A work in progress

More fiddling w/ the blog today. Back in college I spent one summer doing database entry for my residence hall. They had an old system called the IBM 5520 (if I remember right) that used templates to control the output to the printer and the screens used to enter data. The person who had originally set it up created a system that worked, but extremely inconvenient to use. I had a lot of fun fixing up the templates and developing a series of form letters. By the end of the summer the system worked very smoothly.

The HTML and CSS codes remind me a lot of that old system. As you might guess, learning the ins out outs while customizing my blog template brings back some old memories. Today I added the email link and fixed up the About Me box. It really bugged me how none of the profile info. lined up with the picture, the fonts so huge and the picture so small. Also happy to report the XML feed works fine, just took a few hours before the My MSN reader picked up anything.

Fixing up the About Me box ended up involving more that just changing the CSS styles. Blogger uses a prepackaged approach to the HTML part of the code that handles the profile section, so I couldn't just insert the email link like I wanted. After some searching on the web I discovered you can click on Source in the View menu of IE or FireFox and see the underlying HTML code. So I brought up my blog, clicked source, and the mysterious black box of the Blogger Smart tag <$BlogMemberProfile$> revealed itself.

I relied heavily on the web site W3Schools to help me learn the basics of HTML and CSS. There are still a couple things I don't understand about the Profile and Sidebar Boxes sections which frustrates me, but I'm learning. For instance if I remove this section nothing changes, so what does it do?

.box p {
  margin:0 0 .6em
  }

It seems the Blogger code fairly advanced, the W3School examples pretty basic, I couldn't find any examples that looked like this. Eventually I'll figure it out, but for now I'm excited that everything seems to work on IE and FireFox.