[bloggage] Exploring the New Blogger: Editing Layout

722 The first thing I want to find in the new Blogger in how tweakable the HTML is.

My current template is still Classic mode, and the editing I've done in the sidebar is direct and HTML-textable: I went in to the "Edit HTML" pane of the Template tab and lovingly typed in every link, styled every textual bit, and set up little javascript widgets all by myself, and I've gotten fairly confident in what I've been doing there.

New Blogger's "Layouts" both streamline the process and place a barrier between me and the code. Example: I just installed the "Graphic Design World Domination" logo on a test blog I'm playing with. It's 350 px X 350 px. Now, in the classic template, I inserted the "size=200px" attribute in the img tag that linked to it, which made it fall nicely into line since 200 px is the width of the rest of the banner art there.

In the new Layout process, however, the img tag that refers the image doesn't seem directly editable. You can upload a picture and drag it from the footer to the sidebar (niftykeen), but even with "shrink to fit" checked it still comes up huge and chopped. So I download the image, resize it to 200 x 200, and replace. Works fine.

Acually, Pariah says I should be doing that anyway, since if you let your browser resize images you'll usually end up with bad-looking images. I've never noticed this, but my eyes are not the strongest in the world. I'm probably not seeing it.

The sidebar elements are pretty inscrutable at this moment. The functionality of the page elements seem to be based on something in the XHTML called the "widget", which can be expanded in the edit HTML view, but seem to have none of the content I put into them; rather, they seem to refer to data that is stored elsewhere, which location I've not found yet.

But then this new XHTML code is eye-glazing, at least for the moment. I'm seeing tags that I'm going to have to get educated up on, no doubt about that.

Tags: bloggage, New Blogger, Blogger Templates, XHMTL, Sidebar coding