Quotation of the Day Instructions

A small handful of people have asked me to post instructions for how I put my "Quotation of the Day" into my TypePad blog. I have deferred for a while, partly because I've been busy, and partly because when I did it in the first place, I did not document it very well, and needed to go back and figure it out before I explain it to anybody else.

So, I took the time Sunday and puzzled it out.

I also want everyone to note that I got the gist of how to do this from a post by Glenn at the Unofficial TypePad User Group. I'd wanted to do this for a while (since I saw them on MT blogs) and I used his ideas with my own simplifying spin on things.

See the following posts for background:
Glenn's Original Post
My User Group Post
My First Blog Post About QOTD

Instructions Below:

Notes: Below is the information that worked for me. I can only assume that it will do the same for you.

This requires a TypePad Pro account, as you need to create a separate quote-blog, work with Advanced Templates, create a new index page, and put information into your Main Index Template and Styles.css files. If you don't know to do these things, you'll need to do some background reading. If you are not comfortable with this, it might be a bit of effort to work it out.

If you do use this, please let me know, as I'd like to see how you implement it. Also, I'd like to ask that you pass this info on, in the open source spirit, to anyone else who wants to use it. If you upgrade/modify the process or output, let know as well, maybe I can make mine look better to. Thanks, -doc

1. Create a new blog for your quotes. Each quote is a separate daily entry. I take the easy way out by putting some of the formatting in each post. Example in the "Post Introduction" box

<h3><b>today's quotation </b></h3>11/22/03<br />
<h4>"A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom
after the seventh day of creation."</h4> -Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

Send me your favorite quotation, and I'll plug your site here!


This blog is not made public, and it is given the same Advanced Template set as the blog that you post the daily quote in.

2. In the Advanced Template set for the blog that you want the QOTD to be displayed, create a new index template (I call mine "output", with the output file named "qotd.inc").

My qotd.inc has exactly one line in it:

<MTEntries lastn="1"><$MTEntryBody$></MTEntries>

This essentially displays the entry body of the last post.

3. In the Advanced Template set for the blog that you want the QOTD to be displayed, create and add the style for the QOTD section in your styles.css stylesheet. Mine looks like this:

.qotd {
	padding: 8px 5px 8px 5px;
	background-color: #CCCCCC;
	border-top: 8px solid #669999;
        border-bottom: 8px solid #669999;
	color: #333333;
	font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, sans-serif;
	font-size: small;
        text-align: center;
	}

4. In the Main Index Template (index.html) (or one of the sidebars, if that's where you want to put it) for the blog to display QOTD, you need to put an include statement, which tells the blog to display the information gathered from somewhere else (in this case, my Quotes blog). My code looks like this:

<div class="qotd">
<!--#include virtual="../quotes/qotd.inc"-->
</div>


and is included in the "center" div id.

More notes: I generally spend about a half an hour a week selecting quotations to include, and then I future post them for each successive day.