Gotta Start Somewhere... Or Not

Yesterday, I was finally feeling tired of reading, and reading and reading instead of actually DOING, so I decided it would be the day that I would actually make a change to my base template. There's only so much you can read before you have to actually START.

So you're expecting something to have changed on the template, right? Well, trying to change SOMETHING (I decided to go easy and just add my background) highlighted some challenges that I did not foresee because I hadn't actually LOOKED at my template yet.

I THOUGHT I understood the skeleton of blogger, but then I looked at the head tag, where all the CSS is to add my background code, and I didn't understand a lot of things. Like wtf is .body-fauxcolumn-outer?? (and there where other other like .cap and whatnot) Nowhere in all my basic blogger template reading did I see anything mentioning that tag (or is it class?)!

I thought it might be just the template I was using (The Simple tempalte) so I change to the Ethereal template. Well, the same code was there, so I think it might be just a think with the preset blogger templates.

At this point I remembered reading in one of the articles/series that someone was sharing a very basic blogger template as a starting point. Now in WHICH article was it?? I've been reading blog template stuff on 3 computers, so it's not like I could just go back through my history. I'm pretty good at remembering things based on what the page looked like, so I knew if I could just find the webpage that I pictured in my mind, all would be good.

I'm also trying really hard to save all the articles I'm reading for future reference, either here like I started doing in my first research posts, or organized in my OneNote (but sometimes I have a hard time finding it bc I try to over organize my pages in there).

Needless to say I couldn't figure out which article it was. Well, I knew the articles I was refinding were not it, I knew which one I was looking for but where had I looked at it?? And I was pretty sure I had not yet closed the tab. I finally found it last night. It was on my netbook, the one I use the least often. Good thing I decided to do some bedtime blog reading, or else I still wouldn't have found it! And don't worry I've saved the article now.

So, here's a list of the articles and series that have helped me most understand the anatomy of the blogger template, which is quite different from other templates from what I understand.

1. From Blogger Guide starting with Understanding Blogger Template. There's just a couple of posts after this one also that really help.

2. At Theme Forest, there's this article from Amanda of Blogger Buster as a guide for web designers. This is where I found the basic template (in the middle of the article, you can download the template). It's really quite comprehensive and has great info about widgets and such.

3. This series at Our Blog Template is also very good and clear.

I must have read others, but those were the most helpful to get started and feel a little more confident once I open the blogger template (and also the ones I managed to save). They don't discuss as much WHAT to change, but more making sure you understand the anatomy and know where to put what and what not to touch.

Also, reading many articles, from different authors, really helps because everyone has a different way of explaining. What might click with one article might not click in your mind from an other article. Also, repeat exposure helps.

Even after all that reading, I was still stuck not understanding my template. So I downloaded the one from Amanda at Theme Forrest (#2 above). When I opened it in Notepad, it was all a wide and hard to scroll though document, so I started making Enters and Tabs to be able to read it better.

I found this a wonderful exercise. Especially for the body section with all the div tags and b: tags. That's where I am now. Trying to keep the hiaerchy of it all, seeing what goes inside what and indenting properly. Helps to understand the containers to know what I will need to modify later, and how. I'm probably going to go back and read some more after. I'm realizing now that as much as I thought I understood from just reading, I didn't, and hands on playing with the template is what really makes it stick. And then probably when I re read I'll understand even better, and it'll stick and stay in my mind even better!

TBC...