EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT HTML I LEARNED FROM BLOGGER

Okay, that's not 100% true. It sure has given me cause to boost my abilities though just to sharpen my abilities to adjust the template of my site here to what I want it to look like.

Are you intimidated by HTML? Don't worry, I have been too in the past, and the image of those letters probably will haunt me to some degree until my dying day. It's an imposing language, and it is a language all its own, known mostly to the inhabitants of techno-geekville (that was said in a loving way, all you techno-geeks out there, I worship you).

I don't think there's any way to be fluent in any language if you don't speak it all the time, in every aspect of your life. Can you just imagine a true geek's dinner-table converstation?

"Please <> the < / center > bowl to the < align=" left"> please."

Oh well, I imagine it would sound even more mind-boggling that that. I guess who I'd really worship if they were allowed to see the light of day, are the spouses of such mind-blowing wonders.

Still, it is possible to break the code, or at least bend it to the non-geeks will. My first hint at how to figure out ways to create something you want: CHEAT.

That's right--cheat. Go find a similar site. It helps if they're on the same host if the host, (ahem, like blogspot) has their own templates and you're using one as a base pattern, but it's not completely necessary. Anyway, if you've found something you like--for instance I wanted to place my own banner at the top of this page instead of just words--right click on the site you found with such a display, and then click on 'view code'. Scan the massive array of confusing mumbo-jumbo and garbled web-speak to find the area you think holds the magic key. Copy that to a work page (word page if you use word, or the like) and using whatever skills you have at your disposal for code, attempt to tweak it to your own. I use a book of HTML that helps me cheat by looking up certain tags and how to use them so I don't have to remember it all.

It's important to 1) make these code blips first on a seperate page so you don't do something stupid, like update the site, by accident with an incomplete, or bad code. Most important is a second 'cheat' that you must have in place... a dummy site. I use my old blog as my test page. So number 2) is once you have the code you think is good to go, apply it to the same area as the viewed code on the other site, and save the changes... if it works out well with the dummy site, and no worlds collide, and nothing crashes, you're good to go with your main site.

In fact, sometimes it's just a simple little thing. When I re-dated this blog with my banner, I had to change the template I was using because that particular one simply REFUSED to allow me to put a banner up on top, lol... I showed it--delete, replace--done. LOL. But along with the new design I got a center alignment to EVERYTHING on the page, and I hated that. I'd seen a different blog that used the same template as I use as my base, and it did not have that cursed 'center' alignment so... yep, I cheated. I opened the view source window, and it was such a simple little thing. Right up at the top it had 'alignment=left', where mine had 'center'... run back to my blog, open the template, and type in 'left' to replace the 'center', and viola! It worked.

Never say die, and don't let the bastard win... wasn't that a line in a movie somewhere?

It's true though...

Hey, it works, and the world won't explode after all, even if you're not a techno-God.