Christine's Blog Templates

Ideas For Presenting Your Photoblog

• Make your images the focus of your blog.
  • Set your blog to show just one entry per page. This will make the one image the focus of the page, and will also speed loading time.
  • Have as little other stuff on the page as possible. Consider making entries that provide information such as "about me" and "favorite links" and linking to them (with a linklist widget, or even by giving them a label) rather than having that information on the page at all times.
  • Keep your color scheme simple so it doesn't compete with your images for attention.
• For Label pages which list only titles, rather than displaying entire entries- try this Table of Contents hack from Hans at Beautiful Beta. It's particularly nice for photoblogs, where label pages may take a long time to load due to multiple images.
  1. Open your template on your "Edit HTML" Blogger page, under the "Template" tab.
  2. Select all and copy the template, and paste into Notepad, and save as backup in case you need it! This hack is kind of tricky.
  3. Check the "Expand Widget Templates" box just above the large text box there.
  4. Select all, copy, paste into NOTEPAD. This is going to be a much expanded and more complex version of your template's code.
  5. Using NOTEPAD's "Find" feature, under the edit menu, search for
     <b:includable id='main' var='top'>
  6. You are going to have to carefully go down the page and find the very next place it says
     </b:includable>
     It will be the next line that goes all the way to the left side of the page. This includable end tag is present several times on the template, and if you are not careful to get the correct one, you will delete something from your page that you didn't want to delete.
  7. Delete these two tags, and everything between them, and hit the line break a few times to create a space, so you don't lose the correct spot in the code.
  8. Now you go to Hans' article and click the link to the .txt file.
  9. Select all, copy, and paste the contents of his .txt file into the spot on your template where you just deleted the original includable.
  10. On your Blogger Edit HTML page, select all and delete your template (remember you made a backup copy, so it's ok), and replace it with the edited template you've just created.
  11. Preview the template. If you're getting a "delete widget" error message, you've deleted too much from the page. Do not click confirm and save. Click "clear edits". Highlight and copy the code from Blogger, paste into Notepad. Begin again at #5 above.
  12. When it previews without errors, save the changes. You won't be able to see the changes to your label pages without saving first.
  13. Go to your blog and click on one of your label links. The page you get should show a list of links to entries using that label, not the complete entries.
  14. If you have any problems, just go back to the template you saved before making this modification.