Friday, January 26, 2007

Dumb Computers

I'm with Sarah on this one. Changing these blogs is a pain. Lately I've been trying to teach myself HTML and XHTML to see if I can create webpages and change the format of this blog. I've had some success understanding how my blog is put together, and even figuring out how to make some changes. This started when I was still signed up under the old blogger. But, it seems that anything in computerland labeled as "old" means "soon to be eliminated". So yesterday I decided to change to the new blogger.

I think by new they mean "as complicated as possible so no one can change our genius creations". So much for my knowledge of XHTML. Now they're using xml something-or-other. And what are widgets!? I'm lost, again.

4 comments:

Britta said...

Here's a blurb from the face-value definition of widget on wikipedia:
"The text... intentionally refrains from revealing what "widgets" are; clearly, they represent any purely mercantile commodity that has no artistic or spiritual value."

Ha ha.

Anonymous said...

This comment is for all of you who want to edit your blogs but don't know how to get going... Heres a crash course: (I am not trying to be a mr know-it-all or anything, just trying to give a few helpful hints...)

A widget is like a gadget, module, thing-a-mabob, or any other thing that really could mean anything in computer programing. In this case, the widgets are the sections of code that define the header, footer, blog section, links section, archive section etc. You separate them into widgets so that each section can have its own style and features.

On the Page Elements tab of editing the template, each one of those items you can edit/delete/update is a widget in the code. The trick to changing the blogs these days is uploading your images or code as a widget, then getting your widget in the right place, then changing the CSS styles in the HTML.

The other trick is in the HTML the widgets have properties like: locked=true, maxwidgets=1 etc. (They are pretty self explanatory) I change these so that locked is false so I can move the widgets anywhere I want and can resize them etc.

(I suggest just downloading your template to your computer, making a copy of everything, then making your changes, then uploading your template... this way if you mess up you always have a backup copy...)

Karen K. said...

Huh? I think our blog is going to remain the same...I'll just enjoy the rest of yours, widgets and all.

Britta said...

Thanks, Brett, that helped a lot!