Why & How: Recent Posts with Thumbnails for Blogger

Gadget SettingsThis is an updated version of my Recent Posts Gadget.As the name suggests, this Gadget will help you to display the most Recent Posts on your Blog’s Sidebar. The Gadget has an options panel and can be configured to meet your needs. The Gadget inherits styles from your Blog. But you can override the colors if you want(this was done to support third party templates which doesn’t have the skin variables properly defined).

Some Previews of the Gadget with different configurations

About the Various Options

Pull Posts From – By default, the recent posts will be fetched from the blog to which you have added the gadget. If you want to fetch the posts from another Blogger Blog, then you can change this option
External Blogger URL – You need to fill out this field only if you are trying to pull posts from another blogger blog.
Maximum Length of Post Title – Your post titles can be too long. In that case you can limit the title to x number of characters using this parameter.
Snippet Style – You can display the snippet with Post Summary, Post Thumbnail , or both or none.
Snippet Thumbnail – When you upload photos from your PC to blogger using the Blogger Post Editor, Blogger generates a Media Thumbnail of size 72 X 72 px. If you add external images to your blog posts, then Media Thumbnails will be generated. If media thumbnails are not present, the post will be scanned for images or YouTube videos. You can specify which images to use by using this option. The No Image Thumb is a default image which will be used if post has no images or videos(you can turn this off) .
Note:- If you want to grab the images or YouTube thumbnails, then you should have “Site Feeds” set to Full. If you opt for the Media Thumbnail only, then the short feed will be used by default.
Thumbnail Dimensions – Size of the Thumbnail in pixels. The gadget doesn’t generate any Thumbnail. It just uses the media thumbnail,YouTube thumbnail , or any image in the post and scales it to the specified dimensions
Summary Length - If you have opted to display the post Summary, then you can control the length of the summary(in characters)
Post Meta Style – You can display the Post Date, Comment Count and a Read More Link.You can choose any combination of these three.
Font and Font Size– By Default, the container’s font and Font Size is inherited into the Gadget. But if you are using a 3rd party template, then these might not be properly inherited. In that case you can use this Option to over ride these parameters.
Extra Styling – Allows you to specify the position of the Thumbnail, and whether to underline the links or not.
Border Color – If your specify a border color, and if the posts need separation, then a dotted border will be applied between the posts. If you don’t specify a color or if you specify an invalid color, then the border wont be drawn. You can use Hex Color Codes(eg: #000000) or or normal colors (eg : red )
Link Color and Text Color – By default, the link and text colors will be inherited from the blog. But if you want to override this, then you can specify the color in any of the two formats.
Read More Text – This field was intentionally added to help blogs which are not written in English. Initially i used “More »” as the Read more text without taking any user Input. Seeing this on a non- English Blog is a little awkward. So i added this new field :)

Note : - Those who are using the older version of this gadget, please remove it and add the new one.