Overview
If you have a blog, how can you make it more interesting or more “you”?
Blog popularity is due in large part o blogs’ simplicity. Blog hosts have made setting up a personal site easy. Every one on the Internet—no mater what level of technical proficiency—is capable of setting up ablog.
But what if you’re a little further along in the blog experience and are ready for a change? One of the best ways is to redesign your blog and add new features. This section takes an existing blog and tweaks it so that it’s more your style. You learn how to:
• Customize your blog—Add an image or change colors — by editing the blog template
• “Automate” your site so that your readers know when a new post appears using a technology called RSS
• Subscribe to dozens of blog sand receive their most recent posts automatically using RSS aggregators
• Connect with other bloggers using a commenting technology called track backs
Let’s look at site redesign first. Basically this involves grabbing your blog’s template and modifying the HTML and CSS in the template. What are HTML and CSS? Here’s the quick description:
• Hyper Text Mark up Language(HTML)—The native language of the World WideWeb. HTML codes are used to format a page for display to the user. Codes suchas <body></body> for the body of the page and <table></table> for tables are used (along withmany others). You can learn more about HTML codes and how to use HTML at this address:
htp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Html.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)—A newer standard for formating web pages. CSS separates the presentation of a page (how it looks) from its content (what the page says). You can design with HTML alone, but making changes to the way HTML looks also changes the content. CSS changes do not affect content just the way it looks. You can read more about CSS at this address: htp:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets.
If you’ve never seen CSS or HTML before, just walk through the exercises to learn how your blog template operates before actually making changes.
Redesigning Your Blog
Most blog hosts provide templates that look profesional and are easy to read. As we have done a general install we can load any we want. Have a look in the download section. Why changea good thing? Well, for starters, if your blog has become popular, it needs to look different to set it apart from the pack of blogs.
Suppose that you have a blog and want to customize it. This section shows you how to modifythe templates most blog hosts provide and also assumes that you know very little about HTML or CSS.
Most blogs rely on templates (see Figure 1) — predesigned HTML pages that give your blog a sense of design dignity.
