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Instead of having an image occupy the entire Header section, some might want to have a small image beside the Blog Title and Description, either on the left or on the right of the Header. Blogger has a simple feature which allows you to upload an image to the Header. However, as we had explained in our article Background Image for Blogger Header (New), this image appears as a backdrop to the Blog Title and moves with the Title. To have the image on one side, we suggest two methods which you can try.
Using Blogger Header Image Upload
Let's say we have a small picture (150px by 150px) that we want to put on the left of our Blog Header. Use an image editing software to create a new blank canvas of 760px (width) by 150px (height). Check the Header width of your template. Normally it is found under #header
We had in our earlier article showed you how to add Images or Icons to Sidebar Links. Many readers are also interested to add images next to the Blog Post Titles. You can have a small picture to automatically appear in every Post Title. This guide will explain how this can be done.
The image we are talking about has to be small, perhaps about 20px in width. But for the purposes of this guide, we shall also use a bigger image double that size, to let you see the difference.
First, we have to create that image. If you have an existing photo or picture, you can use an image editor like Google's Picasa to crop or resize it to a small image size. After that, upload it onto a free image server. You can read about using free hosts like Google Page Creator and Google Groups. We also have a rather comprehensive list of free Image Hosts and File Hosting Services in our article on Manage Blogger Image Storage Space. Check out those sites and choose one that is fast, reliable and enables hotlinking to the uploaded files. Copy down the IMAGE URL.
Example 1
In this first example, we use an image of 20px by 20px. Login to Dashboard and go to Template -
In some templates, the text links are underlined. This distinguishes the hyperlinks from the normal text. If you don't like that, you can remove the underlines. You can also modify the template to have underlines only in the main posts and not in the sidebar or vice-versa. This tutorial will show you how it can be done.
As explained in our article Links – Hover and Rollover Effects, when you are at Template -
If you are new to Blogger software, once your Blog is up and running, you will see some strange icons. One is a picture of a pencil at the Post Footer and another is a screwdriver and wrench icon at the bottom right corner of every widget. Is there a way to disable them? Why are they there in the first place? Don't they look unsightly in the Blog design?
Allay your fears. However unsightly they may seem, nobody else can see them other than the author of the Blog and only when logged into the Blogger account. Once you are logged out, clear the browser cache or refresh the page and the icons will disappear.
Remove Pencil icons
These icons are there to assist the authors. The pencil icon at the end of the Posts are the links to enable easy quick editing of the Posts.
When typing a Blog Post, the font colors can be changed using the tool provided in the rich-text Post Editor. Unfortunately, there is no icon or tool to add highlighting to the text. However, as we shall discuss, it is possible to add highlights to the text and choose a color to appear behind a word or lines of text. This tutorial will also explain how to enclose the text within a box with a colored background.
Text Highlighting
Create the post as you normally would using the “Compose” mode. If there are some words that you want to highlight, switch to the “Edit HTML” mode and insert the following tags before and after the TEXT TO BE HIGHLIGHTED. Here are some examples of common color highlights and codes to be inserted:-
1. Yellow highlight
There are times when you want to insert plain text into your Blog Post or template. This may be a piece of HTML code or JavaScript that you would like readers to copy, such as the “Link to Our Site” code in the sidebar. It could also be the Terms of a Legal Agreement that users can view. As we shall be discussing in our article on creating forms in Blogs, the text box can also be used in feedback forms for users to input feedback and comments.
The HTML code of the text box makes use of the
There are usage limits imposed by every free service, including Blogger.com. Often, the limits are necessary for design purposes (e.g., how much space to cater for each form field), logistics (e.g., server space and speed) and financial considerations. Most of the answers on the amount of storage space, limitations on posts, etc. are found in Blogger Help. However, since we still receive queries on that, we thought we shall add a few more items to that list for the benefit of the new Bloggers. These limits apply to one Google account, and if you find yourself exceeding these limits, one solution would be to register for an additional Google account to enjoy the services.
