Monday, March 09, 2009

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.

5 comments:

  1. I don't have any suggestions for you but thank you for posting the how to on changing your template. I have done this before only to spend all day trying to fix it afterwards. It sounds a lot easier the way you describe.

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  2. I'll ask my pc whizz (DH!) if he has any suggestions. One thing I noticed is that I can't click on your main banner now - coming from Bloglines into a single post and trying to get to the main blog.

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  3. Thanks Felicity.

    If you click on 'Making A Mark' in the banner then it goes direct to the 'home' page

    Or are you saying you can't get to the home page from Bloglines?

    ReplyDelete
  4. It's no longer possible to click on the banner to get to the home page. (Actually it's nothing to do with Bloglines, it's if I come from any link only showing the latest post.)I noticed just now that under the comments is a link for 'home' so I can do that instead.

    It usually happens if a blogger replaces the header with an image. I just find it easier to click on the header rather than look for the words 'main' or 'home' as they can be anywhere depending on how the blog is re-arranged!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I do the same thing

    I tested it by going to a dedicated URL for a past post and then clicking the banner.

    It still works is you click the title of the blog - right over 'Making A Mark'

    ReplyDelete

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