>

In the example above, the content will show up on all pages other than "index" pages.

The ELSE Statement <b:else/>:

In case you need to display alternate content, insert a <b:else/> tag like this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
...Content 1...
<b:else/>
...Content 2...
</b:if>

In the example above "Content 1" will only appear on Index Pages (homepage, archives and labels page), and if its not an Index Page, "Content 2" will be displayed.

Combining Conditions Together:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.url != "URL_OF_POST_TO_EXEMPT"'>
...ENTER CONTENT HERE...
</b:if>
</b:if>

Finally, in the example above, the content will show up on all posts except a certain URL/Post specified.

How to Add Adsense Ads After First Post On Blogger Homepage

Displaying Adsense or other ads on blogger is as simple as adding it to WordPress or other blogging platforms. You just copy and paste the code on to the template. But adding it precisely where and how you wan't it can sometimes be tricky and may not display as desired. This is exactly where blogger conditional tags come in handy. They provide us better control over our widgets and other elements.

Among the several conditional tags available for blogger, one is specifically written to target the first post - a good position for displaying ads. And here's how you too can insert Adsense after the first post on your blogger blog:

The Steps:

1. Login to Blogger Dashboard
2. Go to Template > Edit HTML
3. Find this line of code in your template

<b:include data="post" name="post">

4. Add the following code just below the code above

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<b:if cond='data:post.isFirstPost'>
---- Replace this line with your Adsense Code -----
</b:if>
</b:if>

5. Finally grab a suitable Adsense unit, parse it and add it to the code above

That's it. You can now monitor the newly added ad unit for clicks.

Fix the "Blogger Images Not Uploading" Problem

Blogger offers a simple option for adding images to your posts. One can simply click the image icon above the post editor and choose from the various options to insert an image or upload it from the system itself. Occasionally one may experience problems with the uploading of images which may be due to one of several reasons. I too recently have had problems uploading images to this blog and got it working after deleting my cache. If you too are having this problem, here are couple of things you should try in this case:

Clear Browser's Cache:
Start by clearing your browser's cache. Many browser related problems including pages that freeze, don't finish loading, or contain old content can be fixed by clearing your cache.