When you started your Blogger site, you were offered some options to choose from on how your site would look like. These are called templates or since we are using blogger, also known as blogger template. But have you ever wished you could change the header to more customize the look of your blog? Well, here it is.
*Very important: When you edit your blogger template, you must first save your current template in case something goes wrong you can simple upload it back.
What you need to do is go to your Dashboard, click on DESIGN and click on Edit HTML.
Once here, you will see some codes. Look for the following line and change the values in red. Since the code is quite long you can try to search (ctrl+f) for the word maxwidget. This way you can scroll down fast and just look for the the highlighted word.
Change the following:
showaddelement ='no' to showaddelement='yes'
locked='true' to locked='false'
Click SAVE TEMPLATE and you are ready to upload your custom blogger header by going to page elements.
Located just below the code.
Scroll back up to top of page.
If you haven't created one yet, you can now create a header using any available image editing software available to you then go back to page elements and upload it like the way you add a gadget. There are also a host of different website offering free custom headers. One thing to remember when creating your header is the width. Make sure that it has the same width as your blog or smaller.
In case you are not familiar yet on how to edit a gadget (or how to upload your header image), in page element, click edit to the corresponding widget (in this case your header). A window will pop-up, click on browse and find the image from your computer then click save.
You will be returned to the page element window, save your work and your blogspot template's header is changed. You can also check out Learning Blogger - Gadgets for a step-by-step on adding a gadget (or widget).
You can now view your blog and enjoy the result.
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Before I started blogging, I thought that this is a lot of work. Imagine you sitting on your computer and writing on lines and lines of text and there might not be even anyone who would be reading it? But once I have started, I could not seem to stop and just want to continue....
Well anyway enough with that let us go on to discuss how you can also start your own blog.
Blog came from the abbreviated words Web log which was initially designed as a journal. But now, it can be of anything like a how to site like what my blog contains.
To start your own blog, there are several options. You could try to look for a free blog hosting sites like Blogger, WordPress, Xanga and Blog.com. All these and others are free and offer tools for you to start your own blog......in minutes. Yes, you read correctly. In just a matter of minutes, you can start blogging your wits out until your fingers hurt if you want.
So why did I choose Blogger? No particular reason, it was just the first one I saw. Each one has their strengths which I can not comment because I personally did not look up on each of them.
So I am only going to talk about Blogger and how I started it.
e-mail address
First you should have a valid e-mail address. I said valid because after completing everything, Blogger will send a confirmation mail with link to Blogger which you need to do. So without an e-mail address you will not be able to confirm your Blogger account. If you don't have one now, make one and come back here.
Blogger.com
Next go to http://www.blogger.com/ and click the Get Started button. Next time when you go to your blog just use the Account Sign in on the right side of the home page using your e-mail address and the password you will supply on the next step. But that is getting ahead of the topic already.
User Information
Upon clicking on the Get started button, a form comes up. Fill-up all the fields and click continue. All the fields are required so if even a single field is missing you will not be permitted to proceed to the next step. Write down your password if there is even a chance that you will forget it to avoid any log in problems later due to lost pass. Once done click the continue button.
Name your Blog
I hope by now you already figure out what to call your blog because you are now about to put a URL (blog address) name and Your blog's title. I called my blog title Something4Everything. I would have wanted the same for my URL but it was already taken so I settled for something similar. It is but wise that your URL and title is catchy so it is easy to remember and catches attention. It need not be super nice but think of something unique and is relevant to what you will be blogging. After entering the URL, click on the Check Availability button to determine if this URL is available. Once you got the URL settled, click on continue.
Final Step.......Designing your blog page
Nope you don't need to be very good at writing codes to be able to finish this last task. In fact you don't need to be writing any code at all. If you have worked with powerpoint before you will find out that it is very similar in format. But first you will need to select the appearance of your blog from a list available to you.
You can also upload a photo to be your background.
Also, you can always go back to these options by clicking on Design tab then click the template designer link.
After completing the selection of the template and layout, you will have a page that doesn't look anything like a web page. You can click save so all your selections are stored. Then try clicking the PREVIEW button and a new window appears to show a preview of your page. Looks better now doesn't it, but still quite empty. At this point your blog is already finished and you can start blogging. Close the preview window and on the original window click on Posting Tab.
Now you can begin to type your very first entry into your blog. Remember to supply your title. Notice also that just below your title, there are several formatting tools you can use to enhance the content of your blog entry including undo and redo. To check out what they will do, just move your mouse pointer over to each item and wait for a second for the description to appear. When you are done remember to spell check your work. You can also click preview to see what it will actually look like. If you are contented with your work click publish post.
Try experimenting on it for now and you will get the hang of it in no time.
For other contents on your blog, look for my post regarding gadgets.
Cheers!
Please leave your comments and suggestions on the comments area.
For the coming days, most of my posts will be on how I have been making my blog site. Hopefully, I can compile them later on into one article to be make it easier to follow.
Now I am learning slowly how to customize my blog......
I am trying to make my blog a little bit more interesting and came across Gadgets. Based on my searches, gadgets are a great tool to add content to your site. You do this by going to Designand underPage Elementsyou will see a page similar to that of a power point template.
In here, you can find several boxes with different labels.
Click on gadgets and a pop-up window appears with choices for you to put-up on your blog. However you are not limited to the choices presented here because there are a lot to choose from on the internet from news, stuff of your interest like books, music to anything you can think of. Although, for those other than what you can find in Google gadgets, you will need to edit the HTML code which quite simple enough even for the non-programmer out there like me.
But don't fret! There are enough for us newbies of this stuff under Google gadgets.
Once you picked what you want, just click on it and presto! It is added to you blog site. Try experimenting on it for a while to get a feel to it and you will be on your way to a lot more interesting blog page of your own.
You can try clicking on other boxes as well. They work the same way.
"If you need the answer to the question without going thru all my babbling, just scroll down to the bottom of the page".
Today, after creating my blogspot last night, I woke up pretty much excited on blogging again and so I turned on my machine and immediately went to my blog site. And as the page came up I was presented with some unreadable characters once again.
You see, I am currently living in Taiwan, and so everytime I use my computer it sends out the information of my "general location" through my IP address which the site in return sends a page in Chinese. Bear in mind that I am very new to blogging so I may not be able to present all the solutions.
Going back on topic, this is what I get:
So what did I do? As most of my questions about anything, I turn to google. And so I search, and the top result showed me a way to change it back to English. This link will give you the blogger page where you can change to any of your preferred language:
This will present you with a simple page and you can then click the SAVE SETTINGS button after selecting your desired language before you proceed to your respective blogspot page.
