Man, I love Blogger. For those who don't know, they are the outfit that make it easy for me to keep this website and post entries. It is the free platform that almost everyone I know uses to publish their blog. I see all sort of cool things that friends are doing with their blogs and not being an HTML programmer, I am not sure how to do these same things on my site, but I am willing to learn. I suspect most of these easy and I could go research the source code of other people's sites, but if someone could show me quickly, I'd be forever grateful.
If you wouldn't mind, could some of my friends or family respond with instructions on how to do the following:
- Include an active URL link within a blog post
- Include an active MailTo email address link within a blog post
- Include an active URL link within a blog comment (may be the same as above)
- Include a downloadable document attachment within a blog post (ie, a sound file, a Word document, a PDF, etc)
- To edit the template design to include a custom title header (for instance, something with a stylized picture of our family in the header)
- To include a little preview of some photos from our Flickr album in the sidebar
- To change the template design to put the "About Me" profile box at the bottom of the page, rather than at the top.
- Any chance that I could remove the Blogger branding/links/etc from this site? If not, do people have recommendations of a non-branded Blog solution that is as easy to use and publish as Blogger?
Thanks, Friends!
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7 comments:
Thanks, my friend. I have actually decided to create my own little reference site at Blogger Assist to post instructions for the things I have learned. I appreciate your help and expertise. Feel free to point me to code on someone else's blog and I'll write up instructions as a reminder for me and others to follow.
I like your new blog. I think you have a great voice for passing along this knowledge that I sometimes make too technical.
I'm not sure If I should post here or there? I'll give you what blogger tidbits I've discovered and try to help you out with anything I can.
Here is what I use to get rid of the Blogger banner:
Step 1.
Put this at the end of, but still inside the last <style></style> tag that you find in your template.
#b-navbar { height:0px; visibility:hidden; display:none }
Step 2.
Find the occurrence of your header div, it will be right after the content div and look like this:
<div id="header">
edit it to include a style attribute that has the margin-top:5 style, it should look like this when you are finished:
<div id="header" style="margin-top:5px">
Bear in mind that this is a *big* hack and should be used at your own risk and with caution.
<dropping a bomb and running away>Allan, are you still reccomending that EE tool when it has busted comments?</dropping a bomb and running away>
And Macs are not the only platform that has cool tools for blog editing.
Point taken, Al. I just miss having a place to comment on your stuff. Get that thing fixed already. Then I can drop bombs on your site :)
Jennifer, (I'm assuming this is Jennifer and not Tony, right?)
Let me know if I was a little too vague in my last set of tips. I hadn't digested all of your questions and just jumped on the first one that looked interesting. After seeing your question about moving stuff around in your template I realize that I may have assumed you were comfortable with more than you are. If that's the case, just let me know and I'll break it down for you. Otherwise I'll assume you are cool and drop some more tips.
Moving the "about me" section is a pretty easy fix. First, locate it in the template. It will be surrounded by these comment tags:
<!-- Begin #profile-container -->
<!-- End #profile -->
Grab that whole chunk, including the comment tags, and move it down the template and put it after the 3 closing divs and comment that look like this:
</div></div></div>
<!-- End .box -->
That should move your green profile box and put it beneath the blue Links/Archive box. Give it a try and let me know how it goes.
For extra credit you can remove the I Power Blogger stuff that is in the <p id="powered-by"> </p> tags.
What Al was trying to show in his comment about links is tricky. You want to display HTML code, but every time you do it gets rendered as the tags you are trying to show, kind of a catch-22.
Your solution in the blogger-assist blog with the images is very elegant.
However, if you ever want a quick and dirty technique and one that will even work in a comment, you can use the ampersand codes.
Typing ampersandlt; (that's & followed by the letters lt and a semi-colon), will yield a less than symbol that won't be swallowed up. If you use ampersandgt; you get a greater than. (I have to spell out the word ampersand in this discussion, else it would just show you the symbol.)
Now you can do this:
<a href="http:somesite.com">Your Link Text Here</a>
Thanks so much, guys. I'll have fun playing around with these suggestions and following your links.
Don't worry about where you post, Jason. I'll transfer/translate my favorite things out to the BlogAssist site (www.blogassist.blogspot.com).
Yes, this is Jennifer. Tony disavows any knowledge of our blog (just like I pretend to not know how to work the lawn mower).
Here is another...Any way to insert a Javascript code bit into a Blog Post or the template? For a potentially cheesy, but illustrative example of the kind of thing I am talking about see this Quote of the Day code.
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