Friday, January 30, 2009

More Things on a Stick: Thing 24-Getting There

You know, I liked my blog before. It was nice, neat, and semi-orderly. So, when I read that Thing 24 involved sprucing up my blog, I was not enthusiastic. Throughout the process of deleting my old template and trying to find one I liked, yet didn't involve a bunch of tweaking, I looked at my blog with fresh eyes, and weeded out the things that were only taking up real estate (especially on the sidebar). While I was trying to decide if I wanted to do a complete overhaul (changing the entire HTML structure) or just an easy fix (putting in a background, and leaving the HTML alone), there were many moments where I wondered if I had lost my ever-loving mind.

But then, I found this site: www.simplychicblogs.blogspot.com. It has lots of different backgrounds to use for FREE, and if a person was so inclined, there are even different seasonal ones that are so easy to swap in and out. I love it! Changing the look of my blog won't be hard at all. It's just a matter of editing the HTML and changing the direct link to the new picture, and then resetting the font/link, etc. colors.

So, for now, this is what my blog looks like. It may or may not stay like this for long, depending on what other backgrounds I want to try.

3 comments:

fairpan said...

Hi Thanks for sharing the backgrounds site. I am now looking it over and if I find just the right one will change my background again.....

fairpan said...

Ok, you are smarter than me. How in the world did you get the back ground to work????? I keep getting an error:Invalid variable declaration in page skin: Variable is used but not defined. Input: bgcolor. Do you know how to fix that?

Lisa said...

Sorry I didn't see your question before...:(

The instructions are on the right sidebar of the site, but here they are:

How to Change Your Background

Our backgrounds work best if you use Blogger's 'minima' template. First you must sign into to your blog and click on 'customize' at the top of the page. Once you have done that you then need to click on the 'edit html' tab. Scroll down in your html to where you see this:

body {
background:$bgcolor;
margin:0; color:$textcolor; font:x-
small Georgia Serif; font-size/*
*/:/**/small; font-size: /**/small;
text-align: center;

Change that part of the code to say this:

body {
background:$bgcolor;background-image:url(direct link);background-position: center; background-repeat:no-repeat; background-attachment: fixed;

margin:0; color:$textcolor; font:x-small Georgia Serif; font-size/*
*/:/**/small; font-size: /**/small;
text-align: center;

Now all you need to do is choose the background that suits you and copy the link underneath it and then paste it in your html between the parenthesis where it says direct link. Preview your changes and then once you have checked that everything looks right be sure to save your template. Voila!

I hope that helps some...it is a really cool and quick way to change the look of a blog without having to completely code everything by hand!