Google Blogger has added new feature, an easy way to show posts summaries on your blog index page! But if you still don't see the "read more" link like I did! Google knows why, But I had to dig into it a little bit more..

After Google Blogger 10th anniversary.. Google Blogger promises that many of our dreams as Bloggers will come true so soon.. by dreams I mean "Product Ideas for Blogger" which Google has launched on last April to collect users votes & feature requests on blogger.

Few months ago I posted a Javascript class on how to Implement a paging listbox using jQuery. which has drawn a lot of traffic and few questions lately so I thought it would be more convenient to rewrite the code as jQuery plugin and make few enhancements plus providing a complete sample code in VB.Net and C#.

Enhancements:

1. Easier usage, You only need to insert a div with the class "paging-listbox" and settings inside "options" attribute to automatically have the paging listbox loaded inside that div. still you can load the listbox with regular Javascript call.
2. Added support for right-to-left layout.
3. You can pass additional parameters to source page via AJAX. for example a category ID that user selects from another form field and should be used to query records by on the source page.
4. Few visual enhancements.

Have you spent much time adding posts thumbnails using custom fields.. or -like me- spent much time trying many plugins that either not working well or very limited.

I was always not convinced with "Read more" built-in option in WordPress. As it is very unlikely to use the starting portion of your post as a teaser or summary.

My first jQuery Plugin.. A 4KB jQuery plugin instead of a 118KB Google Blog Bar!!

I have shown before how to use Google Blog Bar as related posts widget, But when I actually tried to use it on my site, I didn't like all these JavaScript/CSS files that I've to include.
And since I already use jQuery -and who doesn't- I decided to rebuild the Blog Bar from scratch.

The Google AJAX Search API provides simple web objects that perform inline searches over a number of Google services (Web Search, Local Search, Video Search, Blog Search, News Search, Book Search, Image Search, and Patent Search).

It is an old news that: The API exposes a raw RESTful interface that returns JSON encoded results so it would be easily processed by most languages and runtimes.