Saturday, January 31, 2009

Sidebar Has Fallen Down!

Every now and then, the above problem gets raised on many Blogger forums. Sometimes the request comes in the form of "My sidebar is missing!, please help". First of all, don't panic, it's not catastrophic.

The most common reason (I would say 90% of the time) for falling down sidebars has been the presence of unclosed <div> tags in one of the blog posts. i.e. a post without one or more matching </div> (note the /) tags for the corresponding <div> tags. Sometimes, it could be some other HTML tag. (For example, I have seen cases where a missing </script> tag caused the sidebar to be pushed down)

If a missing tag is the problem, the following method can be used to identify the post(s) that cause it.

Visit the individual pages of each post that appears on your home page. (For example, if you have configured your blog to show five recent posts on the home page, then visit each one of those five) In one (or more) of those posts, the sidebar will be pushed down, while it will appear normal in other posts. These posts are the ones that cause the problem.

Once you locate the trouble-making post (or posts), open it in Edit HTML mode and check for any unclosed <div> tags. Add the missing </div> tags and publish the post again. That should bring the sidebar back to its usual position.

Though the missing closing tags has been the biggest culprit for fallen sidebars, there are some other, rare reasons such as posting of large pictures or widgets in the sidebar and obscure script errors. If the above method does not fix your problem, then some more investigations are needed to locate the cause.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Blogger HOWTOs

Given below is a categorized list of HOWTOs available on The Blogger Guide.

Template Customizations

Site Traffic
Blog Promotion
Miscellaneous
Last Updated: 2009 Jan 29

Saturday, January 24, 2009

HOWTO: Upload Files to Blogger

A frequently asked question on many Blogger user groups is "How do I upload files to my blog?". Files refer to types of files such as .doc, .xls, .pdf etc. The simple answer is, you cannot upload any files to Blogger, other than images. But, don't worry, there is a simple alternative.

All you have to do is to upload your file to an online hosting service and link to that file from your Blogger blog. There are many free hosting services available today. Just google for "free file hosting" and you would a get a zillion of hits.

One such service is Google Pages, which allows you to create up to three accounts, each offering 100 MB of free storage. For example, the free resources provided by The Blogger Guide's three column conversion tutorials, wider post column tutorials, and the pdf file showing a mapping of CSS styles to Blogger templates are all hosted on such a Google Pages account.

Update: (2009 Sep 23)
Google Pages does NOT offer new accounts now. Fileave.com is another free file host.