The Real Blogger Status

We see an occasional question in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue about blog links - and the captions that change colour, mysteriously. Some blog owners seem to regard the colour changes as one more Blogger pecadillo - ignoring the fact that colour changing link captions have been part of Internet design , since the early days.

Some blog owners create a post, with content that should be visible, only when required. The post contains a question - accompanied by the answer to the question. The question should be viewed, without the answer being visible, to make the reader think about the answer. This is called, by many, a "spoiler". Not everybody knows how to construct a spoiler. Some blogs use JavaScript - painful to construct, and maybe not effective for every reader. Security conscious blog readers may block scripts from Blogger blogs - and either your spoiler is visible, immediately - or never becomes visible. Neither of the latter scenarios make the post a lot of fun to read.

We're seeing a few reports of bX codes, that are not solved by simply resetting the template - and do not involve the mysterious "500 Internal Server Error" . In some cases, the blog owner may see a bX code when trying to use "Configure Blog Posts", or another Layout gadget wizard. If the blog itself can be viewed, and Template HTML Editor is usable, the bX error may come from use of a "0" Alpha color setting. Blogger Engineering is aware of the problem, and has suggested that a fix is being developed. While we await the necessary fix, we may need to work around the problem.

Some people are particular about the colors used, in their blogs. They may spend hours - or days - choosing the right shade of gray, to complement the text in the posts. Later, they look at the blog, and discover a glaring discrepancy. Why are the post titles so nasty looking? The titles clash with the posts! These owners may just be discovering the reality of Blogger blogs, and the ever changing title colors .

Some blog owners like to publish blogs that use custom colours, in the titles. Carefully coordinated colours are important, in some blogs. Both the blog title, and the individual post titles, in many blogs, are clickable link captions. The blog title links to the blog home page, and / or the post titles link to the individual post pages. Some blog owners get confused, when they try to set the colour of the titles, to a custom colour - and see link colours (which vary according to status) , instead of the selected custom colours.

There were months in 2010, when the Template Designer was a Draft Blogger feature . During 2010, we saw a few reports from bloggers who tried to use the "Fonts and Colors" wizard to make changes to a blog with a Designer template - or tried to use the Template Designer to make changes to a blog with a Layouts template. Since the CSS rules used in Designer templates are significantly different from those in Layout templates, this was a source of a few problems.

One commonly used convention, in website links, uses hyperlinks that change colour when followed. Look at the title of this post, Links In The Title Cause Titles That Change Colour . What colour is the title? Now, click on the title, and observe the colour. Next, look at the bottom of this post, and the Topics - " Fonts and Colors , Links , Settings , Settings - Formatting ". What you're seeing, in this exercise, are unvisited (called generally "links") and visited ("visited links") link captions. In this blog, normal text is black - and all links (unvisited, visited, and hovered) are red. Some templates will differ.

If I publish a blog in which I concentrate on content and information, I want to make the content and information easy (yet inviting) to read. This blog, The Real Blogger Status , is marginally easy to read - and looked boring - before I upgraded to a Designer template , which has a more complex background. Then, I added my floating background , to make the text easier to read. Recently, I redesigned this blog, and published using a new Blogger supplied Responsive template .

The GUI Fonts And Colors screen in New Blogger is pretty kewl. Want to change the typeface for the posts? Just pull down the list, and select "Text Font", then select the typeface and size. Want to change the color? Select "Text Color", then select the color from a chart of colors. For all its kewlness, though, it's limited. You can change the post title color, but you can't change the post title font. Maybe there are even more limitations that we haven't realised yet. The good news is, it's expandable - and easily so. You can add your own GUI selections, with very little work. Look at the template, and the Variable definitions at the top (OK, I snipped the list, below, a bit). /* Variable definitions ==================== <Variable name="bgcolor" description="Page Background Color" type="color" default="#fff" value="#ffffff"> ... <Variable name="pagetitlefont" des...