The Real Blogger Status

The Theme Designer rocks. There are GUI adjustment / selection wizards, for dozens of theme objects, in any given blog. You can make font and color changes, using various GUI wizards - and see results, in real time. And the wizards are logically grouped, by function. If you know what objects you need to change, you can tweak your blog theme, without worrying about CSS coding. But depending upon the browser zoom level, some of the available wizards may not be immediately visible, on some "Advanced" submenus.

Many blog owners have been asking for a selection of less boring fonts for their blogs. It would be so nice to have more default font styles. I know that you can edit them in your HTML, but that is a tedious template editing process. Blogger has been listening, and recently, Blogger responded . The Web has traditionally been pretty limited when it comes to font selection, especially for non-Latin alphabets such as Cyrillic and Greek. But great strides have been made in this arena by our friends on the Google Web Fonts team, and finally there are more choices out there than just Arial and Times New Roman. You'll find an improvement to the typical Font list, in the Template Designer Advanced wizard - accessed using the "Customize" button, on the "Template" dashboard page . Boring! Better! If you like, you can even add wizards to the Template Designer - and improve colors, fonts, and other settings even more.

One of the kewler features of the Blogger templates is the GUI wizards that let you change settings, like fonts and colors for the various text elements in the template. Of course Blogger programmers have one idea what settings are useful - and we may have other ideas. When the Layout templates were provided in 2007, it didn't take too long to discover the fonts and colors possibilities there, and then to discover the limitations. So I found how we could enhance the GUI Fonts And Colors menus. And this evening, I decided to see how a Designer template could be enhanced, similarly.

One of the neatest ways to theme decorate a website is by adding a relevant font. There are music fonts, which look good on musical websites. And classical fonts which look good on classical and literary websites. And everybody knows "technological / computer style" fonts, which can decorate computer / Internet relevant websites. You can change the font for your blog, using the Template Designer "Advanced" submenu , which will let you choose from a dozen or so commonly installed fonts. Special fonts work best for specialised websites, where the majority of the readers are expected to have installed the fonts in question on their computers. Fonts are essentially code, which transforms numbers and letters coded in ASCII, in your blog, into pixels on the computer screens used by your readers. There are thousands of different fonts, available all over the Internet - and not one computer will have all fonts installed.

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 .

Several bloggers are reporting inability to change the blog template, using the GUI Fonts and Colors, and Page Elements, wizards. The screen space which should contain the visual information - a view of the main page (for Fonts and Colors), or a block view of the gadgets (for Page Elements) - is replaced by a copy of the Blogger sign in screen. The frame below then contains the Blogger Sign in page: To access your blog, sign in with your Google Account and then the actual sign in fields/sign in button Alternately, the screen contents are normal, but no controls work, or page elements can't be moved around. When I go to my Add and Arrange Page Elements page all I see is a google sign in page. This is when I am using IE. When I use Firefox I can see the Layout screen with all of the information but I can't make any editing changes. If you are one of the victims of this mystery, help diagnose the scope of the problem. From the dashboard entry for your blog, you have 4 links wh...

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...