I guess we are supposed to describe some of these Web 2.0 tools in a little detail. A lot of us are using Blogspot, so we have some familiarity already. So you already know you can "Add Page Element" to add one of 18 different "widgets" (mostly displaying Google content such as news and images). I noticed some blogs had other content and wanted to do something different. Searching around I found http://www.widgetbox.com/. They have tens of thousands of widgets to add to blogs. What is really slick is how easy it is to add them to your blog. Just follow the directions, it's only a couple of clicks, and it's added to your blog. There are other sites with widgets, such as mashable.com, but widgetbox seems to have the best selection I could find.
I also wanted to spruce up the look. It seems you can easily change colors and place background images behind page elements, but I wanted to put a background behind the entire blog. Blogger provides the raw HTML for your editing pleasure. With a little searching I found direction on how to edit the background section of the HTML CSS template to point to a URL of an image. Alas, where do I put the image? I found another trick for that. Create a posting with a picture, a picture of the background. Change the date of the post to a long time in the past to push it to the end of the blog. Then view the source of the blog page to get the url to paste into the background section.
7 comments:
Why can't you just use the full URL to whatever picture you found for the background? I don't see why you'd need to copy it locally.
That seems like a long way around to implement a background with the ease of set background method function within the object-oriented programming languages.
The http://www.widgetbox.com/ site reminds me of the clipart sites that share a wide variety of bmp, gif, tiff, eps, etc. of images for inclusion in documents and presentations.
wincoder - I used the long way around because I didn't feel it was proper to point a URL to someone else's site, when pointing to another site the content may move, and I didn't want to host it at home.
Dave
Have you delved into how to put a podcast on the blog, I have already created one and I wanted to add it here. I am still searching for the correct combination. Any thoughts. But I can relate to what you are saying, this is my first instance into blogging and blogspot seems to fit the bill nicely.
tm - I haven't researched this yet - but here's my best guess. You'll need to host the content somewhere. For video you can use YouTube or Google Video. For audio only consider Gabcast or other services such as podango or podbean. You should then be able to add a link inside a blog posting, or add a page element with the content if you want it on your blog all of the time.
One of the benefits of hosting your own blog is not having to worry about where to store things like podcasts :)
Fun widgets, Dave! I have to tear myself away from some of the games. *laughs* I love Mahjong and Space Invaders...not to mention lateral thinking puzzles.
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