It's All Beta: a basic guide to using Blogsome

If there’s one thing I loathe on a website, it’s pop up ads. Here’s one I encountered this week on www.snopes.com. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a completely pointless and irritating ad — if you can call a blank white square an ad. I’m annoyed, which is why I decided not to provide a live clickable link to snopes in this post. And from now on I shall go elsewhere for my urban legend and rumour information.

[Click on the screenshot to see a larger version. No pop up ads will appear.]

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WordPress is one of the world’s most popular blogging platforms. Little wonder, then, that a few unscrupulous web sites try to exploit that popularity in a bid to spread malware and viruses.

The safest thing, of course, is to only download WordPress — and the themes that go with it — from the official WordPress site. To be honest, you don’t usually find better themes anywhere else; and if you do, you shouldn’t be surprised to find spammy backlinks lurking in the code, ready to embarrass both you and your readers.

It’s a shame, therefore, that the Great WordPress itself doesn’t have a more intelligent search facility.

I did a search just a few minutes ago for one-column WordPress themes. Here are some of the results. Click the ultra-fuzzy low-res images below to see them bigger and ever so slightly better.

For the benefit of anyone who either can’t or really doesn’t fancy peering at the screenshots, the results included the following themes (remember, I was only looking for one-column themes):

• Techozoic Fluid
• Blog Design Studio NewBlue
• Namib
• alibi
• codescheme_blue
• slight

All the above were described as having two (or, in one case, ‘2 or 3′) columns.

Oh, there was one other theme on the first page of results:

AquaBlock — a quick loading 3 column theme.

Give me strength!

Never bother with quirks mode again. Get yourself a doctype. Choose one from our wide selection: more…

Here are just a couple of easy ways to display an external rss feed on your Blogsome blog.

1. Go to Widgetbox. Follow their instructions on how to turn your blog into a widget (they call it a ‘blidget’) and then copy the code they give you and simply paste it into your blog’s index.html file. If you have another blog somewhere else, you could turn that into a widget, display it on your Blogsome page, and show all your readers what a busy blogger you are. Excellent!

2. Sign up free with webrss.com instead and follow their instructions.

As an example, we’re showing the latest headlines from CNN on the sidebar. It’s really easy to display feeds on Blogsome. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

It’s always good to learn new things. But to be sure you’re learning the right answers to your questions, it pays to be careful who you ask.

A List Apart offers a lot of articles on a wide range of subjects. Every webmaster should visit it regularly. And that’s exactly what I did a few days ago, when I was looking for some advice about javascript. Not just any old javascript either, but the sort of javascript that will work in most, if not all, browsers, and won’t cause too many accessibility problems.

Aaron Gustafson’s recent [November 2008] article, ‘Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript‘ offered some useful advice: more…

Handy reference tables for when you want to change how dates and times are presented on individual blog posts. more…

Not everyone has the latest copy of Internet Explorer. We haven’t. But now you can find out if your blog looks like a bag of spanners in IE7. Just use the new miracle tool, Net Renderer. [Note: IE8 is still beta at the moment but should be fully supported soon.]

If there’s one thing that Blogsome users agree on, it’s themes. There aren’t enough of them, and they aren’t very interesting. But there is something you can do about it.

If you don’t like your blog’s theme, change it!

I know what you’re going to say: ‘There aren’t any good themes to choose from.’ Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Because here’s an amazing fact:

You only ever need one theme. By making a few simple alterations to that theme, you can create anything you want.

Yes, it’s true, and I can prove it to you. Just go over to CSS Zen Garden. They have a gallery full of excellent themes and they are all created from exactly the same HTML template. Only the styles have been changed.

So, there’s no need to worry about Blogsome’s dearth of themes. Now you can create your own. Here’s how to do it:

1. Pick a Blogsome theme that is similar to what you want. For example, if you want a sidebar on the right hand side, don’t pick a theme with a left hand sidebar
2. Tweak and change as much as you like.

Who knows? By custom building your own theme in this way, you might even become an excellent HTML coder, a CSS wizard, or a brilliant theme designer.

A few words of warning, though. Be careful which theme you use as your starting point. The only theme I’ve ever had any problems with was one called ‘dots2′. In my opinion, you need a bit of expertise before you try and alter that one. ‘Mars spirit’ is a nice theme, too, but I think it has a few too many graphics to make it easy to customise.

Personally, I’d start with one of the ‘Viewfinder’ themes, or ‘Green track’ or maybe ‘Minimaplus’. Start by changing the header image; experiment with different typefaces. And most importantly:

Switch off the WYSI-Wordpress WYSIWYG editor in your Plugins. If you want to learn CSS properly, stop using <font> tags in your blog posts. The right place to change the font colours on your blog is in your style sheet.

Blogsome might only have a few basic themes to offer but don’t let that bother you. Just learn a bit about HTML and CSS coding, and you’ll find there’s a lot more you can do with Blogsome themes than you could possibly imagine.