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This article is about how to edit your theme in Blogger. It supports many other articles on this site, which suggest specific theme changes needed to solve particular problems.    Note that until early 2017, themes were called templates.   In practise, "edit your template" and "edit your theme" mean the same thing. In Blogger, a theme is a file which controls how your blog are displayed on the screen when someone reads it using a browser or a mobile device.   Themes used to be called templates, but were renamed "themes" in early 2017. Previously, I've looked at whether it's a good idea to edit your Blogger theme / template or not.   Because themes are the same thing as templates, the same principles apply to editing your theme. For many people, editing the theme is simply something which they need to do, because it's the only way to do what they want ( remove the attribution , show a gadget on the homeppage only , add a Faceb...

In some Blogger templates, there is a big gap between the bottom of the header and the start of the first post, and this means that the posts and the sidebar are not aligned.  This article explains how to adjust the gap, and so remove that problem . In the templates that Blogger provides , as well as all third-party templates, the amount of space between elements on the screen is not accidental:   designers put a lot of effort into working out what spacing will look good, and then finding ways to put CSS code into the template so that the spacing they want is shown in any browser software that Blogger supports. But there are times when you may want to change this spacing, and this is easy to do, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your template , and if  you can work out exactly which part of the template code to change. The pre-Header gap A pet-hate of mine is the blank space above the first post, which looks strange unless y...

This article explains the difference between themes and templates in Blogger, Google's blogging tool. What is (was) a Blogger template How a blog that is made with Blogger is shown to a visitor is controlled by four sets of information: The posts which the blogger writes (ie the content) A user-editable "configuration file" which records the overall formatting options which the file designer and then the blogger have chosen Another configuration file, called the post-template , which records choices that the blogger has made under Layout > Blog posts (edit), but cannot be edited elsewhere.    Blogger's own software, which puts the other things together with some internal rules to make "web pages".   Bloggers cannot control the rules in this at all. Originally, the first "configuration file" was called a template .   In fact, officially it was called a design-template , to distinguish it from the post-template.   However because ...

This article shows you how to set up another person (ie another Google account) as an author for your blog. Google, Blog-Authors and Blogger Setting someone up as an "author" in Blogger is one way that you can let other people post to your blog. It's easy to do: you tell blogger to create an invitation, which sends the person an email saying you would like to be an author, they click a link in the email and then sign in with a Google account to accept the invitation. And once it is done, the person can write and edit their own posts. All you need to know is the person's email address: it doesn't matter if it's a gmail address or not.  You can send invitations to people with hotmail, yahoo, and indeed any email address where your invitee can read their email.  However the other person will need to use a Google account  (which doesn't necessarily include Gmail) to accept the invitation: don't waste time inviting people who are allergi...

This article explains how to find things (gadgets or text) in the Theme editor in Blogger. Very often when you are editing your Theme in Blogger, you need to find particular text. For example, you might need to find all places where  "</head" appears, so you can add something to the very next line.   Or you might want to find the code for a particular gadget (aka widget), so that you can put a conditional-formatting statement around it. There are now two tools you can use to find items in the Theme editor: The Jump to Widget tool if you are looking for a Widget The Find kafetaria if you are looking for a text string. More information about using each of these is given below. How to use the Jump to Widget tool First, you need to find out the exact name for the widget / gadget that you need to find the code for.    (See Finding a gadget's name for a tip on how to do this). Then, inside the Theme editor (see Editing your Blogger Theme ...

This article is about how to add a badge that someone else gives you to a blog made with Blogger. Sometimes, blog-owners run a blog-a-thon or a similar circle-of-blogs event. One aspect of taking part is by showing a badge for the event on your own blog , so that your visitors are invited to take part and to view other participants' blogs too. Usually who-ever is hosting the event gives you the code for the badge, and tells you to install it into your own blog.   Sometimes they even tell you how to install it to your Wordpress blog - like this . Fortunately, installing a badge to a blog made with Blogger is equally easy. Installing a badge to Blogger Decide where you want to put the badge.   Traditionally badges go into the sidebar, but you could choose to put it into the header or footer, into the space above or below your posts, or even into an individual post. Get the">How to make a Button for your Own Blog .   But 99.99% of the time, they ...

