Tweaks
In addition to screwing around with templates and making errors, I tried to change the look of the blog. This requires working, however, with something called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets); this buffaloed me for a while until I spoke with a colleague–who knows much more about this stuff than I–who gave me a book and some encouragement. I then figured out how to add custom CSS to the default template, and changed the font to Ariel, and made the header for each entry smaller, and made the little letters in the banner a bit bigger and the big letters a bit smaller. Overall, I don’t expect anybody would notice these changes, but I think they make the page less blaring and a bit more inviting.
Also I wanted to make a link from this blog to my other blog on teaching and to Brother Steve’s and Brother Dan’s blog. I screwed around trying to do this for a long time, until I noticed on the main template page something called “widget feed.”
Once I discovered that, it was easy to make links to the aforementioned blogs. You can see them over on the right. It’s easy now for me to keep track of Brother Steve’s blog and Brother Dan’s.
Those were the main changes–not much I guess–but they took me a while to do.
This stuff is complicated. As far as I can figure it, in making a blog, one is working with at least three different levels of code. Good old HTML. Then CSS for working with the look of a page. And then in my case MT or movable type to build the site. And in addition there’s something called PHP. I don’t know anything about what that does and don’t want to. Right now I know just about as much as I want to know about this stuff.
And in a week or so I will have forgotten all of it.