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.

I published this blog to the "Notable" theme of the "Responsive" class templates, in February 2018. I never spend a lot of time tweaking and making blog formatting changes - there are so many other Blogger issues to write about. But that ugly big black box, at the top of each post page, was in my list of improvements needed. And last week, I found the motivation, and instructions, to improve the look of this blog.

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.

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.

Occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , we see a report of template inconsistency, in the Tabs Menu. Most of the tabs links work fine - the pages pop right up. The two tabs on the far right, you can't click them and they don't act as links. When we check the published blog code , the pages gadget looks normal - the two tabs reported just, mysteriously, refuse to operate.

Not everybody likes to be known, everywhere. Some folks prefer to publish a blog, without their name appearing. Anonymity is a goal, for many blog owners. Blogs using both Dynamic and non Dynamic (Layout, Designer) templates can be made anonymous - but different tasks are involved. Fortunately, both tasks are simple.

One of the neatest magic tricks is to make something disappear, with just a flick of the wrist (whether or not holding a "magic" wand). We see occasional requests to make template components disappear. Many times, we end up recommending editing the blog template . Sometimes, unwanted components are part of the post template - and we have to explain why editing the post template is not a good idea . Some template components, when properly identified, can be made to disappear with the proper CSS rule. CSS rules can be added, using the Template Designer - and do not require editing the template. Even better news, CSS rules added using "Add CSS" are persistent. Even changing the blog template - or resetting the post template - does not erase CSS rules, added using the Template Designer.

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.

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.

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...