1. Number of Blogs
There is no limit on the number of Blogger Blogs you can create with your Google account. If you are creating Google sites using Google Page Creator, you are allowed to have a maximum of 5 different sites.
2. Blog Address
This is the name inserted between http:// and .blogspot.com. The limit is 37 characters.
3. Blog Title
The Title can go up to 90 characters.
4. Blog Description
The Blog Description can have a maximum of 500 characters.
5. Profile
When you are at “Edit User Profile” page, you can add information about yourself under “About Me” and this has a maximum of 1,200 characters. For other fields like “Interests”, “Favorite Movies” and so on, each has a limit of 2,000 characters.
6. Number of Team Members
You can have as many team members, contributors or administrators as you would like. Add the authors under Settings -
In this guide, we learn how to take screenshots or screen capture and save what you exactly see on the computer screen into an image file. You can edit the screenshot image using image editors like MS Paint. For those who need to take screenshots often, have a look at the list of free screen capture softwares towards the end of this article.
For those who are not familiar with this term “screenshot”, imagine that you are playing a game and have just defeated the top level monster. You are elated and want to share this moment of glory with your friends. How do you take a photograph of your screen without having to use a camera or webcam? The answer lies in capturing it as a screenshot, saving the image file, editing it if you have to, and emailing it to your friends.
Screenshots are also handy when you are reporting problems and error messages to software companies or internet service providers. This will help them to better understand the problem. Our readers had also referred us to their screen captures when raising queries relating to their template customization. As well, when submitting your blog to blog directories, you may be required to upload an image, which can be a screenshot of your site, to go with the listing.
Screenshot in MS Windows
In the standard keyboards, there is a button key that reads “Print Screen”, “PrntScrn” or “PrtScn”. To capture a screenshot of the entire screen, press this key. To take a screenshot of the active window or program, press “Alt” together with this “Print Screen” key.
(Note that in some programs and online games, there are inbuilt commands for screen captures. For instance, in Maplestory, players can press “Scroll Lock” key to take a screenshot. Where there are no special keys, press “Print Screen”. For Windows Vista Premium edition users, there is a Snipping Tool which allows users to take screenshots of windows or free-form area.)
If your computer is connected to a printer, the image would be printed onto paper. Since this image remains on your computer clipboard, it can also be transferred to an image editor program.
Save and Edit Screenshot
To save the screenshot, after pressing the “Print Screen” key, open an image editor program. Users of Microsoft Windows can use Microsoft “Paint” found in Start Menu -
In our article on Horizontal Menu and Navigation Bar, we have given you a how-to guide on adding a horizontal navigation bar into the Blog template. This Navbar can be text links, image links, or both. Since they are navigation tools, they should be somewhere at the top of the page and easily noticeable. You may have a background image in the Header and after adding the Navbar, you find the Navbar sitting at the top or bottom of the Header. Perhaps you want the Navbar somewhere in the middle of the image instead. In this article, we shall explore further customization tips on aligning the Navigation Bar and moving it to the exact position within the Header.
Header Image using Blogger feature
If you have inserted the background image into the Header using the 'Edit Header' method, and added the Navigation Bar, you will see the Header image and the Navbar as 2 separate items like this:-
Search engines look for keywords and it is widely believed that keyword-specific domains and subdomains rank highly in the search engine algorithm. This is so because having the keyword in the URL suggests that the site contents are related to the keyword. Also, when visitors look at the search results, they are likely to click the link that contains relevant keywords. With this in mind, we should ensure that keywords appear in the Blog URL and Blog Post URL for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.
