Blogger template tips and tricks

I know when I first started out in blogger I was nearly terrified to touch anything in my HTML for fear of completely screwing up everything. However that really is the only way you learn how to do things. So you can take a chance or you can rely on others to do it for you.

Granted, you probably won't want to do everything yourself but it is nice to do some of the smaller things. And when you do tweak your template and it actually works out for you it's a really cool feeling.

I am not going to teach you any specific template modifications in this post but I am going to give you a few hints on things that have helped me when you do decide to wander into that foreign world of HTML.

First things first, always download a backup of your template, just in case you go crazy and accidentally delete something unintentionally etc...

If your getting your modification instructions from a website/blog (as most of us do) it usually starts with something like this...

go to Layout>Edit HTML in your Blogger dashboard. Check the "Expand widget templates" box, then search for this section of code: This is usually followed but something reminiscent of a foreign language. You start scrolling through the template thinking you will go blind before you ever find what you are looking for.

First thing, press ctrl F, this will bring up a "find" box (in your browser) where you can type in what your looking for. Let say you are trying to find something like b:includable id='postQuickEdit' var='post' (this would be the first line of perhaps several lines of code your looking for) Type the first line or a few words at least in the Find box and it will automatically highlight the first instance of that phrase/word/s on the webpage you are on. Now sometime a particular phrase can be in a template more then once, so make sure you find the one you want. (press next or previous in the Find box area).

At this point you will usually need to replace some code or add something to what is already there. If I need to replace code I will usually (if it is my first time with a particular modification) copy the old code and paste it on note pad. That way if something goes wrong I have that old part of my code to put back into my template if needed.

So, you have replaced or added the new code and you go to save it and get an error from blogger that says some version of "your template could not be parsed as it is not
well-formed" or "no matching end tags" etc..... Don't panic, either you can
1)go back and check over the changes you just made to see if it all looks right (per directions from whatever website you using to do the mod from) if you can't find what might be wrong go to number 2.
2) Press "clear edits" and all the changes you made will be lost and therefore everything will go back to how it was before you started tweaking your template.
3) Do number 2 then start all over again because maybe you just missed something tiny that you didn't notice when you did number 1.

Something that has helped me many times when I just couldn't get what I wanted to work, was read through the comments of the post that is explaining the modification. Chances are at least one person has had the same problem as you and has figured out the problem and posted a fix for it or someone else has.

I have never written a post like this so I hope I explained it well enough for you to understand and I hope it helps.