Blogger template grumblings

There are some times when I really miss running my own Wordpress installation, and one of those was today when I was hoping to get rid of the “date line” above groups of posts on this very website. Blogger’s template language is quite powerful, providing the data is in the format you desire, and if it is not then there’s no fixing it without some hideous Javascript-powered client-side data munging.

Take for instance time stamps and date stamps on entries - you are given data:post.timestamp, which contains the current time for each post, and data:post.dateHeader, which only exists if the entry is the first post on that particular date. Oh, and by first, they actually mean last - the first showing on the page, which is another annoyance in and of itself - there is no way to have posts in proper chronological order, you are only stuck with reverse chronological order, which while I am used to that for “blog” blogs, for various “journey” blogs it would be really nice to be able to read them in proper chronological order.

Anyway, there’s apparently an undocumented element called data:post.timestampISO8601, which is used in many of the default templates as the “title” text for the time stamp link. This gives me what I want - a date stamp and time stamp for every post, but I have absolutely no ability to format it the way I want except client side which I may resort to if I can be bothered.

I don’t understand this idea - providing the data solely as it exists, without any ability for a user to modify it, and then obviously not including at least one data point that’s not in the “master list“ of all data tags, making me wonder if there are other tags that will do what I want that aren’t documented… but should I bother looking?

Red Lion VIC 3371, Australia

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Red Lion VIC 3371, Australia

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