Blogger Hack: Before I begin...

I want to change my Pregnancy Stories blog to three columns - Blogger Hack: Three Columns, Any Browser, but before I do, I need to retrace my steps and find the previous blog hacks I used, which will be deleted when I change the template to Minima to begin. So...

♦ First, the meta tags hack:
Blogger Title & Meta Tag Keyword ,Description hack - Blog SEO Tip
Some easy mods to optimize the Meta tags for Keywords, Description, Title and even customize for the Index page, post page and archive !

♦ Next, I added a picture to the header, and then moved over the words to the right so they were clear of the picture, by changing the header description margin - I added 300px at the end:

#header .description {
margin: 10px 5px 5px 300px;

♦ To create more white space between the main posts and the sidebars, I went to Add or Remove Borders in CSS Templates:

Scroll to where you see this and change or insert the code (shown in red):-

.post {
border:1px dotted #ff00ff;
padding:1.5em;
}

We have included a padding to give some space between the contents and the border. Without this padding, the text will be too close to the border.

♦ Had an idea, I wanted the background of the posts to be different than the rest of the page, so I went back to this and added:

.post {
background:#ffFFff;
padding:1.5em; }

♦ Then I added the label tabs - Tabs are in place!:
changing the background colour to match the page:

#tabsB {
float:left;
width:100%;
background:#FFFFe6;

♦ To place the label tabs below the Header, I changed this showaddelement to "yes", and dragged the new label Page Element there:

div id='crosscol-wrapper'
b:section class='crosscol' id='crosscol' showaddelement='yes'

♦ To move around all the Page Elements, the "maxwidgets" & "show elements" must be set to "2" & "yes".

There is one in the header:

b:section class='header' id='header'
maxwidgets='2' showaddelement='yes'

And the main wrapper:

div id='main-wrapper'
b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='yes'
/b:section

♦ Next adding FeedFlare to the footer - Paste the code just below

div class='post-footer'

or just above:

p class='post-footer-line

♦ To place the tiny pic next to the title of each post, I added the following between a expr:href='data:post.url' and data:post.title/:

img src='http://www.borntolove.com/tn_golden_egg2.jpg' style='border-width:0px'/

Hopefully that's all the changes I made, and I won't lose anything important as I begin the transformation!

Blogger Hack: Three Columns, Any Browser

This is so simple to do! I thought it would be hard, confusing and frustrating. But I found the initial info on Blogger Widget and Tips-Tricks, and then made a few changes to make it work for any brower size.

First I switched my test blog to the Minima template. Followed each of the steps in his post. Then I made some changes to his additions:

Step one:

#sidebar-wrapper {
width: 220px; (I changed 220px; to 25%;)
float: right;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}

Step Two:

#newsidebar-wrapper {
width: 220px; (I changed 220px; to 25%;)
float: left;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}

Step Three:

#outer-wrapper {
width: 850px; (I changed 850px; to 100%;)
margin:0 auto;
padding:10px;
text-align:left;
font: $bodyfont;
}

Then I found & changed the following:

#main-wrapper {
width: 410px; (I changed 410px; to 46%;)
float: $startSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}

and also:

#header-wrapper {
width: 660px; (I changed 660px; to 90%;)
margin:0 auto 10px;
border:1px solid $bordercolor;
}

and finally:

#footer {
width:660px; (I changed 660px; to 100%;)
clear:both;
margin:0 auto;
padding-top:15px;
line-height: 1.6em;
text-transform:uppercase;
letter-spacing:.1em;
text-align: center;

It's perfect! Now to try it here on this blog...

Marketing Tip for 1/9/08

Tried to sign up for Vibe today, but once I was signed in, I found most of the links didn't work and it's been over a month since anything new was added. I'll try to check back in a while to see if the site is active again.

Got a note about an update at dotdashcreate.com that they have added a "Add Your Blog" to your profile, and to change your profile from "Private" to "Public" if you wish people to be able to see your list of blogs. So I went back in and added my blogs.

The RSS line cut off the address, so I was unable to add that info in. I wrote to the owner of the site to see if that could be fixed, and if there was any way to update your blog listing once it was fixed?

UPDATE: Ashley, the owner and designer of dotdashcreate.com wrote to me the next day to let me know the problem was being fixed, wrote back when it was fixed and then offered to add in my RSS feed addresses for me. Which is quite an offer since I have 8 blogs listed! Very nice tech support, and I've already gotten some hits from this site. Thanks Ashley!

Marketing Tip for 1/8/08

Another place to promote your blog:

http://bloglist.visionmind.net/index.php/your-blog-here/

Best done in IE, because in Mozilla I couldn't see half of the form, and there was no submit button.


The main concept of The Blog List is really simple and very useful. It’s as easy as telling us what your blog is all about and let us divulge it. If you find this interesting add this blog to your favorites.