This article shows how to make that the description is correctly shown when one of your blog-posts is shared on Facebook. When you share one of your blog-posts using either the via the "what's on your mind" space on Facebook or the Facebook share button on your blog, you may find that the only information automatically shown is: A picture (hopefully, but not always from the post) The post title The blog URL or the post URL But many people want the post-description to be included too. There are two things which you need to do to make sure that this happens correctly. Step 1: Add search descriptions to your blog-posts If a post does not have a description, Facebook will sometimes try to estimate one based on the contents. But this is not reliable, and it depends on the blog template you have used, and possibly even on other factors, eg at one stage, Facebook just looked for the the first (paragraph) tag with at least 120 characters in it - which gave very ...

This article explains how to remove the semi-transparent image that is shown at the back of the Travel theme (template) provided by Blogger. I like Blogger's Travel template (now called a theme) - it's clean, and lets me control lots of things.  But I don't like the semi-transparent image that you can see underneath parts of blog-header, navigation kafe and perhaps the post header and body. By itself, this image looks like this (I suspect it's supposed to be represented a scrunched-up piece of travel diary paper of similar): Underneath one of my blog's header it's like this - see the lightly shaded area to the left of the red arrow: Do you see the grey shading? You can possibly ignore it - until you do something like show an ad-unit with a genuine white background in that really shows up the difference. Then it just looks scruffy. I'm sure that with some major template changes, it could be eliminated altogether - but lucki...

This article is about how to put an item (any type of gadget) above the Title section in a blog made with Google Blogger. If your blog has a layout or designer theme / template , then it most probably has a nav-bar at the top of the screen, followed by a Header section showing your blogs title & description, or a custom header image if you've uploaded one. And even if you go into the place in the layout-designer where you can re-arrange the layout by drag-and-dropping items, you cannot drag any gadgets to above the header . But this is easy to change, provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your blog's theme . How to allow changes above your blog's header Follow these steps to make it possible for you (or any blog administrator ) to add gadgets to the area about your blog's heading section: 1  Edit your blog's theme  in the usual way 2   Find this code in your theme: <b:section class='header' id='...

This article shows how to use Google's Takeout service to make a copy of the contents of all your blogs at the same time. A backup is a copy that you can use to restore from if something goes wrong.  For your personal compter, you may have a backup copy of the files on your hard-drive, so that if you lose the machine, you can get the files back, usually with a little work. In blogging terms, a backup of your blog is a copy that you can use if you accidentally delete a post, or lose control of your blog, or perhaps even a copy of a blog that you have deleted but still want some last-chance access to. Unfortunately Blogger does not offer a complete solution for backing up our blogs .    Instead, we need to take separate actions to back up our gadget settings , our template when it is being edited , and our post-contents. You can back up the posts from one content from the Settings > Other > Blog Tools  tab.  If you choose the Export Blog ...

This article is about how to set up a gadget / widget in Blogger so that it is only visible on the first place that a reader sees when they visit your blog (often called the "home page").   It is one of a series of articles about controlling what goes on the homepage of your blogspot blog. Front Page Bob By Paginator (Own work)  [ CC-BY-3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons There are a number of reasons why you might want to put a gadget only the screen that shows when a visitor first navigates to your blog's home page. You may want to show a welcome message, or a topic-index page, or to give a view of your recent tweets or some other RSS feed.     No matter what the reason, the process is very similar: How to make a gadget only appear on the first page Note:  in Blogger, the words "gadget", "widget", and even "page-element" all mean the same thing.  I generally use "gadget", because the Page Elements tab currently s...