August 3, 2010

Blogging Tips for Dummies - Part 3

As promised, I am back with more tips and tricks regarding your new Blogger blogs. Today, I'm going to primarily tell you how you can change your blog's background image using Blogger in Draft's template designer, using a CSS snippet. And I'm going to talk about what RSS feeds are and why they are important for your blog. First things first, and therefore:

How to change the background image of your Blogger blog?

It's as easy as saying one, two, three. Log into draft.blogger.com. Click on Design and then click on Template Designer. Once you've gotten there, click on Advance, and then click 'Add CSS'.

You will see a text box which says "Add CSS here..."

Just copy and paste the following code into that box:

body {background: url(YourImageUrl) no-repeat center fixed;}
.body-fauxcolumns .fauxcolumn-outer div, .body-fauxcolumn-outer .cap-top .cap-left{background:none;}
And you are good to go. This snippet is extremely useful if you want a background image who's size is more than 300 kb, the current limit allowed by blogger to put up background images. Please remember to put up images which are more that 1800 x 1600 in area, in order to cover the whole background area. And voila, you're done!

What are RSS feeds and how can you get them?

RSS feeds are basically web feeds that are used for publishing frequently updated works. In simple terms, this is the coolest way of letting your readers know when you make a post. RSS feeds are viewed via the RSS readers. One example is the Google reader; and another one is the Windows Vista and 7 built in RSS feed reader gadget. The next question is how you can get hold of your RSS feed? Again that is relatively simple. The vast majority of the bloggers' online today use Feedburner to publish their feeds. All you have to do is goto www.feedburner.com and register yourself and your blog. Once you've done that, goto the optimize tab to set your preferences. It's all pretty straightforward. Then goto the publicize and get your RSS feed widget, which Feedburner automatically adds to your registered Blogger blog. Just select Blogger from the drop down menu. Similarly, Feedburner also offers an email subscription service which is also available under the publicize tab. And yes, Feedburner will automatically add that to your blog as well!

You can change the position of your added widgets by logging into Blogger in Draft and clicking on Design. Under the Page Elements tab, you will be able to see your newly added widgets. You can then change their positions and move them around till you're happy with their position.

Remember, if you face any difficulty, use the comments section to post your problems and I will try my best to solve them.

In the next post on blogging tips, I'll talk about how to get a search bar that actually works in searching stuff off your blog; quite unlike the Google powered search bar that is available on Blogger. Again, it is a CSS snippet, but you don't paste this one into the 'Add CSS' field!

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