The ENGL539 Blogging Meta-Post: "Rust"

(Updated 15 September 2010)

The Blogger CSS Editing Tool

The Challenge

I've been hammering away at this blog off and on most the weekend.  My biggest challenges have been doing the formating for the webpage.  In many ways I sabotaged myself by using Blogger's templates.  They generate a great deal of code, most of which involves JavaScript and some challenging variable assignments that had me scratching my head most of the weekend. I remembered enough from my undergrad days to identify why the generated html was so horrible to work with, but I definitely didn't remember enough to be very efficient at fixing things the way I wanted them.

Background troubles
My first efforts were directed at setting up a custom background for the blog.  I found the image in a Wikipedia entry on ancient maps. It's a WikiCommons image that I edited with Paint.net software (download from here: http://www.getpaint.net/download.html), which I hadn't used since college, but was able to pick back up fairly easy.

After that, I had to brush off my CSS knowledge to figure out exactly how to get the picture to show up as I wanted it to.  I had no small trouble with Blogger's CSS entry tool.  While I certainly appreciate the inclusion of this in their template editors, because of where it puts the code in the generated html, I had a number of syntax issues that weren't easy to track down in an editor like notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ --again, another tool I frequently used while programming for my undergrad work).  Copy and pasting my code in Blogger's native HMTL editor kept on generating errors arising from the JavaScript coming from the template editor, so I was really forced to do a lot of trial-and-error coding within the CSS editor.

No big problem, but it took a while...

All's well that ends
I'm feeling more comfortable with the Blogger interface now, and with a little more time, I will probably be able to strip out a lot of the messy auto-generated code for something a bit more streamline.

That said, Blogger does do a good job of coding in some really nice HTML4 and 5 features, such as identifying a mobile web browser and providing all the code that pares down the site to fit a smaller screen.  I had never coded something like this myself, and it probably would have taken me the entire semester to come up with the right 'formula' to pull it off myself.

All in all, not too frustrating... Now if I could just get these posts to stop showing up as center-justified all the time...