phil ringnalda

While right-click BlogThis is still a bit of a sore spot for me, a question in the BlogThis Howto forum (for which the questioner owes me $10) made me realize that there is one advantage to hosting the script locally: you can have as many different custom BlogThis context menus as you like. I use BlogThis in two ways: sometimes I just want to link to the site, and so all I want is the default link with the page title as text, but when I want to blog some text from the page, I want


<a href="http://www.example.com">example</a> :

<blockquote><i>The text that I am quoting from the page</i></blockquote>


but I’m far too lazy to stick the blockquotes in every time. However, if you aren’t afraid of registry editing (which you should be), it’s not hard to create your own custom BlogThis:

• Backup your registry, or it’s your own damn fault when you break your computer.
• Make a copy of your local blogthis.pyra file and name it blogquote.pyra
• Open blogquote.pyra in a text editor, and change the line that starts “sel=… to:
  sel = "<blockquote><i>" + escape(doc.selection.createRange().text) + "</i></blockquote>";
• Start regedit, and search for blogthis
• Select MenuExt (the “folder” that contains the BlogThis key) and create a new key named BlogQuote!
• Double click BlogQuote!’s (Default) value, and change the value data to the location of blogquote.pyra (e.g. c:\blogthis\blogquote.pyra)
• Add a new Binary value to BlogQuote!, name it contexts, then double click it to change the value data to 31
• Close any open IE windows, and then restart IE, select some text, and try out your BlogQuote!

Now if only the popup would leave out the link if you didn’t pass it a url, so we could have the long begged for BlogNothing!