Adding Forms in Blogger

You can create all different types of forms in blogger.

• Questionnaires
  
• Surveys
  
• Polls
  
• Link Request
  
• Suggestion Box

An example is this survey form I created to see how visitors found out about blogatech. ( even tho this is a tutorial on creating forms I would appreciate it if you took a minute and completed this survey.)

Name: * E-mail Address: * How did you find us? * Search Engine Link From Another Site Blog Directory Click Exchange Site Word of Mouth How often do you visit our site? * Daily Weekly Monthly Yearly First Visit Message: * Required Create Email Forms

Ok thanks. So there is a good example of how to use a form on your site. In the past adding a form would have required a substantial knowledge of HTML as well as a hosting service that would provide a file for your forms to be sent to.

Mycontactform.com is a site that lets you create a custom form, without any knowledge of HTML. You are walked through the building process by an online wizard. When you have finished creating your form they give you the code to place in your template or post like I have done here.

When a visitor submits a form, you receive the information they provided by e-mail, to whatever address you have specified during your form creation. It will even send a confirmation e-mail to the visitor, thanking them for there participation, if you desire. You have the option of redirecting the visitor back to your site when they have completed the form.

Mycontactform's basic service is free and allows you 20 form submissions a month, with unlimited form types. They offer a paid premium service that will give you unlimited submission and added features but even the free service gives you the features i've discussed. I really like what they have done and give them a five star***** rating.

Note: I did experience slight difficulties when I pasted the code to this post. I had a large space between the header at the top of the page and the beginning of the form. This is not a problem with the code mycontactpage provides but of how Blogger handles it. Blogger merely adds page returns whenever a line break occurs, as it should. I have found this problem any time I have tried to add a HTML table to a Blogger post, such as the above form.

To correct the problem you have to eliminate any line breaks within the code. After you have pasted the code to your post, look for any lines that begin with the symbol <. Place your cursor in front of that symbol and hit the backspace key to eliminate that line break. Do this for every instance that you see in the code that mycontactform.com has provided. Here is an example of what I mean. In the following code, the line you see in red needs to be backspaced to the previous line so that it is not a broken line. name="formid" type="hidden" id="formid" value="58111">input name="subject" type="hidden" id="subject" value="Site Survey"> <table width="350" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"

This is how the snippet of code should look after the line break has been eliminated:

name="formid" type="hidden" id="formid" value="58111">input name="subject" type="hidden" id="subject" value="Site Survey"><table width="350" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"

Technorati Tags: forms, blogger, survey

Slide Show

A slide show is a great way to share a collection of photos or graphics on your blog. The above slide show displays graphics I created for Poker Chaos, another blog of mine.

Slide.com gives you an easy way to upload and arrange your photos directly from your computer or the web, and its free. They also have some cool options for your slide presentation:

• Sliding
  
• Fading
  
• Pushing
  
• Spinna
  
• 007
  
• Shatter

A slide show could also be used to create a custom header for your blog by incorporating photos with a graphic of your blog name. Instructions for doing this in Blogger are included at slide.com. After you have created your slide show, the site gives you the code you need to insert the show into your template or post. Be aware that if you want your show to be in a post, or the sidebar, your going to have to change the height and width numbers in the code to a size that will fit.

For example the slide show at the top was originally 800x250 pixels. After inserting the code into this post I just changed the size attributes of width to 400 and height to 125, or half size. If I had not done this the image would have overlaped into the sidebar and made a mess. I also found that when I tried to save this post, Blogger popped up and told me there was a open HTML tag . In this case all I had to do was add the closing tag </embed> at the end of the code provide by slide.com and the problem was corrected.

Others sites with slide show software:

• Flickr
  
• Slideroll
  

Free Content

The key to a successful blog is offering up good content. That can be a challenging task when your blog is new. It would be nice to have a staff of writers at your disposal to fill your blog with interesting reading, but most of us have to depend on ourselves to do this. There is however help available in this area. There are plenty of sources of what I call "free content"

You may have noticed the article of the day in Blogatech's sidebar. This is an example of free content available from The Free Dictionary. They will provide you with javascript code, you place this in your template and it generates a container of information that is updated daily. There are several topic you can choose from:

• Word of the Day
  
• This day in history
  
• Today's birthdays
  
• In the News
  
• Quotation of the Day
  
• Match Up
  
• Hangman

All of these can be formated to better fit in with your blogs layout and color scheme.
If your have a kids oriented site, surfnetkids has free content also:

• Daily educational quotations
  
• Daily Factoid
  
• Daily Chuckle
  
• Coloring page of the day
  
• Surfing the calendar

Another example of free content would be the scrolling news feed you see in blogatech's right sidebar. (see adding a news scroll to your blog)


Technorati Tags: free content, the free dictionary, surfnetkids