(Thanks to SEW for reminding me that I meant to write about this.)
Google recently introduced another nice piece of flair: a “Blog Bar” that lets you pick keywords, and then rotates through relevant posts by fading new links in and out. You can see it in action over on this post by Mark Lucovsky. You can also get a News bar, which is kind of fun too.
It’s really easy to get your own:
Step 1. Go to http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/wizards.html and click the “Blog Bar Wizard”.
Step 2. Choose the topics and formatting you want. When you click on “Generate code”, you’ll get some HTML that you can copy/paste onto your site. I wanted to keep my HTML clean, so I saved it as a separate file, like this file.
Step 3. If you saved the HTML off in a separate file, edit your website template and add this code wherever you want your blog bar to appear:

(Change the path to point to your file, of course.) That’s pretty much it. I’m going to put a blog bar (or maybe a news bar) on my individual posts above the comments for a little while to see how it looks. If you are looking for a way to spruce up a blog without much work, the blog and news bars are pretty easy.


Google Flair: Google Blog Bar - Read More...