Stretch! (and scream ever so quietly!)

I've changed my template to the Denim stretch template. Here's a few tips for if you're planning to make a change

• download your old template first. That's so that if you don't like what you get when you select a new one you can upload it from your computer!
• now go into the html view and expand the widgets. Block and copy all html and copy it over into notepad and save it in the same place as the template file with a suitable name like "bloghtml". The reason you need to do this is because all your codes for Google Analytics and anything else which gets inserted outside the html widget will get lost when you update the template. It's an awful lot easier to see what you need to transfer in a notepad file
  
• also make a note of all the hex codes for all the colours you chose. These are also noted in the html - but I jotted them down anyway!
• then make a note of any useful little tweaks you've made (like my html code for the quote boxes - which you can see posted on the right)

html code for the
coloured blockquote box
(works in 'Denim')

After you've done all that then you can:

• decide which new template you want to go for - use the preview function to decide
• activate the new template
• change all the default colours back to your chosen colours.
• reinsert all critical html which comes at the beginning or end of the template (eg Google Analytics)
• reinsert all coding tweaks. (Last night I had to do this via the html as Denim Stretch wouldn't allow me to change the code from inside the Layout/Fonts and Colours section.)
  

Why change?

I didn't really want to however I need to increase font sizes to work with my big screen and somewhere something seems to have gone wrong. For some unknown reason my widescreen monitor has taken to showing all websites either in the monitor format (ie stretched to 1680 x 1050) or in what appears to be the old basic 800 x 600 format only (which my previous blog format exceeded).

Last week I could expand my non-stretchy websites and make both sites and fonts bigger using the zoom function. Yesterday and today the fonts increase but the websites no longer expand - and they're also narrower than they were before.

If I look at the error console it tells that I'm getting an error in parsing width and a declaration is dropped. Quite meaningless to me and I've not a clue what to do.

So far in trying to sort it out I've switched to a display of 125% of normal font size and increased the refresh rate to 75 Hertz.

Nothing I do reinstates the ability to expand the width of the 'fixed width' websites (such as Blogger and Squidoo) as I was doing before

If anybody has any suggestions I'd be most grateful.