The Blogger Guide passed another milestone today; the unique visits count crossed the one hundred thousand mark!
It's just over two years since the inception, and given the relatively little amount of time I put in, this is a great achievement for me. It's been a slow but steady growth.
Thanks for all the help in spreading the word about The Blogger Guide.
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This is to inform you that I have completed the domain name transition from bguide.blogspot.com to www.bloggerguide.lk.
The FeedBurner feeds should work without a problem, as I have not changed the feed address.
Thank you,
ids.
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The purpose of this post is to let all the subscribed readers know that The Blogger Guide will switch to a custom domain starting next week. The new URL is www.bloggerguide.lk and I hope to complete the transition during the course of the next week.
Hopefully the transition will be smooth, but there can be some unexpected hiccups, especially with my feeds. Once all the configurations are complete, I will do another post on the week starting Jan 4th, 2010. If you come across any problems in receiving feeds after the transition, please drop me a mail on bloggerguide@gmail.com.
Thank you and sorry for any inconvenience that you might come across.
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Copying content from MS Word and pasting directly on to the Blogger post editor can upsets the template styles and on most occasions, it directly affects the URL colors (i.e. the link, visited link colors etc). Over the past six months or so I have observed this question getting raised on the Blogger help forums several times and on all occasions it was caused by the same reason. (see this one for example)
Here's how it happens.
The text editor in MS Word is referred to as a Rich Text editor, meaning that it support various rich formatting such as bold, italics, different fonts and colors and also many styles such as Heading 1, Heading 2, Body Text and so on. It's true that Blogger editor also gives some formatting options, but MS Word offers much much more style and formatting options. In order to support these additional formatting, MS Word keeps a whole lot of meta data in addition to the basic text you type. If you copy some text from a Word document, all the meta data also gets copied in the background and, when you directly paste that on to Blogger, you get that whole gamut of meta data as well. (Paste a single word directly from MS Word, go to the Edit HTML mode of Blogger editor and see the amount of meta information that get's pasted for that single word)
Once you publish such a post, your template styles get messed up due to the styles copied over from MS Word and the final result will be problems such as the one describe above.
If you draft your posts using MS Word, first pasting on to a simple text editor such as Notepad will strip off all the style information and will leave you with only the text you typed. Then copy from Notepad and paste on to Blogger editor. You will now have all what you typed minus all the formatting (such as bold, italics, fonts etc). This obviously has the problem of you having to reapply all the formatting using the Blogger's editor, but that is a safer approach as it will not mess up your template styles.
(Note: Same problem can occur with other Rich Text editors as well)
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Today marks the first birthday of The Blogger Guide! It’s been one full year since the very first article, titled Understanding Blogger Templates, was posted here. What a year it has been!
This post is the 80th on TBG and, looking back, it has been quite an effort to write that much in the space of a single year. I’ve written extensively about the under the hood details of Blogger templates , many popular tutorials on how to convert default Blogger templates in to three columns and how to make them wider and also a lot of tips on template customizations. Since of late, TBG touched on the topic of blog monetization as well.
Over the past year, TBG had nearly 27,000 thousand visitors and over 55,000 page views. The subscriber base, through both Feed Burner and Blogger Followers, has gone over fifty. During this time, I’ve helped thousands of Blogger users at many forums such as the Blogger Help Group and also have solved problems of numerous readers who reached me via email. And what’s more, in a single year, TBG has achieved a Google Page Rank of 3!
Thank you all the readers out there for all the suggestions, comments and feedback given to bring TBG to this level. TBG will continue to provide the articles, tutorials, howtos etc that you’ve valued so much, whilst keeping with its moto of empowering Blogger users with simple and clear guides with illustrations.
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Since its inception, The Blogger Guide has had a more technical focus. I’ve written about the basic of the Blogger template, explained the intricacies of converting to 3 columns and how to add custom CSS styles to Blogger. Then, there are the extremely popular step by step guides for three column conversions and wider post areas for many of the famous Blogger templates. And recently I completed a detailed series of posts looking at the internals of the Blog Widget.
