#ContactForm1 { display: none ! important; }

Friday, March 12, 2010

Q & A, Friday Fun, and Other Musings of a Rambling Author

Question 1: From Stephanie McGee
How'd you get your current background? It doesn't look like a blogger template. And there's no logo on it so I assume you created it yourself.

The original template was not mine. I found a layout I liked and hacked it. To death %-) The first time I tried changing a template it took me several hours. Now I know what I'm looking for and I can drop into the HTML, find the jpgs, and color codes and change them to what I want.

The background for the blog and for my twitter feed are credited at the bottom of the info column on the right. The original art was done by Sami Mattila. I found it on Deviant Art and it is used with permission.

If you want I can put up some blog posts about editing/hacking HTML so you can design your own blog template. It isn't as hard as you think. :o)



Question 2: From several people in one form or another
Blogger now allows separate pages...? As in with a different template (looks excited)? Or is there an example somewhere or a code?


If you go to the Blogger dashboard, choose Posting and look to the right of New Post you will see EDIT PAGES. It's new as of a week or two ago and I haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet.

YET.

I will be playing this weekend.

The main idea behind pages is to fill the spaces like the tabs I have. Those are linked to buried posts. Buried means I made a post, backdated it to 2008, and left a label off. If you click Older Posts long enough you will eventually wind up stumbling across all those posts the tabs link to.

Blogger allows you to have up to ten individual pages. The web address won't be www.BlogName.blogspot. Name-Of-Post-Goes-Here. The web address will be something shorter with a backslash. It's a little more like a full featured website. It's tidier. And I imagine it helps search engines find you just a little bit faster, but don't quote me on that last bit.


Question 3: From the mail box

What are you doing this weekend?

Okay, that's a cheat question. It's not from the blog or a writing friend, just a normal civilian type friend who is never involved with trench warfare editing. But that's not a problem, right? :o)

To Be Read: Orphan's Alliance, Orphan's Triumph, Rogue Clone, and Hat Full of Sky.... actually, Alliance will be lucky if it survives until lunch time. I finished Orphan's Journey at 8am and was half-way through Alliance by 10. It's a really good series.

To Be Edited: On the computer, I'm half-way through chapter nine of thirteen. With hardcopy line-edits I'm on chapter eleven. I need to catch up on the on-computer edits, read through the first six chapters again to double-check for a history change, and work on some of the body language scenes.

To be Watched: Friday night is Date Night around here and this week we're watching Three Musketeers. We were quoting it last week and I realized it's been years since I watched Porthos stab anyone. That's practically criminal!

11 comments:

  1. Before I forget.... the Leprechaun is a regular at the Ren Fest outside Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX. We're not in Texas anymore, but if anyone is there the "faire" is usually in April or May. Send me pictures if you go!

    ReplyDelete
  2. That'd be cool. I have an image I want to use for my bog but can't figure out how to get it to be the background. (I designed it myself and it matches my current header.) I'm hopeless when it comes to figuring out technology things sometimes.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Stephanie - If you go and edit your templates HTML you should find something that reads:

    Background: blah blah blah :(abc.JPG)

    That .JPG is what you need to change. There's a post here (http://lianabrooks.blogspot.com/2009/05/html-class-101-finding-image.html) on how to do that.

    If your background is just color, not a JPG, you can insert the HTML script. And the blog post on that is here: (http://lianabrooks.blogspot.com/2009/02/learning-to-make-my-blog-mine.html)

    If that's not enough, let me know what questions you still have and I'll see what I can do :o)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks! I'll see what I can find. Hopefully it will work this time.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Liana, I don't see "Posting" anywhere on my Dashboard. Where would this be located? I'd like to find it, so I can then find "Edit Pages."

    Who says that men can't ask for directions?? :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Yay! I got it to work! Thanks! Except now I've got these weird lines all over my blog that aren't part of the background image.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Woo thanks for the inside info! I was wondering how to get into all that and I didn't want to resort to asking my husband. :)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thanks to your post, I've just spent the last three hours playing with my blog. My family would like to know where the heck their dinner is. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  9. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Jean - That's totally not my fault! But now I need to go look at your blog.

    J.N. Neeb - Go to Dashboard or hit New Post/Edit New Post.... this is only for Blogger. I'm not sure how to do this in Wordpress.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Thanks so much, Liana!! Just found it and will have to play around with some new pages this week... :)

    ReplyDelete