Tried to join Blogcave (A Social Networking Community Where Bloggers Meet Readers), but there is a glitch with their sign in page, and I can't get past it. It keeps telling me - "You missed some fields..." - I think that it is the 2nd password field that you can see for a few seconds when you go back, but then it disappears. Tried it in both IE and Mozilla - same problem.

Marketing Tip for 1/7/08

Finished adding my blogs to the Bumpeze site today, though I still need to go back and add widgets to a few of them. I figure I will wait till I update each blog's look. They offer to let you add a picture after you load each blog information, but there doesn't seem to be any way to connect the pictures to a blog. When you go to your dashboard, it says "screenshot not available yet".

Then I went and joined the Women Bloggers community that monawea suggested.

While I was checking on my blogs at BlogCatalog.com, I answered a few questions in the Women Bloggers discussion forum, hopefully making a few friends.

Making a typing error, when I was typing in Blogger.com, I ended up on Blogged.com (find better blogs), so I thought I would add my blogs there as well. So far, I am still waiting on a verification email, that hasn't arrived after a 2nd click. However, in the meantime, I am adding the blogs.

Better get to this one quick at Dotdashcreate.com:

Posted by ashleyford on the BlogCatalog discussion forum:
Everyone thats added their blogs on Dotdashcreate.com will get featured for Logged in users in the coming months, this will help to add to your readers and hits. Im also building a widget that will display random blogs on the homepage to help you all out with promotion.im closing the Submit your Blog form on the homepage shortly to non registered users so if you still haven't added your blog this is your last chance!

Tabs are in place!

It took me 5 DAYS, thanks to Blogger server problems, but I finally have the tabs up and working!

I used to have the tabs up on my Pregnancy Stories blog, and found people used them all the time, according to my stats on Statscounter.com. But when I updated the blog, I didn't know how to make them work in the new Beta Blogger, so deleted them. Right away, I noticed the difference, even though I provided text links at the top of the sidebar column.

But there have been many days of information overload, and I kept putting it off as too much work. Finally, looking at Horatio's blog, I realized that he had a new updated version for Beta Blogger, and decided to put them on here to test it out.

What an ordeal it became! Most of it was because of Blogger server problems - every time I tried to preview or save, I got error messages that it couldn't. Took me 5 days to finally save the last step. But it works like magic once it's done. I've added them back to the Stories blog as well.

The only thing I didn't like, was that there was no way to match up the background colour to my blog background colour, or to make it transparent. So I went back to Horatio's blog to see if he had any ideas?

What do I find? He has yet ANOTHER update to his tabs hack! Maybe in a few days I will tackle that one...

Marketing Tip for 1/6/08

Still struggling with the labels! Arrgh!

OK, today I came across a couple more sites in the BlogCatalog discussion forums, to list my blogs on.

1. Posted by keetsa : I just signed up for sitehoppin.com that brought me extra 500 visitors for the post I submitted. Check it out.

SiteHoppin' - Verb 1. - To go from one site to the next with a beer in your hand and get progressively more "happy" and enjoy interesting websites with a click of a button.

So I signed up and was able to list all of my blogs fairly easily. There doesn't seem to be any link back required. Each blog was given a Talk page

2. Posted by monawea : I started a Women Bloggers Group on Bumpzee a few months before this one. I though some of you might want to join the Bumpzee group as well. www.bumpzee.com/womenbloggers/

Welcome to BUMPzee.com ...read blogs, comment here or there, start new discussions, network with others.

So I went to start adding my blogs, which requires a fair-size widget to be placed on your blog. I am getting tired of cluttering up my blog with all these widgets, etc, but I placed it at the bottom of the blog. Seems a lot more tenedous to get my blogs listed. I only have one finished so far.

Then there was a Free Back Link post:

3. Posted by dzrbenson : I'm offering free back links from my blog, I feel like I should help the people that helped me start blogging. So if you want a free blog link dzrbenson.com/blog/?p=281 My site averages about 1000 - 1500 Unique visitors per day. So thats quite an opportunity to be noticed DzRBenson

He writes "Insight Of Nothingness "
Mental Rants and Raves - Where You Might Find Everything Or Nothing

So I figure why not? Couldn't decide which blog to offer, so I listed them all and told him to pick any of interest. Turns out his fiance is expecting a baby, so he generously gave me 4 links! Pretty generous when he was only offering 50 free links total!

Frustration, and a new report

A-r-g-h! You will have to excuse the "mess", but I have spent 3 days now trying to add labels to this blog, but Blogger keeps giving me error messages of a server problem. As soon as I get it working, I will report about how it went.

In the meantime, I came across a new report on the Mark Flavin Marketing blog that I thought might be interesting to read.

How To Make Money Blogging

Here’s a new report to show you how to get started blogging, how to get traffic to your blog & how to make money from it.
It’s written in a nice simple step by step format so if you already know the basics you can just skip along to another chapter.Click below to download it now.
How To Make Money Blogging<<--Download
Remember you are free to give away the reports to your list, subscribers, friends, family… anyone! but the content of the report cannot be changed.