Blog URL
In case you are lost as to what we are referring to, consider this. Suppose you want to blog about politics in planet Mars (fictional of course). You start to create a new blog. Between the two – one bearing your name http://tom-dick-harry.blogspot.com and the other bearing the URL http://politics-in-planet-mars.blogspot.com – which do you think will attract the search engines and potential visitors? Quite obviously the second URL. People who are interested in this topic will search for the keywords “politics”, “planet” and “mars” and are never going to search for your name. Search engines identifies these keywords in the Blog URL and displays that in their search results.
It may be that over time, you are so famous that your name is synonymous with this topic and people will search for your name instead. The start will be slow and more effort has to be put into publicity, such as submitting your blog to Blog Directories, Feed Directories and Search Engines. Until such time, you would have to endure trickling traffic to your Blog. If you are starting a new blog, bear this in mind.
Blog Post URL
Under Settings -
We wrote about how you can move the Labels to the top of the post so that Technorati can index the Labels as tags for those people who do not have full post feeds. In addition, users have asked whether they can show the number of comments at the top of the posts instead of the footer. In this tutorial, you will learn how to move the comment count link to the top, below the post title. We can even have the comments link appear at both the top and bottom of the post.
Before modifying the template, backup a copy of the existing template. Go to Template -
In our article on Background Image for Blogger Template, we had explained how to have a background color or background image in the body, main posts, or sidebars. This will apply to most blog templates except templates like TicTac. Instead of having the entire sidebar in one color, you can also assign a different color to each of the widgets. This guide will let you know how you can change the background color of each individual widget.
Let us assume that you have created a Link List via Template -
When readers post comments in your Blog, you will be notified. How about backlinks? Do you want Blogger to notify you when people write a post and link to you? Although it is not an option available in the Dashboard, it is possible to work around this and be notified whenever you receive a backlink.
Backlinks
By definition, backlinks are incoming or inbound links to your Blog. If you have a lot of backlinks, it shows that your posts have been talked about or referred to by many sites, an indication that the posts are noteworthy, popular or important. Links can come from any site, but for the purposes of our article, we are interested in the links from sites that are indexed by Blogger search engine. This is because we want to be informed by Blogger when someone links to us, and the only way Blogger knows is when that site is in their index and crawled by their spiders.
Email Notification
If it were comments, you can set an email address under Settings -
This is written in response to several queries on changing labels to published posts. People are not aware of the simple method of changing, removing or adding labels to published posts. This short article is a reminder of an easy-to-use feature that is already available in our Blogger platform.
The situation is that when we start writing posts, we assign different words as labels to our posts. As we had mentioned in Technorati Tags in Blogger Posts, such labels are tagged by Technorati and other third party sites and your posts appear in their tag search results. It is therefore good to assign the relevant keywords or labels that can best describe your posts. Over time, after publishing several posts, you may realize that some of the labels are not appropriate, or you may simply want to streamline the words to make them consistent.
Instead of editing each individual post, you can click the Manage Posts link on the Blogger Dashboard or go to Posting -
At the bottom of every article, you will see the Comments posted by readers (that is if you have configured the blog to Show comments and not Hide comments) as well as a “Post a Comment” link. This is a default message. To change the words “Post a Comment” and rename or customize them to a message that suits your blog, we can modify the template code.
If you have followed our main article Add Scrollbars to Blog Widgets, you would be able to introduce horizontal and vertical scrollbars to all or any of the widgets in the Blogger template. These scrollbars can be made to automatically appear when the contents overflow a certain specified width or height setting. We have also talked about how scrollbars can be added to the Blog Post body. We shall in this tutorial elaborate on that and let you know how to add the scrollbars within each Blog Post.
Scrollbars to Blog Post body
As we had mentioned in our article, to have the scrollbars to each of the blog posts, once you are logged into Blogger account, go to Template -
The Original Pinterest Pin it button
The following code will work just fine on any blogger blog.
Excellent points here, Jared. I install plugins on my site based strictly on recommendations from people that I trust. I agree that is super important to check out reviews and if possible, support information. If you have issues with that plugin on your blog, you want to make sure that you have someone to contact to so you can can resolve it