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Showing posts from October, 2016

How to center gadgets in Blogger

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This article is about centering gadgets from 3rd parties that you install onto your blog. Previously, I've described how to put HTML code from a 3rd party into your blog . When code like this is put into a gadget , one common question is "how do I center it?" There are (at least) three options for doing this, ie for putting a gadget into the middle (horizontally) of the area it is located in.   These are described below. Option 1: Centre all the gadgets in your blog To center-align every single gadget in your blog, just, add a CSS rule to your blog .  The rule to add is: .widget {   text-align: center; }  This will centre the contents and title of every gadget on your blog. Option 2: Only center-align the specific gadget To only centre-align one gadget, which is made from HTML/Javascript code, you can just put the gadget-code from the 3rd party (eg PayPal, Amazon, etc) inside a centering statement, like this: <div style="text-align: center;"> PUT THE...

Lining up the first post and the sidebar

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In some Blogger templates, there is a big gap between the bottom of the header and the start of the first post, and this means that the posts and the sidebar are not aligned.  This article explains how to adjust the gap, and so remove that problem . In the templates that Blogger provides , as well as all third-party templates, 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 template , 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, which looks strange unless you put something...

Getting the HTML code to put a picture into your blog's sidebar, header or footer

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This article explains how to use Blogger's Post Editor to get the HTML code that you need to put a picture into your sidebar (or header or footer, or anywhere else a gadget can go). The Picture gadget is the normal tool for adding a picture to your blog's sidebar . But sometimes you want more control over the picture size or behaviour.  Eg, you may want to have two pictures very close to each other and guarantee that they're the same size. To do this, you need to get the HTML code for the picture, and then put it into your blog as an HTML-gadget.  Fortunately, Blogger's Post-editor make it very easy to do this without writing the code yourself. Using the Post Editor to generate the HTML for a picture 1  Start a new Post   (you're not ever going to publish this:  it's just a work-area) 2  Don't enter any text:   just use the Picture icon on the toolbar to add a picture .   Blogger will prompt you to upload the picture, or to choose it from ...

Showing your oldest blog-post first - and the rest in reverse order.

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Blogger doesn't have an option to display your posts in reverse order - so that the oldest post is first, and the most recent post is last.   But this article describes displaying your posts in this way by manipulating their post dates.  And it links to an article about some other possible options. Previously I've discussed the options for giving your blog a home page.   One option is to organise the post-date for each of your posts, so that you control the order posts are displayed in. This is easy enough to do, although there are a couple of risks that you need to be aware of as discussed below. Blogger Posts and the Post-date Each Post in your blog has a date-time value, which is called its "post-date".   Normally , this is set to the date/time when you publish the post for the first time.  But you can change the post date for any post , and you can do this either when you publish it first, or later on. The post-date is important because it control...