Thursday, February 12, 2009

Sprucing Up Your Blog!

I am not an expert on this, but I have searched the Internet and these are some of my tips, if you (like me) are trying to find a way to spruce up your blog!

I’ve always wanted to compile this list, but never found the time. Well, there is good that came out of my 2-week medical leave, after all!

Useful Tools You Will Like

Windows Live Writer: One of the pitfalls of Blogger is the blogging interface. I am very particular when it comes to alignment and paragraph spacing and it used to KILL me when my carefully crafted blog posts went out of whack and the alignments went crazy!

live writer

The best thing about WLW is that it offers true WYSIWYG blog authoring – meaning the post will be EXACTLY as how you see on your screen! A God-sent!

Photoscape: Another wonderful tool. I’m Photoshop-challenged, and besides, all the “layering” in Photoshop is a bit too difficult for someone as aesthetically-UNinclined as myself. It offers simple editing & collages to be done as easy as a-b-c!

photoscape

As you can see from my blog, I’ve purposefully run through all the photos to be uploaded on my blog via the “frame” model in Photoscape to give all my photos that “rough-edges" finish!

Photo-hosting sites like Photobucket or Phlook: I use Photobucket, and it allows you to create photo montages. I haven’t used Phlook yet – but it seems pretty interesting. It basically is a photo-hosting website that also allows your readers to “tag” the photo and leave comments on the photo! Quite interesting!

photobucket

phlook

Blog Layouts

Blogger does have quite a variety of ready-made templates for your blog. They are perfectly fine, but if you are wanting a little difference, you can try these:

Three-column blogs (like mine!)

Blogger standard templates only offer two-column templates, but I always preferred to have three columns. There are loads of blogs out there teaching you how to amend the code to get three columns too! I shan’t regurgitate them here, but here’re some good websites that teach this (and more)…

Random Bytes

Blogger Buster

The Blog Doctor

Backgrounds

I got to recommend The Cutest Blog on the Block! They have awesome backgrounds that you can use – for FREE! – and it is really nice. Rather than having the entire page scroll down as you scroll to read, the background stays “constant” and only the text areas move. Apart from backgrounds, they even have matching headers for your use!

tcbotb

Adding A Signature After Each Post

Jaydee asked me this, after seeing my posts. If you’re wondering, it is super simple! It is a simple way to customise your posts.

If you have photoshop (or any other software), customise how you want your signature to look like, then upload your signature onto a photohosting site like Photobucket.

But I used another method. I went to My Live Signature, which has 120 fonts and allows you to “re-create” your signature! You can choose the size, the font, and even the “angle” of signature! Believe me, the options are so many that it boggled me for quite a while!

signature

Once you’re done selecting that “perfect” signature, you have two options.

a. You can click on “Want To Use This Signature?” and the website will give you the HTML code to insert into your blog.

b. Alternatively, you can also save the image into your computer, then upload onto Photobucket or a similar hosting website.

JPG vs PNG: Remember! If you have a non-white background to your blog, do remember to save the signature file with the .png extension. Else, a .jpg extension will also do for blogs with white backgrounds. Both Photoshop and Photobucket has the option for you to save the file as a “.png”.

After that, log on to your Blogger Account –> Dashboard –> Layout –> Edit HTML. Click on “Expand Widget Templates” and find this line:

<div class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-1'>

Paste this line of code just below:

<img src='the URL of your signature'>

And ta-da! You’re set! Preview it, and if you’re happy with how it looks, just press “Save Template”!

 

Phew… I think that should be enough for now. I’ve got a few more, but this is turning out to be a looooooooooooong blog post already! :) Hope it helps some of you out there.

If you have great tips on how I can improve my blog, do leave me a comment and tell me all about it!

5 comments:

Mummy Kless said...

oh gosh! Great tips!!!!

and I have been wondering about yr very lovely signature for a long time now.. thanks for the tip!!

Unknown said...

Thanks! ;)

Gretchen said...

Wow,you have NO idea how great it was to find this post. Thanks SO much. I stumbled it too, and I hope other people find this post as well.

I tried forever to figure out where to insert the html for "my live signature" to no avail. Your post is the only place I could figure it out!

I also love Picnik for photo editing. They have some awesome tricks. I dont' know if they host, but you can really do some cool stuff there for free.

Gretchen said...

One more question for you, if you know... my signature has a grey box around it. Do you know how I can get rid of that? You can check out my blog (and signature!) at http://whoputmeinchargeofthesepeople.blogspot.com

Thanks!

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