Bear with me. It's not often I get to brag about stuff I've designed. I say "designed" because I figured it out, then got some AI help to fix the most esoteric (to me at any rate) problems that came up.
The widget at the foot of these articles.
You know it, this one:
Google didn't just give me a widget like that. I think maybe they just aren't the "Do No Evil" company they started out as ... 😸 But (and this is part of the reason why I pay so many online fees) I have a virtual server at Digital Pacific. I host one blog on there because I sometimes worry that Google will just close Blogger/Blogspot down as it has so many other of its properties.
First - Digital Pacific aren't giving me anything for this testimonial. I started with them almost twenty years ago, to host a small static website. Yes, they've been around for a long time. I also put several people onto one of their servers and set them up with websites. And when my old site wasn't needed any more, I closed it down and didn't use DP for a year or two, but then another use case came along, and I signed on again. And then again with the current site, O Hai Corona!
I've never had a problem that either I couldn't solve fairly easily or one that DP considered too trivial to give me their full support.
So Anyway.
As the site has a perfectly good webserver, I can use it to serve out content - and chunks of web code. That whole image above is a mini web page that (thanks to ChatGPT3.5 looking up the variables for me) grabs the URL of the blog post and puts it into the buttons so that you can share/copy/bookmark, it contains a whole little Universe of code and stuff, and that you can use to do whatever with.
To bung it into a blog article here, I have a little HTML template I just copy over an existing page, and that creates that little graphic up at the top of the page, and adds the code to display the Bitty Little Box down at the bottom of the page.
What's the beauty of that?
I can add the piece of HTML to display the BLB on the bottom of any post or web page and it'll consistently display the same way. And if something stops working or I want to add a new feature, I do it once in my DP server and it reflects in ALL the pages the code is in. So even old posts that had it in, can now see my "Contact Details" link I added at the bottom. If I use a different service to display the links, I only have to change it once on the DP server, and not have to worry about editing 900+ instances manually.
And it only took me a few weeks of refining and experimenting for n hour here and there to get it up and runnimg.
One other feature I like about it is that if I have an older post (which may not have had a BLB in the past) I can edit and update it with just that one piece of HTML and bongo - it now has the BLB and all that it contains.
Short post, I know, but now the BLB contains a contact details link so if you're interested you can contact me.
Enjoy!
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