Being a Computer Engineer, it’s no wonder that I have been writing articles with a technical focus. One of the primary objectives of this blog was to explain the technical details of Blogger, for the average non-technical user, in clear, simple English. Looking at the reactions from my readers, I can safely assume that I’ve been successful in doing that.
Starting from today, The Blogger Guide will expand its scope beyond the technicalities of Blogger. As the first step, I will venture in to one of the most sought after topics by bloggers, blog monetization. In other words, I will write about how you can make money blogging! But, without being a yet another listing of money making tips, I intend to offer a more complete guide including what those avenues are, how to incorporate them to your Blogger blog and their income potentials.
That’s not all. Tips on search engine optimization, Blogger templates and template design tips are all in the pipeline. And rest assured, I will continue to offer the technical assistance that you all found useful so far.
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I've just made it easier for you to follow The Blogger Guide, by enabling Blogger's Followers widget. Now you can easily keep track of all the clear and simple technical tutorials and tips that you always loved.
Go ahead and become a follower and show your appreciation! Thank you.
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Hope something on this blog has been useful to you and I assume that’s why you are here. It’s indeed my pleasure to have you helped you! Given below are some methods in which you can show your appreciation.
Donate
Make a small donation to cover my basic costs. Remember, every dollar counts, so donate only what you are comfortable with. And there’s no obligation at all; donate only if you wish to do so. :-) Use the PayPal Donate button in the sidebar to donate.
Link to This Blog
You are absolutely free to use the various resources such as images, scripts etc provided with some of the tutorials. However, if you do use them, I appreciate if you can put The Blogger Guide to your Blog List and/or write a post in your blog linking to the relevant tutorial
Bookmark the Articles
Sharing and bookmarking the articles is another good way to say thanks. Submit to Digg, Stumble, add to Technorati favorites or add to whatever social bookmarking service you use.
Rate My Posts/Blog
If you found this blog via an answer given by me on a forum such as Blogger Help Group, Blogger Forum or BlogCatalog, then please rate or rank my posts/blog on those forums.
Spread the Word
Tell your friends and family; refer them to The Blogger Guide.
Thank You,
ids.
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When you try to customize your blog, you come across situations where you have to deal with some cryptic numbers that represent colors. For example, if you want to customize your AdSense ad units to match your blog's colors, you have to edit its various color elements.
These numbers are called the RGB color values and they are specified as hexa-decimal numbers (Hexa-decimal means the base 16 number system and in the absence of digits beyond 0..9, letters 'a' through 'f' are used for values '10' through '15'). RGB stands for the 3 basic colors Red, Green and Blue. A computer knows only to work with binary (i.e. 0 and 1) numbers. So what we write in the above cryptic form is actually a 24 bit color number.
The 24 bits are divided in to 3 equal parts of 8 bits, each representing one of the basic colors. 8 bits is 1 byte, so we have 3 bytes of information making up a color value. This is, in fact, the color used to paint an individual pixel (or picture element) on the screen. So a white background means a background where each pixel in that background is displayed using the color value #ffffff.
An RGB color value is specified with a leading '#' character. The '#' tells the computer that the proceeding number is a hexa-decimal number. The next 6 digits represent the color values for R,G,B using two digits for each. Each of the main colors are divided in to 256 different gradients and a number between 0..255 is assigned to each gradient. In binary, 255 is the largest number you can write using an 8-bit number (i.e. 11111111). Decimal '0' maps to binary 00000000.
A value that we write using 8 binary digits can be written using only two hexa-decimal digits. So the value 'fifteen' is written as 15 in decimal, as 1111 in binary and as ff in hex. This allows us to easily represent a 24 bit binary number as a 6 digit hexa-decimal number.
Therefore the number #6699cc tells the computer that the color values are 66 for R, 99 for G and cc for B. Those values map to the decimal numbers 102, 153 and 204 respectively. Another shortened form to right RGB colors is to use decimal numbers as in RGB(102,153,224).
This article explains a simple technique to find out the RGB color values of a given color.
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