Does every blog start with “Welcome to my blog?”
Does every blog start with “Welcome to my blog?”
Survey says: yup. Well, a lot of them do. A quick Google search yields 2,160,000 returns for that statement. First up? U.S. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.
I was about to feel all humble and outclassed, until I got to line two:
This is new to me. I can’t say I’m much of a techie. I guess you could say my office is teaching the old guy new tricks. But I’m excited. This is the future. And it is a new way for us to get our message out.
Not exactly sure what “our message” is… as fellow bloggers, do he and I have the same one? I doubt it, but I’m happy to get it out regardless. Feels much better.
Makes me feel young again, at least by comparison. See? The self-proclaimed “old guy” (left, which I hope is obvious) is so old he’s in black & white!
And look, it gets even better in his bio:
Whenever he can find free time, Hastert enjoys attending wrestling meets, going fishing, restoring vintage automobiles, carving and painting duck decoys.
Looks like my work is cut out for me. If “Welcome to my blog” is good enough for Mr. Speaker, it’s good enough for me.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 07-11-2006 | 02:07 AM
Posted in: Blogging
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I started my new blog with “Don’t mind the mess… or the boxes”
So you did! Tiny, green boxes no less. Thanks for droppy by, Bis. Your blog have some very cool add-on features I’ll have to steal. Still trying to figure out how to add tags, myself.
Ok, the technorati tags thing:
1. Use Firefox and then take a gander at this:
Ask and ye shall receive, as I’ve looked at a lot of things.
And so you have an idea of what I started with, my first blog template basically used a similar theme as yours in greens. I’ve come pretty far since the week of April 23rd.
Cool, I’ll totally take you up on that offer.
I’ve started figuring out the tags thing (see my first post), though the results don’t show anything yet. My guess is that it just hasn’t circulated through Technorati yet, even though I did ping them. Is that likely?
So my next thing to figure out (which you’ve already got…): adding a separator graphic between posts. I’m particularly irked by the way two posts from the same day are so close together.
Ok, when you see a ( or ) it is really a of course, you know enough about html for me not to have to mention that.
In your template, you should find the following line.
( !– End .post — }
Above which is a closing ( /div ) tag and above that closing tag, you can put a graphic or even a horizontal rule to separate your entries. I made one specifically for my blog, after all, I do have cutlery in my title.
Or if you don’t want a graphic, you can also add some padding to the .post element… like maybe something like this:
.post {padding-top: 5px; }
But you get the idea.
Now the tags issue. I don’t know if you are using a hit counter like sitemeter which will allow you to see where your referrals are coming from. I did just click on your tags and they are working however, as you do come up in searches(but gor[b] is breaking the search command because I don’t think technorati likes [b])
Well, you can see that this worked just fine! Thanks again.
So, my next three tweaks:
1) Put spaces where my profile is displayed - the missing spaces between “Name:Paul” and “Location:Toronto” irk me
2) Figure out a way to link the topic titles to the single article pages, like you have on your blog:
http://rantocracy.blogspot.com/
3) Dressing up my quotations a little - the mere indentation isn’t quite enough.
Either with horizontal rules, like here:
http://kiss-for-blogger.blogspot.com/
Or something more dramatic (but not quite as dramatic as this):
http://newzen-for-blogger.blogspot.com/
Much later, I’d like to look into a better way to display the comments (but I decided against the Metempsychosis Comments hack.) But that’s way down the list.
For #2, try this(find the BlogItemTitle section in your template) and then replace that code with the following stuff.. with the right brackets of course… replace them all with
(BlogItemTitle)
{h3 class=”post-title”)
{a href=”($BlogItemPermalinkURL$)” title=”permalink”)
($BlogItemTitle$)
(/a)
(/h3)
(/BlogItemTitle)
For your quotations, you can add a rule for blockquote in your css as well… maybe put a margin on the top and bottom of the element to give it that visual impact that you want(like have it so one is thicker than the other). It could work.
See, I thought you might have also been looking at having a graphic at the top of your blog as well.
Thanks, I figured out those two things also. Now for those little spaces.
I had thought of changing the header graphic, but I’m not sure to what…