I count my first blog among the more than 156 million web logs said to be in existence since mid February 2011. With a Canadian traffic rank at 76,723 – reported by Alexa Internet, Inc. – it should be clear that my site, “Just Blogging,” at http://www.lionelgayle.com, is a very new online journal.
In fact, I published my first post just about mid May 2011, and currently, Alexa says my blog “is relatively popular among users” in Toronto where it is ranked at #11,234. The company gives my site a global traffic rank at 4,566,642.
I am fully aware that the information I’ve just shared above is not really exciting news. I merely want to brag a little, now that my literary effort is noted at some little spot on a global platform – namely, the World Wide Web, via the Information Superhighway.
The real focus of this article is to share some of my experiences as a newbie blogista (that’s my coinage for blogger), especially as I attempt to customize the free Google Blogger template to attract attention, as well as to fit my personal taste.
Customizing your site means you can manipulate the template to change the look of the page as long as you stay within the guidelines set by Google. And even though it would help a lot, you don’t have to know HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), two popular languages – comprising tags, rules and brackets – used in hypertext documents and web development.
Recently, while trying to customize my other blog, I experienced what I thought was a big problem and didn’t know how to solve it. I wanted to do two tasks: (a) to put a box around my sidebar, and (b) to put a background colour to my post (that’s my article).
After following the advice of several how-to-do-it online gurus I succeeded only in putting boxes and colour to the sidebar titles – “Follow by Mail,” “Links,” “Followers,” etc. And the date header above my post was automatically formatted in the same way.
In the interim it seemed that I had messed up the template because the headline of my article had shrunk to about 12 points – from 36 points, and the dateline and the sidebar titles had increased in size and displayed in bold letters.
I fiddled with the template code for a long while until I fixed the date header and the sidebar titles, but the post headline wouldn’t budge. So I searched online and found several bloggers with the same problem, but no published solutions. I then posted the following question in an online forum: "How do I fix my post title, I use to be able to increase size from Template Designer, but it no longer works?"
Later I received an email from Google Help saying that Bonjour Tristesse had found an error in my template. I was directed to “Put a closing bracket } at the end of your h2 declaration.” I knew what that meant, followed the instruction and the headline became fixable.
