Thursday, November 17, 2005

Oh, Brave New World! A Quick Guide

Okay, guys, I see a lot of links sections in your sidebars with the tell-tale words "Edit-Me." People are asking me how to add links. Okay, a few quick hints:

1. If you actually click where it says Edit Me, it takes you to a help page on how to do it. Mind you, I'm not sure how helpful the help page is. I haven't looked at it.

Alternate method:

2. The links section is part of your template. If you click on the tab labeled Template in your Blogger control panel, you'll see a page of all the coding that tells Blogspot what your blog looks like and where things go in it. Scroll down, almost to the bottom. You'll see something that looks like this:




(If you right click and save these pictures, they should be a bit more readable.)

This is an unordered list (ul), and each line begins with a list item tag (li). Paste the links you want between the quotation marks in each line, and put the name of the blog or whatever where it says Google News or Edit-Me. You can paste in as many lines as you want, as long as they all start with li and end with /li with the /ul at the very end. Now it should look something like this:



Save changes.

Click the Republish button.

Done!

3. For how to keep up with non-AOL blogs: go to http://www.bloglines.com/, sign up, and read through what they do there. Basically, it's a way to look at everything that's been posted to blogs on your subscription list since you last checked. I've been lazy about doing this myself, 'cause it's a little confusing, and I was mostly depending on AOL Alerts instead. You too, huh? But check out the bottom of my sidebar. There's a little button that makes subscribing to Outpost relatively painless. If you want, you can add one of those handy-dandy buttons to yours, too, to help other people find their way back to you. The procedure is similar to adding links - just paste the HTML Bloglines gives you into your sidebar section, with a line break (br) before and after it.

4. People are getting upset because they publish an entry, and then can't see it right away. Been there, done that! This is a problem with the AOL internal browser, and sometimes with Internet Explorer. Emptying your cache and deleting history may or may not help. But if you do your blogging in Netscape, and reload the page, you see the entry right away! Also, IE doesn't seem to retain formatting if you're pasting stuff from elsewhere. Netscape does. I haven't tried Firefox - that might be good too. Somebody please let me know!

Karen

Update: please see the comments to this post for a couple of really good tips from Shelly and Robbie. Also, a thousand thank yous to Shelly for finding the source of my glitch on Messages from Mâvarin. The trick is to keep those photos narrow enough to fit the space alloted. I thought I had, but I missed one! - KFB

5 comments:

emmapeelDallas said...

Thanks for posting this! I've figured out how to do it, and I'm happy to help anyone who needs help, too.

Your site looks great, and I've put you in my favorites and I'll be back.

Judi
http://emmapeeldallas.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

Wow, I leave for four days and the world turns upside down. Just wanted to let you know I found you!

Sarah

Robbie said...

A few helpful hints: You can do your Bloglines as a blogroll in your sidebar so you don't have to create a link for each individual journal/blog that you follow. You just copy and paste code from the Bloglines website.

Another thing, instead of the delete history, empty cache, all you have to do is right click on the screen with your mouse and select refresh.

Welcome to the neighborhood!!

ShellyS said...

I don't usually copy and paste Blogger entries. Blogger now has a recover post feature in case of disaster and that's actually worked once for me. So I type directly in Blogger. I could try to do the copy and paste thing in Firefox to see how it works.

Be aware if you use Firefox with Blogger that sometimes, it gets wonky. Ditto AOL and Blogger. A lot of the wonkiness has to do with the enter key. I don't know why. Blogger supposedly fixed the wonkiness with AOL, but it still gets wonky for me at times there.

I mostly use Firefox now and it's mostly fine. And I'll happily check blogs in FF for folks who don't have it and want to know if their blogs look okay in it.

ShellyS said...

Glad I could help.

As Robbie said, you can add your Bloglines subs to your sidebar. You can do the whole thing, or just one or two folders. For ex, on my new Photoblog, I put only my Bloglines Photoblogs folder into the sidebar.

There's also Blogrolling, which when in your sidebar, will actually show on your blog when someone's updated theirs.

Thee are a number of related blog reading services. For other fun things to do with blogs, when you're using a blogging service that lets you add them, you can look at the links I've gathered at: http://impressbooks.com/LinksPages/Blogs.htm