In pathing up my blog template to not crash down so badly when Del.icio.us is offline, I also found the bug that made my backlinks disappear; somehow I had dropped a bit of initialization code that made my overly complex Blogger backlink injection work in the first place. I ought to rewrite that from scratch using document.write like Jasper does; it would take out the need for my more bloated approach. Either way, backlinks here now work again, in Firefox. Not in IE nor Opera, though, further suggesting I'd be better off with Jasper's more robust approach.
While at it, I added a feature to tell my own back links apart from back links from other people, though. Maybe I ought to separate them into sections too, I'm not sure yet. I also ought to write an article on how to do such things, eventually, but in the meantime I warmly recommend Jasper's article above. It is easily extended by those of you familiar with programming in general, or ecmascript/javascript in particular.
Good to see my ClustrMaps hack working neatly in the latest versions of IE, Firefox and Opera alike; I had not tested that myself until today. I think I will set myself up with a more formal test bed of browsers (also including Firefox 1.0.7 and 1.0.6, either of which was reported not to get it quite right) if (or should I perhaps say when) I start doing freelance / consultancy work on web related development. Until then, quality control will remain loosely at today's level of laxity, user feedback driven.
My post navigation calendar approach of using the Blogger tags and daily archival to enumerate all post dates, and my Del.icio.us tags for providing them with titles on mouseover seems to be worth keeping and pursuing, as it degrades nicely when the latter is not available. Had I done as I initially planned on, and relied solely on Del.icio.us for it (less and cleaner code), that navigation option would have been effectively severed now.
I'll probably end up writing next post in my article series on setting up Blogger blogs with calendar navigation using this two tier approach, too, the latter feature being an optional add-on to those who take the time and trouble to tag all their posts at Del.icio.us, for that feature, for the possible topic navigation system that opens up for or just for driving relevant traffic to your blog.
