Blogger.Com Tips

If you use Blogger.com for content I have a few tips that may help develop the website you really want.

Why use Blogger.com

To date, blogger.com is free to use. You don't even have to buy a domain name! There are some shortcomings as always with free stuff.

• Layout is kind of fixed, you can change for certain templates, but is limited.
• Colour schemes seem to be adhoc, I tried selecting dark gray on the simple theme and the overall colour was red.
• Link management is hard work. Google Websites manages links so much better.
• A ton of additional resources, JavaScript, CSS etc are required for each page. This tends to increase page loading times.

Of course, there are some benefits.

• Editor allows for HTML or compose view.
• Can add you own CSS to style certain elelments as you see fit. (Thinking paragrapgh tags here).
• Easy to integrate Google Adsense.

Blogger.com Tips

I am quite new to Blogger but the following are tips that may prove worthwhile.

• Bookmarks

  Bookmarks in the web world is a mechanism that allows viewers of your site to jump to in-page content. Bookmarks are basically in-page navigation. To create a bookmark you simply need to create an HTML element with a unique id. In this post I created an A element which simply contains a unique id.

  <a id="top"></a>

  Notice how the A element only contains an id. The id must be unqiue to the page (not the entire site). I can now link to the new bookmark, again using simple HTML code. Click here to use my bookmark.

  Basically, a bookmark is an HTML element with a unique id (unique to the page, not the website). To reference a bookmark, simply use the the anchor (A) element and set the href property to the unique id preceded with a #. To elaborate.

  <h3 id="Bookmark">My heading</h3>

  The above code declares a bookmark. The id property is what A elements will use when declaring an inline jump to content.

  <a href="#Bookmark">My heading</h3>

  Notice how for the bookmark reference the id is preceded by a hash (#). Anyone clicking on the My Heading link will be taken to the HTML element containing the id.

• Paragraphs

  Been a while, but I do remember that in school, when learning English, the first line of a paragraph is always indented. This can be achieved in the "Compose view" editor. Simply use the tab key to insert a tab.

  The problem is that a tab will result in several non-breaking spaces (&nsbp;). This is far from ideal. A better way is to use CSS to state that all paragraphs will indent the first line.

  Fortunately, Blogger allows one to add custom CSS. Simply navigate to theme, then select customise. Select advanced and navigate to the bottom where you should see Add CSS. The following CSS will indent all paragraphs.

  p {
   text-indent: 10px;
  }
  

  The value 10px can be changed to suit your own needs.

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