It's Here!

All righty now, what do you think? It should load faster now and easier, how about it Mayberry, is it working better for you or is it still giving your computer a headache? I will be tweaking it, moving things around, but for the most part, this is what you will be looking at, when on this site, from now on, or at least until I choose another background.

I cringed when blogger recently changed to the new blog designer, I had just gotten pretty good at tweaking the old site, I immediately made a new test blog and checked out the code, it looked nothing like the original code, and it was clear that there was no way to add your own backgrounds, you had to use theirs. I couldn't find the background image, no gif, no jpg, nothing that said "this is the background", so I decided not to change it to the new designer/template.

My old design was heavily edited, so much so that some of the new and old tweaks (from blogger) would not work, such as I couldn't add labels to each post, oh I could add them but they wouldn't show below the message, I also couldn't add the share buttons, it just wouldn't show at all, I wouldn't risk screwing up my blog by going back to the original template, so I just lived without some of those fun items.

I have since found out through trial and error where and what the code is for the background, all you have to do is right click on the side of the page (assuming you are using the new designer), move your cursor off of anything except for the background, and choose the option to view the background, once that is opened, look at the URL, now, copy that URL, go to the edit HTML tab and do a search for that URL, you will see that it's a strange list of characters instead of a gif or jpg, that's why it's so hard to find.

Now that you know what and where it is, all you have to do is create a background image and upload it somewhere, most places that host pictures will allow you to hot link to the picture, now trade the URL of your image with the URL of the original background image in the edit HTML tab, be sure to preview your blog BEFORE you make the edit permanent, you might need to tweak the size of the image, if everything looks the way you want it to, then save your template. I would highly recommend that you make a test blog and try out any changes on that instead of experimenting on your main/live blog, then once you have it the way you like, then before making any changes to your main/live blog, be sure to download your original template, that way if something goes terribly wrong, you can easily upload your original template and then try to figure out what went wrong.

Now, if all of this is clear as mud to you, don't worry, the fine folks at blogger know that some bloggers are partial to their own backgrounds, even though they offer a mega-assortment of backgrounds, they will be making it an option in the future to upload your own background, it's even available to do if you use the draft version of blogger now, to use that, when in your dashboard, replace "www"with "draft" (without the quotes)  and you will be in the draft version and get to see all the fun stuff that you didn't get to see before, one warning though, just like anything beta, it may be unstable, I couldn't get it to work for me right now, that will probably change soon.

They also have a way you can edit or add to the CSS (including how to alter the background), go here to learn more about that
http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=175740

OK, I'm tired now, it's been a loooong day, my Dad is here for a visit, he will be staying for a month,  I got up fairly early today, early for me, I'm ready to go to bed. Hope you enjoy the new look, let me know what you think, please leave a comment and answer anything you want below:

do you like new the look
does it load any faster than it did before
does everything fit well on your screen
what size is your monitor
do you use a desktop or laptop
is your computer newer or older
what is your screen resolution
what is your internet/connection speed
what browser do you use

Thanks!

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