Neo for everyone!

Today, I announce my Neo template as a free template for anybody to use. I think it's time to unleash the power of feeds and make blogs faster. Many who liked Neo but couldn't afford it before are now welcome to try it. Do you want to check out how your blog posts will show up with Neo before actually using it? If you have full feeds enabled in your blog, then you can. Just goto Neo demo blog and submit your blog's URL. You will see how Neo works with your posts.

If your blog is new and doesn't have many widgets, then you can download the Neo template (right-click, save as a file) and browse+upload to your blog in Template/Edit HTML tab. You can then recreate your widgets again with Neo. If your blog has many widgets and you want to move them as it is to Neo, just wait for my next post for the instructions.

Let the revolution begin :)

[Later, I wrote this post explaining how to transition to Neo]

Neo needs a fix

This post is for all those using Neo. Looks like Blogger has changed their JSON feed content slightly in their latest code drop. They seem to have killed index.html (as Steven wanted). This will cause Neo to misbehave. It will show the title Posts labelled "" instead of Recent Posts in the second column. Here's how you can fix this in your template. Find this section of code

if (label == "index.html") {
 labeltitle.innerHTML = '<center><h2>Recent Posts</h2></center><hr/>';
} else {
 labeltitle.innerHTML = '<h2>Posts labelled "' + label + '"</h2>';

and change the first line in red to this instead.

if (label == "") {

If this doesn't fix the problem, let me know.

Hacks broken; Blogger working on a fix

Yesterday, Phydeaux3 found that Blogger feeds are broken. Feeds are the bread and butter of most of our hacks and so you will see that hacks like Recent Posts/comments and Neo will be broken. Pete, the nicest Blogger developer, has commented in Phydeaux3's blog that yesterday's build broke something. He has also promised to work on it today. So, let's all cross our fingers and wait....

And yes, I am still alive :) Here's something that I am working on. About 4 months after it was created, Neo will be available free of cost soon. Like all those software products that are made free of cost a while after their release, I have decided to make Neo priceless now! (but with limited support for installation, moving widgets etc).

UPDATE 4/26/07: Blogger seems to have fixed this problem within a day. All glories to Pete who reads hacker blogs.