Blog Tips – LinkWithin Customization

When designing your Blog sites, we usually make use any sorts of widgets to give features and content to our Blog. One of the handy widget that you can use is one that I recently found out called LinkWithin.

LinkWithin is a free widget for blog that can display related stories below every post. This makes a chance for readers to read further in your blog by reading other related post shown making chances of more page views for your site. It will also give convenience for readers to easily see other contents of your blog. I first seen this widget from one of the usual blogs I’m visiting like Joystiko and became interested how it works until I stumble upon its official webpage and get one myself. It’s really a neat widget to use and surely gives a plus in your blog site.

Doesn't look nice if you're

 summarizing post in the main page

However the said widget also has a disadvantage. It depends actually whether it matters to you or not. Generally, you can’t totally control LinkWithin on its manner of positioning. It will always position itself in the bottom of every post and even in your main page. This case is not really a big deal especially if your blog contents are long and always in full view in the main page. But for cases like me, in my blog, I always have my own standard way of summarizing my post especially if they got that long. If I use LinkWithin in that way, it’s not really look good. It actually looks redundant in that way.

Personally, LinkWithin fit best to display only within the very post and not in the main page but the widget doesn’t have option for that. That’s where things will be technical. >=) You have to customize your blog by editing the very HTML template to change the behavior of the widget. 

NOTE: LinkWithin usually installs in the blog as a Page Element. It will display in both Main page and Post page of your blog. But if you're going to follow this tip, you don't need to put the LinkWithin as a Page Element. Just get the very code of that and incorporate it with this. 

We’ll going to use this particular code

<b:if cond==’data:blog.pageType == “item”’>

*put the LinkWithin code here!

</b:if>

I’m not yet that much familiar with codes of Blogger but I very much can follow this since I basically understand programming. The code interprets as: if the blog’s page is an “item” (the “item” is refer to the post page) it will then executes whatever is in the condition inside. So basically, the code of the LinkWithin will be put inside this conditional statement. That will make the LinkWithin only to display within the very post page. Now, the only thing to do is to put the code in your blog’s template.

Now go to your Blogger account, go to your blog site’s Design tab then to Edit HTML. Find the End Body Tag (</body>) in the template. It is usually at the bottom of your template. You can just use the Find command (CTRL + F) of your browser to find it. Once you find it, insert the code before the End Body Tag.

So it will be something like this:

<b:if cond==’data:blog.pageType == “item”’>

*LinkWithin code is here

</b:if>

</body>

Once it’s done save your template and check your blog page. The LinkWithin will now only displays within the post page and not the main page.

LinkWithin doesn't show in the

 main page

LinkWithin is in the post page.

 Now that's better, I guess

So that’s about my tips on customizing the LinkWithin widget. Hope that helps a bit.

To have a basic knowledge on how to customize your Blogger, follow this link for several topics about it.

To have LinkWithin in your blog site, go to their webpage and follow the instructions on how to get the code.

All thanks to Today’s Playlist blog run by a guy named murk_core for the idea. Please visit his blog site; it has lots of cool tips about technical stuffs. 

Until then!

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