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.

Free for you to use and enjoy. Grab it now. No hotlinking to the image, though. It’s being moved elsewhere soon

If you are having difficulty creating a Site Map in Blogsome, these tips should help.

1. On your Dashboard, go to Manage > Pages and click the button that says ‘Create new page’. (If you have already created a Site Map but it is not working, select ‘Edit’.)
2. In the box marked ‘Page Title’, type ‘Site Map’.
3. Leave the box marked ‘Page Content’ blank. This is important.
4. If you already had something written in the ‘Page Content’ area, erase it. Then go to Manage > Hacks and click ‘Clear cache’.
5. Return to Dashboard and go to Manage > Files. Select the file called ‘index.html’.
6. In your ‘index.html’ file, find the main content div.
7. Find the bit that says {$content) and put the following piece of code immediately after it.

   
{if $smarty.server.REQUEST_URI == '/sitemap/'}
<h2>Site map</h2
<ul>{wp_list_pages}</ul>
<h2>Categories</h2>
<ul>{list_cats optionall='1' all='All' sort_column='name' optioncount='0' children='0'}</ul>
<h2>Posts</h2>
<ul>{get_archives type='postbypost' limit='' format='html'}</ul>
{/if}


8. Click ‘update template’.
9. View your Site Map, which should now be working fine.

Let’s imagine you are starting a web site to promote an event, such as a Hallowe’en party or Christmas market. Perhaps your site is there to advertise a concert tour, and the last gig will be at the end of October. There’s no point in cluttering up everyone’s search results with your site after the tour or the party has taken place, is there?

Trouble is, after the party, people often forget about the ‘loose ends’, and loads of their old out-of-date web sites are left online forever.

If you know that your site is going to be needed only for a limited period, and you don’t want to have to remember to take the site down afterwards, you really should use this meta tag:

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”unavailable_after: 31-Jul-2008 12:00:00 GMT” />

Obviously, change the date and time to your own requirements.

Go to your ‘index.html’ template and find the bit that says {$content}. Make a backup or keep a copy of ‘index.html’ in case you make a mistake. Then replace {$content} with this:

{if $smarty.server.REQUEST_URI == '/'}
Front Page Content
{else}
{$content}
{/if}

Where it says ‘Front Page Content’, place whatever you want to have as your static front page. (This could be a summary of what your site or blog is about.) Use regular HTML code for this part.

You will also need to put a link to your archives, so that your readers can find all your other posts.

Update: See a demo of this method at http://blogstuff.blogsome.com/

We last wrote about template tags back in February 2007. Here’s some more stuff you might like to know.

Display your categories

Go to Manage > Files and look in your index.html file. Somewhere, usually in your menu or navigation section, you will see a little piece of code that tells Blogsome to display a list of your blog’s categories. For a basic list, use this:

<ul>{list_cats optionall='1' all='All'}</ul>

For something a bit more interesting, though, take a look at this:

<ul>{list_cats sort_column='name' optioncount='1'}</ul>

In the above example, optioncount=’1′ will show the number of posts for each category after the category’s name. The number is usually shown in brackets.

Use sort_column=’name’ to display categories by name, which is what we do on this blog. If you want to display your categories by their number (go to Manage > Categories, and you will see that each category has a number as well as a name), then you would use sort_column=’ID’ instead.

Here are some more options that you can use in that categories code:

• optiondates=’1′ displays the date of the last post in each Category. Dates take the form YYYY-MM-DD.
• children=’1′ will show children (subCategories).
• children=’0′ will not show subCategories.
• hierarchical=’1′ will display children (subCategories) in a hierarchical (after parent) list.
• hierarchical=’0′ will not display subCategories in a hierarchical list.
• child_of=’4′will display only the Categories that are children of the Category that has the ID number ‘4′.
• exclude=’3 , 7 ‘will exclude the Categories that have the ID numbers ‘3′ and ‘7′ from the list. Obviously, if you want to exclude one or more categories, just change the ID numbers to suit.
• feed=’rss’ will display a link after each Category to the Category’s RSS feed.
• feed_image=’PATH/FILENAME’ will display an image link to the Category feed. Substitute the location of an image (usually a small RSS icon) where it says PATH/FILENAME.

Sometimes, it’s just simple stuff that we want to know. For example, you could be new to the art of blogging (after all, we all have to start somewhere, don’t we?). And one thing that can seem mysterious to novice bloggers is all this stuff about something called ‘RSS’.

First things first. Go to your Dashboard and choose Manage»Files, then look in ‘index.html’. There are loads of things near the top of that file between the <head> and </head> tags. Look for something like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS" href="{bloginfo show='rss2_url'}" />

Important: Make sure that feed link is in your blog’s code. Otherwise, Google Reader or Bloglines (or whichever RSS reader you use) might not be able to use autodiscovery to find the feed at all. If that code is not in your ‘index.html’ file, put it in.

If you just need to give your RSS feed link to other people, it is exactly the same URL as your blog, but with the word ‘feed’ after it, like this:

http://YOUR_BLOG_NAME.blogsome.com/feed/

Your comments feed (yes, people do sometimes subscribe to a comments feed too) will look like this:

http://YOUR_BLOG_NAME.blogsome.com/comments/feed/

Caleb left a comment last month. He was having problems creating protected blog posts (posts that can be read only by certain people who have the right password to access the posts). He had tried some Javascript but it hadn’t worked. So I decided to look into the problem.

As far as Blogsome is concerned, it’s easy to protect your posts. There’s no need to use any Javascript at all. When you write a post, there is a password box on the right hand side of the dashboard. Here’s one I filled in earlier over on a test blog. Notice the password field has been completed with the password ‘roger_rabbit’. If you decided to protect a post, do try to pick a better password than that.

Next time someone comes to your blog, this is what they will see.

I tried putting the wrong password in, as if I was a nosy visitor who was trying to guess it, but I was only allowed to read the post when I put the correct password in the box.

I tested this in Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6 and it worked ok in both browsers.

Updates: Password protection does seem to stop anyone from reading your protected post in an RSS feed reader. Have checked this in Google Reader and Bloglines. All you see for the protected entry is the line “There is no excerpt because this is a protected post”.

There is also a way to make your entire Blogsome blog private. No Javascript required. Matt Schinckel has the solution.