important tips

In some Blogger themes, there is a big gap between the bottom of the header and the start of the first post, which means that the posts and the sidebar are not aligned.  This article explains how to adjust the gap, and so remove the problem . In the themes that Blogger provides , as well as all third-party themes, the amount of space between elements on the screen is not accidental:   designers put a lot of effort into working out what spacing will look good, and then finding ways to put CSS code into the template so that the spacing they want is shown in any browser software that Blogger supports. But there are times when you may want to change this spacing, and this is easy to do, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your theme , and if  you can work out exactly which part of the template code to change. The pre-Header gap A pet-hate of mine is the blank space above the first post in many Designer themes, which looks strange unless you put...

This article shows how to get and then centre-align the row of sharing items that you can get from AddThis (and it's likely that a similar technique applies to sharing buttons from other services like ShareThis, too). If you think that Blogger's own social sharing buttons a just a bit too small and difficult position, then you may decide to use a service like AddThis to generate buttons that are more elegant all round. Signing up with AddThis is easy: just log in to your Blogger account, and in a separate tab open up AddThis.com. Choose Create Account, and then Continue with Google. This links your Google account and your AddThis account, and is the easiest approach - but there are other options too, like creating your account with your Facebook or Twitter accounts, or even just signing up the old fashioned way with your email address. Once you have signed up and chosen a plan (personally I just the free "Basic" plan), you need to actually install the AddThis...

This QuickTip is about finding the "expand widgets" option in Blogger's template editor. Today, Blogger Buzz announced a new version of the template editor . This is exciting in all sorts of ways, including that it implies that Blogger will continue to support template editing:   some people suspected that Dynamic Templates , which don't allow template editing, might be the way of the future. But there's one immediate issue: many of the existing "How to do XXXX in Blogger" tutorials include statements like Open your template for editing, and tick the "Expand widgets" checkbox or Open your template for editing, and make sure that "Expand widgets" isn't ticked However today's changes have deleted the Expand Widgets checkbox . So - what do you do if you need to expand the widgets?   Luckily, this is one of the things that has been made easier, once you find out where the option has moved to. How to see expanded code for a gadget ...