Transforming Blogger's Popular Posts widget into a slideshow

Why didn't we think of this sooner?!?!?

Most blogs on +Blogger take advantage of the Popular Posts widget in their blog, and to some extent, most people wish it could look better or do more. For instance, one of our earlier scripts was creating the ability to resize the popular post thumbnails so that they could be bigger without losing quality.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to take that same, boring widget and turn it into a slideshow, using the thumbnails as a background image for the slides with the title and snippet displayed over top of the image?



Well, that's what we've done! (example)

There is no coding necessary beyond copy and pasting the code snippet available here into your template before the </head> tag in your template.

In the code we had to set a width for the element; in our case 235px. You will want to change this value everywhere it is found to be the correct size for your own layout.

All colors and other attributes are customizable using CSS.

Enjoy!