Test post

Update 21 May 2007: Stavanger of Blogcrowd has made a couple of changes for access to his templates. Now you have to register, sign in, made at least 3 posts in his forum (shouldn't be too difficult, make some posts regarding your blogs, may even provide links to your blog to increase exposure).

Backing up and changing template

Before changing or editing a template, it is always good practice to backup the current template so that if there is anything you are not satisfied with or if anything goes wrong, you can always revert to the previous situation. To backup the template, sign into the Dashboard, and in the relevant section of the list of blogs, click "Layout", then click the "TEMPLATE" tab, then click the "EDIT HTML" sub-tab which will open the template editor window. At the top of the page, click "Download Full Template" and save the template with a suitable filename into a suitable folder which you can easily remember.

To change to a new template from the selection below, in the same template editor window, click inside the window, press "ctrl + A" to highlight all the template codes and press the "delete" key and the template editor window will be empty, ready for you to paste the new template that you obtained from any of the choices below. Then in the page where the new template is given, click inside the codes, press ctrl+A to highlight all the codes, right-click and select "copy" to copy the new template to the clipboard, go back to the template editor, click inside the template editor window, right-click and select "paste". Make sure the last 2 lines of the template is



All these is best done with a browser that has tabbed browing like FireFox which is one of two browsers recommended by Blogger. You can download and install FireFox with Google toolbar by clicking on "Browse the web better with Firefox with Google toolbar" at the top of the right sidebar of all my blogs. Then you can have the template editor window opened in one tab and Stavanger's template page opened in another tab.

Fixed and fluid width templates and screen resolution

Templates can have either fixed or fluid width. Blogs using a fluid template will have its main column width adjusted according to the screen width so that there is no need to scroll horizontally. The disadvantage of a template with a fluid template is that the appearance of the blog will change with the screen resolution, and a photo or table which may appear OK in a large screen may cause the sidebar to slide to the bottom of the page. Fixed width template however, will appear the same in all screen resolutions, but for a smaller screen, you may have to scroll horizontally to see the rest of the right sidebar. The template I am using is a center fixed width template. If you are using a larger screen to view this blog, you may see white spaces on both side of the content. If you want to observe how a visitor with a smaller screen (800x600 screen resolution) sees this blog type or copy-paste javascript:top.resizeTo(800,600) into the address bar and press the enter key. You can do the same thing with all the example blogs given below