Monday, July 17, 2006

This is the Blog that Morris Built (with a whole lota help)

As part of my experiment, I have decided to build onto my blog using tips/ help/ info and resources from only other bloggers and blogs. Hopefully this will stand as proof to the grand amount of information there is out there amongst the blogger community.

I am going to keep adding to this thread, and link to it in the sidebar, as I improve the blog bit by bit. I will also give credit to those who have contributed in some way, i.e. the bloggers, here in this thread. Feel free to use any of the ideas expressed here in your own blogs, and drop me a comment if you have any questions. Also please visit the blogs of my contributers if you have the time.

The way this thread works is that I will post a question about how to do something in particular, and I invite people to help out if the can by leaving a comment in the comments section. However, I welcome any ideas people might have for additions to the blog. Enjoy!

Question 1:
You may notice at the bottom of the sidebar I have added a section called 'Blogger Tools,' and under that is a sub heading called 'Blogger directories.' I am wondering how I can make the sub heading different from the main heading, ie. make in smaller or not as bold or a different colour etc. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer:
It's all about moving the "ul" tag.
Set-up should look like this:

MainOrArchivePage
H2...your title...end h2
your subtitle (I added two br tags for spacing)
ul tagli tag with your links
end ul
end MainOrArchivePage

If in doubt, you can view the source code on mine (or lisa's) blog.
To view the source code of any website got to the browser menu bar > View > Source. It will come up in a seperate window and show you the html code for the whole website.

Thanks to Lisa Hutch, for supplying the answer to the problem, you can visit her blog 'Lisa Hutch - The TRIALS (heh heh), and adventures of a new Law Student.' by clicking on the link in the sidebar.

Question 2:
Following on with the blogger tools section of my sidebar, you can see that I've started listing some blog directories, however they are appearing next to each other instead of on a seperate line. How can I get them on a seperate line?

Answer:
To separate each section I recomend you to insert in the html code a label (replace the brackets with <> to make is work):

(br)

This is to get a new parragraph.
Then use the - or the _ many times like:_______________

Thanks to svodoba for supplying the answer, you can visit svodoba's blog by clicking the link in the sidebar, under 'Personal Blogs.'

Question 3: How can I get a little bullet next to my blog directory links like on all the other links in the sidebar?

I worked this one out for myself by playing around with the html template. To add the bullets, simply put the following tag in the html code (exchange the brackets for <> to make it work):

(li) and (/li)

The one without the slash '/' goes at the beggining of the link and the one with the slash goes at the end (in the html code).

Question 4: I've recently launched my Blog of the Month and Week section which is at the top of my sidebar, however it looks rather plain at the moment. I would like some suggestions on how to spruce it up, such as changing text colour or putting it in a seperate box etc. and an explanation of how to do it. The best suggestion will win that blogger BLOG OF THE WEEK for next week. Thanks.

This is the suggestion that Svodoba had, which also won him blog of the week for this week. You can check out his blog, Svodoba here.

I've got an idea to do it really fantastic.You can us a program like Photoshop. Create a banner (calcule the size on the column. The save it as a jpg file.Upload it to http://imageshack.us/ for instance (there are a lot of host sites). The get de html code. Put it on the rigth place int your code (you can try different places or sizes). Add th link, you know with htnl tags aref.Finally you will have a very different link and it will be emphasized. And, th best: it is very easy and it will give you a lot of choices related to the design.

Question 5: As you can see, I've decided to put the blog of the week/ month awards in a seperate column at the top of the sidebar. I've actually cheated a little bit by using the profile box to do it. This might be the reason for the problem I'm having. I'm getting the little curved corners in the middle of the left and right edge of the box, can anyone help?

6 Comments:

At 9:46 PM, Blogger Lisa Hutch said...

It's all about moving the "ul" tag.

Set-up should look like this:

MainOrArchivePage
H2...your title...end h2
your subtitle (I added two br tags for spacing)
ul tag
li tag with your links
end ul
end MainOrArchivePage

The subheading took me a second ... to play around with it - man are my programming skills RUSTY!

If in doubt - View the Source code on my blog - you'll see it!

 
At 12:39 AM, Blogger svodoba said...

To separate each section I recomend you to insert in the html code a label (i will put it separated but it works together):
< br >
This is to get a new parragraph. Then use the - or the _ many times like:
_______________

and then the label again. It is very rude way to do it, if anyone has another better it will be welcome!

 
At 3:36 AM, Blogger svodoba said...

Good idea, yo can check our codes to see how many different ways there are to do it.

 
At 5:55 AM, Blogger svodoba said...

I've got an idea to do it really fantastic.

You can us a program like Photoshop. Create a banner (calcule the size on the column. The save it as a jpg file.

Upload it to http://imageshack.us/ for instance (there are a lot of host sites). The get de html code. Put it on the rigth place int your code (you can try different places or sizes). Add th link, you know with htnl tags aref.

Finally you will have a very different link and it will be emphasized. And, th best: it is very easy and it will give you a lot of choices related to the design.

 
At 5:57 AM, Blogger svodoba said...

Sorry for the grammal and syntax errors, but I've written it very quickly and English is not my mature languaje.

 
At 6:57 PM, Blogger Carola said...

For the boxes with the curved edges...

The top box has the top two corners curved and the bottom two are square, WHEREAS the bottom box has all four corners curved...

Perhaps is there a way you can copy the html of the second box and replace the first one with it and then add the nessecary information so that theyre not the same box... well this would be my suggestion for a starter anyway...

If it doesnt work, i'll think up more brain power :)

 

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