Monday, March 17, 2008

Things I discovered last week

~random ramblings from last week~

I'm late
Yep. I didn't get this written or posted last week. I meant to do it on Friday. Oh well. Since there wasn't anything very profound, I'll keep it short. :)

The Lawn
Yes. The snow has melted and I saw the lawn for the first time since January. It's brown and dormant. (See, lacking in profoundness.)

Center clicking my mouse
On the EntreCard forums, someone posted that center clicking the mouse (the scroll wheel) in Firefox will cause a link to open in a new tab. Also, center clicking a tab in Firefox will cause it to close. I love handy-dandy time-saving tips like that.

BlogLog
I joined BlogLog this week and was surprised to see that it's affiliated with Yahoo! The concept of BlogLog is very similar to BlogCatalog. I've barely explored the advantages of either site yet for promoting this blog and discovering other new ones, but I'm registered and that's a start.

Three-column layout
I was on Hunting the Muse one night and noticed that Brady Frost had switched to a three-column layout and uses Blogger/Blogspot as a host. I've been wanting to try that for a while, but couldn't find any easy-to-use templates. When I found the link on his page, I followed it to discover my exact Blogger/Blogspot layout (minima) available in three columns! Yeah! That, of course, led to a lot of playing and tweaking and redesigning of this site. I'm not sure I love what I've done so far, but it's a start. I'm really frustrated that I can't figure out how to hack a white background behind the main column of content. I'm open to ideas and suggestions.

Thumbnails of evolution of The Beacon's layout

7 comments:

  1. Hi Haley! My curiosity will get the better of me, and I'll wind up going over to BlogLog, and probably will sign up with them, too. Gads, I need to have a part-time job that pays full-time wages so I have time to keep up with all this exciting blogging and internet sales stuff. ;)

    I'll go take a look at the HTML of my remaining Blogger blogs and see where they put the background color and try to get back to you later this morning. (Kind of depends on how many meetings my boss has scheduled for today. Lawsy, that man loves meetings!)

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  2. I know very little and not sure how blogspot is setup. But I think that grey color looks to be the color code #999. Look for that color under body background and change to #FFF which is white.

    Just remember what you changed in case you need to change it back.

    ReplyDelete
  3. If you go edit the HTML, you'll see fairly close to the top a section called:

    /* Variable definitions

    The first variable is for the page background color. Change these two parameters...

    default="#fff"
    value="#ffffff"

    and you should be good to go.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks for looking that up. It works, but it turns the background of the entire page white, and I was hoping for just the center column.

    No worries, though. I found a new tool tonight that lets me custom make an entire template for Blogger. It gets good reviews, so I'll give that a go when I have time, and post what I discover.

    The template generator is at this site: http://psyc.horm.org/

    And I found it throught this site: http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/05/31/free-blogger-templates/

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  5. That's a wicked site! LOL I have two blogs still on Blogger, and might spend some time playing with the template generator for them. Can't wait to see what you come up with here!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I was just about to suggest you take a look at http://psyc.horm.org/ when I read down the comments and realized that you'd already mentioned it. I've played around with it a little bit but haven't gotten the design exactly how I want it. I'll keep tweaking as I get more time.
    I think your blog looks great though! Keep up the good work!
    Also, you can export your template to an xml file and that will save all your changes to your loaded widgets and whatnot. That way you don't have to remember what you changed. If all else fails, reload your saved template.

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  7. I have no idea when I'm going to have time in the next few weeks to build a new template using the generator at psyc.horm.org. Aerten and Brady, if you come up with something usable, I'd love to get a glimpse of it.

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