The Real Blogger Status

One of the most versatile ways to improve your blog is by adding CSS rules. CSS stands for " Cascading Style Sheet ". The term "style sheet" refers to the template sections which contain style rules, which affect the appearance of the blog. The term "cascading" refers to how you manage the rules. With CSS, you have no need to edit existing style rules, to make a change. If you define your rules properly, you make higher level rules specific enough so they cascade over lower level rules .

Some blog owners, who publish their blogs using a dynamic template, prefer the "Magazine" view. A few owners observe that there's a problem with the "Read More" function, in the "Magazine" post summary display. How do I let my readers know that there's more to read? There's no caption to indicate "Read more ..."! This is an odd omission, too. With Dynamic Templates involving 7 different views, though, it's not difficult to imagine 1 or 2 details dropping through the cracks - and we are here.

An occasional blog owner reports frustration with various "Advanced" Template Designer wizards, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue . I have entered my new colour palette under "template>advanced>" - and the colours will not show up on the blog. I even checked that the colour values were right under "Edit HTML". This blog owner wants different background colours, than are provided as defaults - and does not understand why the wizards, that advise Template applied. simply don't work.

Not every blog owner, who likes the dynamic templates, likes the docked sidebar - which pops out, only with the cursor properly positioned. How do I get the sidebar to remain visible? Nobody knows where it is, with it hidden! This blog owner is ignoring the need to use all horizontal screen space, effectively, when viewing the blog in some dynamic views. However, if you really want the sidebar to always be visible, it's easy enough to make it do that.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets - and the new Designer Templates use CSS to full advantage. The new Layout templates, with the GUI "Fonts and Colors" and "Page Elements" wizards eliminated the need to edit template HTML to change fonts or colors of many template objects, or to add or move objects around the screen. The Template Designer goes even further, in GUI wizardry.

Background images make the blog so much more colourful than plain old solid colour backgrounds. A background image Is not clickable. Can be seen where no foreground content is present. Look at using a background image under the text title, for instance. Note that this is the opposite from replacing the text in the title with a picture . If you put a picture in the title, no background will be visible, unless you intentionally make the picture too small for the title space, or use a transparent .gif file for an image.